Who makes this site.
Two people stand behind MedLifestyle. Not a brand, not a faceless content team, not an algorithm hiding behind a logo. Two named people who have actually lived what they publish, and here they are.
Most sites in this field hide the person. You read three thousand words about buying a house in the Algarve and never learn who wrote it, whether they have ever set foot in the Algarve, or who to hold accountable if the advice turns out to be wrong. We think that is exactly backwards. The entire value of this publication rests on you knowing who is telling you things, and being able to hold us to it. So we put our names at the top.
Peter Hjortsoe
Peter Hjortsoe is the face of MedLifestyle and holds editorial ownership of everything it publishes. The standards are his standards, and his name stands behind them. When something here is wrong, correcting it is his call and his responsibility, that is the whole point of a masthead with a person on it instead of a logo.
He is Danish, forty-four, and has spent twenty-one years in the same corner of Provence (the hills behind Cotignac, in the Var) long enough to have watched the same bakery change hands twice and to know which of the Tuesday market stalls is worth the wait. He lives it now from Cascais, on the Portuguese coast. That is the edge this publication is built on: not a fortnight of research, but two decades of actually living the life our readers are weighing.
He is European by origin and writes for Americans on purpose, and that combination is exactly the point. An insider on the ground in Europe who speaks plainly to the reader back home.
Before MedLifestyle he built a career in sales and then retail across Vietnam (first with Carlsberg, then running retail operations from 2015 to 2021) and took an MBA in international business along the way. He has moved his own life across borders more than once, done the paperwork, and made the expensive mistakes. When a reader wants that experience one-on-one, he takes the call himself. None of it makes him your lawyer, your tax advisor, or your estate agent, and he says so on the pages where it matters, and would rather you made fewer mistakes than he did.
Simone Millward
Simone Millward runs everything on the commercial side: the partner network, the directory, and the arrangements that keep MedLifestyle independent enough to stay honest.
She built her career inside the golden-visa and residency-by-investment industry, guiding people who were moving serious money and whole lives into Portugal and Italy. It is a field with more than its share of sharp operators, and she spent enough time inside it to know exactly which questions to put to a lawyer, a relocation firm, or a currency partner before their name goes anywhere near our directory. When we say a professional has been vetted, she is usually the one who did the vetting, and a partner doesn't make the directory until she's satisfied.
She is South African and based in Cascais. She keeps a hard line between her side of the business and the editorial side: the money that comes in through partners and affiliates does not decide what an article says. Exactly how that wall works is set out on the disclosure page.
How the articles actually get made
We run a modern, AI-assisted editorial operation, and we are proud of it: a purpose-built system that produces and checks, a quality gate that decides what is good enough, a named editor who owns the result, and verification that keeps running long after we publish. The full account is on its own page: how we work. When we get something wrong, we fix it in the open, that is our corrections policy.
If you want to reach either of us, the contact page has the address. It is read by a person.
Last updated 22 July 2026