"My takeaway is, to put it very bluntly, that the average Portuguese person is quite ignorant. They either don't know a lot of important things, or they know a bit but don't care (because they don't know why it's important). It feels like time stopped here in the mid 1900s."

This is quite true, we are ranked very low on things like financial literacy, and most people here don't care why things are the way they are.