Quite a few reasons:

1/ Easy to start, hard to master.

2/ Good balance between being still athletic (you have to run), while not punish less-fit players a lot.

3/ Social component. In Portugal you must get a beer after each match. Suddenly you have 100+ friends and a shared interest.

4/ Full gradient between 'funny dumb ass game with friends with no experience' to 'professional competitive sport'. With a lot of options in between like beginners games, clubs events, amateur leagues and semi/pro tournaments.

5/ The game is more tactical, that athletic. After you get initial technical background, you start to play more 'chess' than 'overpower opponent' style.

6/ Good business. More people on less space = more revenue. More social = more spending in a bar. Coaching is more profitable as well (groups of 4).

7/ Open to all social groups. My wife is playing female-only tournaments. We play mixed tournaments together.

I play padel for 3 years, played tennis for year, tried squash and badminton.

I tried it, it was fun to get started, but after 3-4 sessions, when you want to start getting good and learning stuff, it's not fun anymore.

I tried playing with Playtomic, with better players, and everyone expects to play the same, go and play at the net as that's the main goal, but I dislike staying close to the net and playing the reflex game, while trying to not get hit by the ball. I have a lot more fun playing back court, and volleying the ball, but apparently that's not the way to play this sport.

Also, the wall part of the game, once you play against better players, is not fun. Most of the balls go in the corner, and you have to wait for the ball/predict and avoid hitting the glass or hit from an uncomfortable position, which is not as fun as the open play game.

Simply put: it’s a very fun sport.

It’s doubles so you only need four people to play. The underarm serve gives it a very shallow learning curve so almost anybody can play. However, there is enough nuance to the game that there’s lots of tactics and skill to learn as you get better.

Also the app (Playtomic) for organising games works great.

We have indoor courts here in the UK where’s there’s not much else to do in the winter. It’s a lot easier to get four people together to play padel for 90 minutes than trying to get 10/12 together for a 5/6-a-side football match.

Besides being beginner friendly (forgiving mistakes), easy to learn and see the progress quickly (instant gratification, quick catch-up with friends who started earlier) the fact that it's not as physically exhausting as squash or tennis makes it attractive for many people.

I ussed to play it with friends. The big advantage to tennis is that the ball never gets too far away :)

5+ years ago, perhaps? Almost all the places have closed down now here in Sweden. The bubble popped and now it's a joke and you see repurposed ex-padel buildings around every city. It's been years since I heard anyone talk about it other than to comment on how weird it was that it was so popular for a short time and then disappeared.

It takes much less time to learn it at a playable level than tennis. In my opinion, learning tennis and being able to hit a powerful drive is much more rewarding, but nowadays people don’t want to “waste” time in improving technique.

Wait, is this like European pickleball or something?

Every time I'm playing pickleball on vacation with my younger children, I look over at Padel courts (if available) with envy. It seems both more fun and athletic, but still less challenging to pick up than tennis.

Bubble. We had it a couple of years ago. Everything got converted to a paddle place. Then it popped and most closed down.

yeah, it is getting popular everywhere.

Yuppies/expats love it, that's pretty much the reason.