Adopting a rescue animal in Portugal has long meant detective work. Dogs and cats waiting for homes were scattered across Facebook posts, municipal kennel listings and shelter websites, many with no photos or no web presence at all. An American couple based in the Algarve has built a fix.
Tami Cross and Craig Schreiber, who left San Diego for the Algarve three years ago, launched AdoptPets.pt, a free bilingual Portuguese-English directory that pulls adoptable animals from across the country into one searchable place. At launch it listed around 2,400 dogs and cats from 45 shelters, rescues and municipal kennels — including familiar Algarve names like Animal Rescue Algarve, Tiny Shelter, Cadela Carlota and Carvoeiro Cat Charity, plus organisations elsewhere in Portugal.
Search by location, age, size, breed or gender, browse nationally or zoom into a region, and the site hands you over to the shelter or municipal kennel managing the adoption. The founders run no shelter themselves and have no say over who adopts — the site is deliberately just a bridge between would-be adopters and the organisations caring for the animals.
A smart design choice: it adds no admin work for already stretched volunteers. Where possible, listings are pulled and updated automatically from each organisation's own website. If a kennel has no site at all, the project builds it a free page and helps with photos and profiles. Charities, rescues and municipal kennels pay nothing, while breeders and animal sellers are excluded entirely.
The site is already drawing over 400 visitors a day, and the couple hope the extra visibility will pull in volunteers and donors as well as adopters. For anyone settling in Portugal — expats especially, given the English interface — it turns what used to be hours of scrolling into a few minutes of browsing.
