Long before Portugal existed, the west of the Iberian peninsula was inhabited by peoples the Romans lumped together as Lusitanians, along with Gallaeci in the far north and other Celtic and Iberian tribes. They lived in fortified stone hilltop settlements, the castros, living off herding, farming and war. Phoenician and Greek sailors had also left their mark along the coasts, trading in the metals of the interior, and later the Carthaginians.
Rome's expansion across Hispania from the 3rd century BC found in the Lusitanians one of its most stubborn adversaries. Their resistance had a name: Viriathus, a shepherd and war leader who between 147 and 139 BC held the Roman legions at bay with brilliant guerrilla warfare, inflicting several humiliating defeats. Rome could not beat him on the battlefield: it resorted to bribing three of his lieutenants, who murdered him in his sleep. The phrase tradition attributes to the Romans — "Rome does not pay traitors" — and the figure of Viriathus made him, centuries later, a symbol of both Portuguese and Spanish identity.
With the resistance crushed, Rome organised the territory. Under Augustus the province of Lusitania was created, with its capital at Emerita Augusta (today's Mérida, now in Spain), covering much of present-day Portugal south of the Douro. Cities were founded such as Olisipo (Lisbon), Bracara Augusta (Braga), Conimbriga (beside Coimbra) and Ebora (Évora), roads, bridges, aqueducts and temples were built — such as the one still standing in Évora — and the land was deeply Latinised: from the vulgar Latin spoken in these provinces would come, over the centuries, the Portuguese language. Romanisation also left the vine, the olive and a way of organising the landscape that endures.
The crisis of the Western Roman Empire dragged down the Atlantic edge of Hispania too. At the start of the 5th century, in the year 409, Germanic peoples crossed the Pyrenees and divided the peninsula between them. In the north-west — the old Gallaecia, which included the north of present-day Portugal — the Suebi settled and around 411 founded one of the first Germanic kingdoms in western Europe, with its capital at Bracara Augusta (Braga). The Suebic Kingdom lasted more than a century and a half and converted to Catholicism, leaving a lasting imprint on northern Portugal.
Meanwhile, in the rest of Hispania the most powerful people were imposing themselves: the Visigoths, who from their kingdom based at Toledo gradually subdued the rest. Around 585 the Visigothic king Leovigild conquered and annexed the Suebic Kingdom, unifying almost the whole peninsula under the Visigothic crown. Portugal as a distinct territory did not yet exist: the land it now occupies was simply the western part of the Hispano-Gothic kingdom.
The Visigothic era was one of continuity rather than rupture: Latin, the church organisation and much of the Roman structures were kept, in Christianised form. But it was also a period of instability, with an elective monarchy shaken by conspiracies and civil wars between noble factions. That internal weakness would prove fatal: in the year 711 one of the warring factions called in the Muslim troops of North Africa, and that intervention turned into a conquest that swept away the Visigothic kingdom in barely a few years and changed the history of the peninsula completely.
From the year 711, Muslim armies — Arabs and, above all, Berbers from North Africa — conquered almost the entire Iberian peninsula with extraordinary speed, and it came to be called al-Andalus. The territory of present-day Portugal, at the western edge, was named Gharb al-Andalus, that is, "the west of al-Andalus". Over the following centuries, while the mountainous north stayed in Christian hands, the centre and the south lived fully within Andalusi civilisation.
Muslim rule in southern Portugal was long and deep, especially in the Algarve and the Alentejo, where it lasted more than five centuries, until the mid-13th century. Cities such as Xelb (Silves) — capital of a taifa and famous for its poets — Yābura (Évora), Shantarīn (Santarém), Qulumriyya (Coimbra) and al-Ushbūna (Lisbon) flourished as urban centres with mosques, baths, markets and market gardens. The Andalusis introduced new crops and irrigation techniques, citrus, the almond tree, advances in agronomy, mathematics and medicine, and left an architecture of which castles, cisterns and street plans survive.
That inheritance is still alive in today's Portugal, above all in the south: in the whitewashed houses and the openwork chimneys of the Algarve, in the roof terraces and courtyards, in place names beginning with "Al-" (Albufeira, Alcácer, Aljezur) and in hundreds of Portuguese words of Arabic origin (alface, azeite, almofada, oxalá). Coexistence between Muslims, Mozarab Christians and Jewish communities was complex and not always peaceful, but it left the future Portuguese nation a Mediterranean and African cultural substrate that sets it apart. Onto that Andalusi Gharb the Christian Reconquest would advance, slowly and violently, from the north.
In the far north-west, between the rivers Minho and Douro, a Christian settlement had survived since Suebic and Visigothic times and by the end of the 11th century fell under the rule of the kingdom of León and Castile. To defend and repopulate that frontier, King Alfonso VI handed over around 1096 the County of Portucale — its name coming from the old city of Portucale, today's Porto — to a Burgundian crusading noble, Henry of Burgundy, married to his daughter Teresa. That county, still dependent on León, was the embryo of Portugal.
On Count Henry's death, his widow Teresa governed the county, but her closeness to the Galician nobility set the Portucalense barons and her own son against her. On 24 June 1128, at the battle of São Mamede near Guimarães, the young Afonso Henriques defeated the troops of his mother Teresa and of her Galician ally, Count Fernão Peres de Trava. That victory gave him control of the county and marked the start of the road to independence. Afonso Henriques established himself as an autonomous leader and made war on the Muslims to the south: in 1139, after the victory at Ourique, he began to call himself king.
Formal recognition came in 1143 with the Treaty of Zamora, by which his cousin Alfonso VII of León and Castile accepted Afonso Henriques as king of Portugal (albeit within the games of vassalage typical of the period). The definitive seal was ecclesiastical: in 1179 Pope Alexander III, in the bull Manifestis Probatum, recognised Afonso Henriques as king and Portugal as an independent kingdom under the protection of the Holy See. Guimarães, where the king had been born and raised, remained in memory as the cradle of the nation: "Aqui nasceu Portugal".
With the kingdom now recognised, the successors of Afonso Henriques spent the following century pushing the frontier southwards, at the expense of Muslim al-Andalus. In 1147, with the help of crusaders from northern Europe bound for the Holy Land, Afonso Henriques took Lisbon after a long siege, a decisive milestone that put the mouth of the Tagus in Christian hands. Through the 12th and 13th centuries the cities of the Alentejo and the south fell one after another: Évora, Beja, Santarém, Alcácer do Sal.
The final stretch was the conquest of the Algarve, the southernmost region and the most deeply Islamised. Between 1238 and 1249 the military orders — above all the Order of Santiago, under its master Paio Peres Correia — and royal troops took stronghold after stronghold: Silves, the old taifa capital, Loulé, Aljezur, Albufeira. The campaign ended in 1249, when King Afonso III took Faro, the last important Muslim bastion. With that the Portuguese Reconquest was essentially complete, more than two centuries before Castile took Granada.
The conquest of the Algarve consolidated Portugal's borders, which would barely change afterwards, making it one of the oldest states in Europe with stable limits. Portuguese kings began to style themselves "kings of Portugal and of the Algarve", underlining that this was almost two kingdoms joined. Under King Dinis (1279-1325), "the farmer", the young kingdom took root: farming and resettlement were encouraged, the great pine forest of Leiria was planted, the university was founded (it would end up in Coimbra) and Portuguese replaced Latin as the official language, giving the nation a cultural identity of its own.
At the end of the 14th century, Portuguese independence came close to being lost. In 1383 King Fernando I died leaving no male heir. His only daughter, Beatriz, was married to King Juan I of Castile, so the crown threatened to fall into Castilian hands and Portugal to be absorbed by its powerful neighbour. So began a period of civil war and war against Castile known as the crisis of 1383-1385.
Part of the nobility and much of the population of Lisbon, the merchants and the urban classes opposed the Castilian solution and rallied around João, Master of Avis, illegitimate son of King Pedro I. In December 1383 João killed Count Andeiro, the favourite of the dowager queen Leonor Teles, and was proclaimed "ruler and defender of the realm". Juan I of Castile invaded Portugal and in 1384 laid siege to Lisbon, which held out heroically despite hunger and plague. The Cortes of Coimbra proclaimed João of Avis king in 1385.
The outcome came on 14 August 1385 at the battle of Aljubarrota. A Portuguese army far inferior in numbers, commanded by King João I and his brilliant constable Nuno Álvares Pereira, and reinforced by English archers, crushed the large Castilian army using defensive tactics learned in the Hundred Years' War. The Castilian defeat was so complete that it secured Portuguese independence for good and enthroned the Avis dynasty. That military alliance also gave rise to the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance, sealed in the Treaty of Windsor of 1386 and considered the oldest diplomatic alliance in the world still in force. Portugal, saved and independent, was ready to take to the ocean.
With the Avis dynasty, Portugal opened the age of Discovery, the epic that would make it the first global maritime power. The symbolic starting point was the conquest of Ceuta, in North Africa, in 1415. From there, driven by Prince Henry the Navigator (Henrique o Navegador), son of King João I, Portugal organised from the Algarve — around Sagres and Lagos — methodical expeditions working their way down the coast of West Africa. Madeira and the Azores were settled, the feared Cape Bojador was rounded (1434) and the caravel and the techniques of ocean navigation were perfected.
The pace was dizzying. In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias rounded the southern tip of Africa, the cape that King João II renamed "of Good Hope". In 1498 Vasco da Gama reached Calicut in India by sea, opening the spice route that would enrich Portugal. In 1500 Pedro Álvares Cabral's fleet touched the coast of Brazil on 22 April before continuing east. Within a few decades the Portuguese had woven a network of ports and fortresses running from Brazil to Goa, Malacca, Hormuz, Macau and the Moluccas: a trading empire without precedent.
But that achievement had an appalling side from the very beginning. As early as 1444, six caravels under Lançarote de Freitas unloaded at Lagos 235 Africans captured on the coast of Mauritania, who were divided up and sold in the presence of Prince Henry: it was the first great market of African slaves in modern Europe, a scene described in stark terms by the chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara. From then on, Portugal opened and organised the Atlantic slave trade, which would last more than four centuries — the longest of all the European powers — and would carry millions of Africans by force to Brazil and the colonies. The Discoveries and slavery were thus born of the same enterprise: Portuguese imperial greatness was built, in large part, on the suffering of enslaved peoples.
The 16th century was Portugal's golden century. Lisbon became the great emporium of spices, ivory, gold and slaves, and one of the richest and most cosmopolitan cities in Europe. The empire spread across four continents: Brazil, trading posts and fortresses along the coasts of Africa, Goa and other holdings in India, Malacca, the Moluccas, Timor and, from 1557, Macau in China, the gateway to trade with the East. Portuguese became the lingua franca of the seas of Asia and Africa. It was also the age of the poet Luís de Camões, who in Os Lusíadas (1572) sang the nation's maritime epic.
That peak concealed a demographic and financial fragility. Disaster came in 1578, when the young King Sebastião I died along with the flower of the nobility at the battle of Alcácer-Quibir (Ksar el-Kebir) in Morocco, leaving no heir. His death opened a succession crisis that King Philip II of Spain, nephew of the late Portuguese monarch, seized on to press his claim. In 1580, after a brief campaign, Philip was recognised as king of Portugal: the Iberian Union was born, sixty years in which Portugal and its empire shared a monarch with Spain while keeping their own laws and institutions.
The union, advantageous at first, ended up costly: Portugal was dragged into Spain's wars and lost imperial holdings to the Dutch and the English, enemies of the Spanish crown. Discontent erupted on 1 December 1640, when a group of nobles deposed the Spanish governors in Lisbon and proclaimed the Duke of Bragança king as João IV. So began the Restoration: a long war with Spain that lasted until 1668, the year Madrid finally recognised Portuguese independence. The Bragança dynasty would reign until the end of the monarchy in 1910.
The Portuguese 18th century was marked by two opposing events: the wealth of Brazilian gold and the catastrophe of the Lisbon earthquake. From the end of the 17th century, enormous deposits of gold and later diamonds were found in the interior of Brazil, above all in Minas Gerais. That torrent of precious metals — extracted largely with slave labour — financed the sumptuous reign of João V, who raised pharaonic works such as the monastery-palace of Mafra, but it was squandered without modernising the kingdom's economy.
On 1 November 1755, All Saints' Day, an earthquake of an estimated magnitude between 8.5 and 9 shook Lisbon, with its epicentre in the Atlantic. The shock was followed by a tsunami that swept the riverside area of the Tagus and by a series of fires that burned for days. The city, one of the richest in Europe, was devastated; estimates of the dead vary widely, between some 12,000 and as many as 50,000 or more, out of a population of around 200,000. The disaster shook all of Europe and influenced Enlightenment thought: Voltaire evoked it in his Candide as an argument against the optimism that "all is well in the best of all possible worlds".
Reconstruction fell to Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, the future Marquis of Pombal, all-powerful minister of King José I. With relentless energy — "bury the dead and care for the living" — Pombal rebuilt central Lisbon (the Baixa Pombalina) on a rational grid, with wide streets and buildings given an anti-seismic timber structure, the gaiola pombalina, a world first. The embodiment of enlightened despotism, Pombal modernised the state, reformed education, drove the economy, expelled the Jesuits (1759) and abolished slavery in mainland Portugal (1761, though not in the colonies). Authoritarian and feared, he left a new Lisbon and a reformed country, but also the memory of ferocious repression against his opponents.
The 19th century began with a humiliation and an extraordinary flight. In 1807 Napoleon, determined to close Europe to British trade, demanded that Portugal — England's old ally — join the blockade. When it refused, he sent his troops, who invaded the country. In November 1807, with the French at the gates of Lisbon, the entire Portuguese court, led by the prince regent João (the future João VI), embarked for Brazil escorted by the British fleet. It was the only time in history that a European monarchy moved its capital to a colony: Rio de Janeiro became, in practice, the centre of the Portuguese empire.
Between 1808 and 1814 Portugal was the theatre of the Peninsular War: three French invasions were repelled with the decisive support of the Duke of Wellington's British army and of popular resistance, in a devastating conflict. The court, meanwhile, stayed in Brazil, which was raised to the status of a kingdom in 1815, on an equal footing with Portugal. When João VI finally returned to Lisbon in 1821, pressed by the liberal revolution of 1820, he left his son Pedro in Rio as regent.
The outcome was the loss of the jewel of the empire. On 7 September 1822, faced with Portuguese attempts to subordinate Brazil once more, Pedro proclaimed its independence and had himself crowned Emperor Pedro I of Brazil. Portugal lost its richest colony and was left with almost nothing in the Americas. The rest of the century was convulsive: civil wars between liberals and absolutists (the Miguelite wars), the establishment of a constitutional monarchy, the definitive abolition of slavery throughout the empire in 1869, and a slow economic decline. Growing mistrust of a weakened and discredited monarchy came to a head on 5 October 1910, when a revolution in Lisbon overthrew King Manuel II and proclaimed the First Portuguese Republic.
The First Republic (1910-1926) was a turbulent and unstable period: in sixteen years dozens of governments came and went, there were conflicts with the Church, economic crises and participation in the First World War alongside the Allies, with thousands of Portuguese dead in Flanders and Africa. The chaos opened the way to a military coup in 1926, which installed a dictatorship. Out of that regime emerged the figure who would dominate Portugal for almost half a century: António de Oliveira Salazar, an austere professor of economics called in in 1928 to put the finances in order, who in 1932 was made head of government and in 1933 institutionalised the Estado Novo, an authoritarian, corporatist and conservative regime inspired by the fascist models of the day.
The Estado Novo rested on three pillars that propaganda summed up as "God, Fatherland and Family". It was a one-party regime, with no free elections, that suppressed liberties and regimented society. Its repressive backbone was the political police, the PIDE (Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado), notorious for surveillance, arbitrary arrests, torture and a network of informers that spread fear; opponents filled prisons such as Peniche or the Tarrafal camp in Cape Verde. Prior censorship (the so-called "blue pencil") controlled the press, books, theatre and cinema. Salazar kept Portugal neutral in the Second World War, though with ambiguous sympathies and business dealings, and maintained a poor, rural and isolated country, with very high illiteracy and heavy emigration to France and elsewhere.
The regime's Achilles' heel was the empire. While the other European powers decolonised, Salazar clung to the African colonies — Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau — proclaiming that Portugal was a "pluricontinental" nation. From 1961 wars of independence broke out in all three territories, and Portugal became entangled in thirteen years of colonial wars (1961-1974) that consumed almost half the national budget and sent tens of thousands of young conscripts to Africa, many of whom died or came back scarred. In 1968 Salazar suffered a stroke and was replaced by Marcelo Caetano, who changed nothing essential. The strain of those endless wars would be precisely what brought the regime down.
On 25 April 1974, a movement of army captains sick of a colonial war with no way out — the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) — overthrew the Estado Novo in an almost bloodless coup. It was the Carnation Revolution (Revolução dos Cravos), so called because the public came out into the streets to support the soldiers and women put red carnations in the barrels of their rifles. The broadcasting of the banned song "Grândola, Vila Morena" on the radio was the agreed signal for the rising. Within hours, the oldest dictatorship in western Europe fell and Portugal recovered its freedom after almost fifty years.
The period that followed, the PREC (Ongoing Revolutionary Process), was intense and turbulent: nationalisations, land reform in the south, struggles between left-wing currents and moderate sectors, and a strong military presence, until the crisis settled and the democratic Constitution of 1976 set the rules of a parliamentary republic. At the same time came a rapid decolonisation: in 1974-1975, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and São Tomé gained independence, sometimes amid civil wars. That hurried withdrawal brought back to Portugal around half a million people, the "retornados", many born in Africa, who arrived within a few months and transformed Portuguese society. East Timor, invaded by Indonesia in 1975, would not achieve independence until 2002; Macau was handed back to China in 1999, closing five centuries of empire.
Free and without colonies, Portugal looked to Europe. In 1986 it joined the European Economic Community (today the European Union) along with Spain, which drove a profound modernisation: infrastructure, investment, openness and a marked rise in living standards. It adopted the euro in 1999-2002, hosted Expo 98 and the 2004 European Championship, and in 2011 went through a harsh debt crisis that forced a financial bailout and years of austerity, later overcome with a recovery that made the country a booming tourist and technology destination. 25 April, today the national holiday of "Freedom Day", remains the founding date of Portuguese democracy: the memory that the long night of the Estado Novo ended with flowers in the rifles.
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The very name of the Algarve gives away its past: it comes from the Arabic al-Gharb, "the west", because this was the westernmost region of all al-Andalus and of the Islamic world. The Algarve was indeed the part of Portugal where Muslim rule lasted longest and went deepest: from the 8th century to the mid-13th, nearly five hundred years. During that period a refined Andalusi culture flourished, with cities, irrigated agriculture, maritime trade and a notable intellectual life.
Its great capital was Xelb (today's Silves), seat of an independent taifa in the 11th century and famous for its poets — the poet-king al-Mutamid himself passed through here — and for its trade. From that period remain the imposing red sandstone castle of Silves and numerous traces: cisterns, wells, water tanks and street plans. After the Christian conquest, completed by Afonso III with the taking of Faro in 1249, the Algarve was absorbed into the kingdom, though it kept an identity of its own: kings would style themselves "kings of Portugal and of the Algarves", in the plural, including the North African possessions.
The Arab imprint remains the most visible of any Portuguese region. You see it in the vernacular architecture — the cubic white houses, the flat roof terraces and above all the openwork chimneys, true lacework in plaster — in the farming of figs, almonds, carobs and oranges, in the cooking and in hundreds of place names beginning with "Al-": Albufeira, Alcoutim, Aljezur, Alvor. The Algarve is, in many ways, the most Mediterranean and African Portugal, the closest to its Maghrebi neighbour across the sea.
At the south-western tip of the Algarve, on the promontory of Sagres — beside Cape St Vincent, the most south-westerly point of continental Europe — tradition places the starting point of the age of Discovery. It was here that Prince Henry the Navigator (Henrique o Navegador), son of King João I, established his base at the beginning of the 15th century and from where he drove, organised and financed the first systematic expeditions down the coast of West Africa.
Romantic historiography imagined at Sagres a great "school of navigation" where Henry supposedly gathered cartographers, astronomers, shipbuilders and pilots from various nations. Historians today qualify that myth considerably: there was probably no formal academy, but there was a genuine centre of impetus, tied to the nearby port of Lagos, from which the caravels sailed. Under Henry's patronage, the Portuguese refined the caravel, worked their way down the African coast, passed the feared Cape Bojador in 1434 — a psychological rather than a physical barrier — and opened the route that would lead, decades later, to rounding Africa and reaching India.
At Sagres stands the Fortaleza de Sagres, with the enigmatic compass rose carved into the ground (the rosa dos ventos), a huge stone circle whose origin is debated. Whether or not it was the exact site of Henry's court, the promontory of Sagres, battered by wind and ocean, has become a symbolic place: the edge from which a small Atlantic kingdom set out to explore and conquer the world.
The port of Lagos, in the western Algarve, was one of the great protagonists of the first Portuguese expansion. Expeditions sponsored by Henry the Navigator sailed from its bay and returned laden with gold, goods and African captives. It was here that one of the darkest episodes in European history took place: the opening of the Atlantic slave trade.
In 1444, six caravels under Lançarote de Freitas returned to Lagos with 235 Africans captured on the coast of what is now Mauritania. On 8 August of that year, those men, women and children were landed, divided up and sold in a square in Lagos, in the presence of Prince Henry himself, who watched on horseback and took his share as the "royal fifth". The chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara described the scene with unusual starkness for the time: the weeping, the separation of families, the division of the captives. It was the first great market of African slaves in modern Europe.
That inaugural act began the Portuguese Atlantic slave trade, which would last more than four centuries — the longest of all the European powers — and would tear millions of Africans from their land to take them to Europe, to the Atlantic islands and, above all, to Brazil. In Lagos, on the site where those sales took place, the Mercado de Escravos now stands, converted in 2016 into a museum devoted to the memory of slavery. It is a necessary counterpoint to the epic of the Discoveries: a reminder that Portuguese maritime glory and the greatest collective crime of the modern age were born of the same enterprise and in the same place.
The Algarve, facing the Atlantic and close to the fault separating the African and European plates, was one of the regions worst hit by the 1755 earthquake. The tidal wave that followed the shock — a tsunami with waves several metres high — devastated coastal towns in the south, especially in the western Algarve, near the epicentre. Lagos, Faro, Portimão and other towns suffered enormous damage, and many southern towns had to be rebuilt, which is why much of their historic architecture postdates that year.
For centuries, life in the Algarve revolved around the sea. Fishing was the great economic activity: sardines, salted or canned, and above all the tuna almadrava, an ancient fishing method of Mediterranean origin — inherited from Phoenicians and Arabs — consisting of setting mazes of fixed nets to catch the great bluefin tuna on their migration. The Algarve almadravas, at places such as Tavira or the Sagres coast, sustained whole communities and an important canning industry, now almost gone.
To that maritime economy were added the traditional farming of the interior — figs, almonds, carobs and, later, oranges, which made Algarve citrus famous — and salt. Taken together it was a poor, peripheral region, far from the centres of power in the north, with heavy emigration. All that would change radically in the second half of the 20th century with the arrival of a phenomenon that would transform the Algarve completely: tourism.
In the 1960s the Algarve began to turn into Portugal's great sun-and-beach destination. The building of Faro airport in 1965 opened the region to international tourism, above all British, and the golden sand beaches, the mild water, the sculpted cliffs and sea caves of the Lagos and Portimão coast, and the year-round gentle climate drew a growing number of visitors. Fishing villages such as Albufeira, Lagos and Vilamoura filled with hotels, apartments and golf courses.
Growth was dizzying and not always orderly: within a few decades the coastal strip of the central Algarve was covered in developments, with the speculation, pressure on water and transformation of the landscape that implied. Today tourism is by a wide margin the region's main activity, receiving millions of visitors a year and holding much of Portugal's hotel capacity. The contrast between the built-up coast and the hilly interior, still rural and thinly populated, is one of the region's tensions.
Despite the crowding of some stretches, the Algarve keeps corners of great beauty and authenticity: the Costa Vicentina in the west, wild and protected; the Ria Formosa, beside Faro, a maze of islands, marshes and lagoons of enormous ecological value; the white villages of the interior and the historic towns of Silves, Tavira and Lagos. The region that was the last Muslim stronghold and the cradle of the Discoveries is today the sunny southern gateway of Portugal, where a thousand-year history coexists with the parasols of the golden coast.
The Madeira archipelago was rediscovered by Portuguese navigators around 1419-1420, as part of the first expeditions sponsored by Henry the Navigator, and found uninhabited. Its name — "wood" — refers to the dense forests that covered it, partly burned by the first settlers to clear land for crops. Settlement began around 1425 and the island soon proved to be a laboratory for what would become the future Atlantic colonial system.
The key was sugar. From the mid-15th century sugar cane was introduced, and it found ideal conditions in Madeira's climate. The island filled with plantations and mills (engenhos) and became, by around 1500, one of the world's largest sugar producers, the "white gold" that sold at high prices in Europe. But that crop was brutally labour-intensive, and to work the cane fields and mills the settlers turned massively to slaves: first Guanches captured in the Canaries and captives from North Africa, and very soon sub-Saharan Africans brought by the emerging Portuguese slave trade.
Madeira was thus the first place where the tragic model that would define the colonial economy of the Americas was tested: the sugar plantation based on slave labour. That scheme — cane, mill, slavery — would later be exported to the Azores, Cape Verde, São Tomé and, above all, to Brazil and the Caribbean, where it reached immense proportions. Madeira's sugar wealth declined when much cheaper Brazilian competition sank prices in the 16th century, but the island had already played its historical role as the cradle of the Atlantic plantation system.
After the decline of sugar, Madeira found another source of wealth that would make it famous the world over: wine. Madeira wine is a fortified wine, like port, but with a unique feature born by accident. In the 17th and 18th centuries the island was an obligatory stop for ships crossing the Atlantic, and the wine they loaded travelled in the holds through the tropics, exposed to heat and motion. Far from spoiling, that wine improved: the heat gave it a distinctive flavour. Producers then began to imitate the process deliberately, "cooking" the wine, which gave rise to an almost indestructible drink that could last for centuries.
Madeira wine became a luxury product highly prized in England, the American colonies and the European courts. Tradition has it that the United States Declaration of Independence was toasted in 1776 with Madeira wine. That trade, largely in the hands of British firms, tied the island closely to the English-speaking world and sustained its economy for generations.
Madeira is also known as "the garden island" or "the pearl of the Atlantic", for its mild subtropical climate all year and its exuberant vegetation. Its slopes are threaded by the levadas, an ingenious system of irrigation channels that carry water from the damp mountains of the north to the crops of the south, now turned into famous walking routes. The capital, Funchal, with its port, its old quarter and its gardens, was through the 19th and 20th centuries a resting place for the European aristocracy. In 1976, after the Carnation Revolution, Madeira became an Autonomous Region of Portugal, with its own government.
The Azores are an archipelago of nine volcanic islands lost in the middle of the Atlantic, more than 1,400 kilometres from mainland Portugal, on the mid-ocean ridge. They were reached by Portuguese navigators around 1427-1431 and found, like Madeira, uninhabited. Settlement began around 1439 on the eastern and central islands and spread through the 15th and 16th centuries to the western ones, with settlers from mainland Portugal joined by Flemings — hence the strong Flemish settlement of some islands, such as Faial — and other Europeans.
The position of the Azores in the middle of the ocean gave them enormous strategic value during the age of Discovery and the empire. The archipelago became the great Atlantic staging post: ships returning from India (the Carreira da Índia), from Brazil or with the Spanish silver fleets made their last stop here to resupply before reaching Europe. The port of Angra, on Terceira, was from the 16th to the 18th centuries one of the most important supports of all transatlantic navigation, a genuine crossroads of world trade. For its heritage value, the central area of Angra do Heroísmo was declared a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1983.
That central position also had military and political consequences. The Azores were the scene of naval battles during the Iberian Union, a refuge for liberal causes in the 19th century — Angra received the title "do Heroísmo" for its role in the liberal wars — and, in the 20th century, a key air base for the Allies in the Second World War and for NATO in the Cold War (the Lajes base, still in use). Like Madeira, the Azores were granted the status of Autonomous Region of Portugal in 1976.
For almost two centuries, whaling was one of the great activities of the Azores and shaped much of their identity. It began at the end of the 18th century, when New England whalers roaming the Atlantic in pursuit of sperm whales started calling at the islands to resupply and to recruit crew among the Azoreans, famous for their courage and seamanship. Many islanders signed on to those Yankee ships and learned the trade.
In time the Azoreans set up their own shore-based whaling industry. From lookouts (vigias) high on the cliffs, watchers spotted the spout of sperm whales and raised the alarm; the crews then launched into the sea in fragile rowing boats, the botes baleeiros, to harpoon the huge animals by hand, work as dangerous as it was spectacular and which continued almost unchanged well into the 20th century. The blubber, the oil, the ivory and the ambergris of the sperm whales were processed in the islands' whaling factories.
Whaling in the Azores did not end until the 1980s, when international pressure and moratoria brought the activity to a close; the last catch was in 1987. That whaling culture, however, did not disappear: it changed. Today the Azores are one of the best places in the world for whale and dolphin watching, and the old lookouts and boats have been converted to nature tourism. The whaling museums on islands such as Pico and Faial preserve the memory of a trade that marked generations of Azoreans.
Few communities in the world have emigrated as much, in proportion, as the Azoreans. The combination of limited volcanic land, a poor economy and a high birth rate pushed islanders for centuries to seek a future across the sea. The link with the New England whalers opened the way: many Azoreans who signed on to those ships ended up staying on the east coast of the United States, in ports such as New Bedford or Provincetown (Massachusetts), which became genuine Azorean colonies.
From the 19th century and throughout the 20th, Azorean emigration went mainly to the United States and Canada, and also to Brazil, Bermuda and Hawaii, where many islanders worked on the plantations. Whole island communities moved to California — to farming valleys in the centre of the state, where they went into dairy farming — and to New England, keeping the language, the Espírito Santo religious festivals and Azorean traditions alive for generations. There are reckoned to be far more people of Azorean origin outside the islands than in them.
Volcanic eruptions were sometimes the trigger for those mass departures: the eruption of the Capelinhos volcano on Faial, between 1957 and 1958, buried villages under ash and caused emigration on such a scale that the United States Congress passed special laws (the Azorean Refugee Acts) to take in the displaced. That diaspora turned the Azoreans into a people scattered across the world, held together by family ties, remittances and a deep attachment to the islands they came from. Emigration is still, today, one of the keys to understanding Azorean society and culture.
On the banks of the river Mondego, Coimbra was the first effective capital of the kingdom of Portugal: the first kings lived here and the founder, Afonso Henriques, is buried here in the monastery of Santa Cruz. But what made the city famous worldwide is its university. Founded by King Dinis in Lisbon in 1290 and moved definitively to Coimbra in 1537, it is one of the oldest continuously operating universities in Europe and the world.
The University of Coimbra was installed in the old royal palace, on top of the hill overlooking the city. Its heart is an extraordinary monumental complex: the Paço das Escolas with its tower and its Via Latina, the Chapel of São Miguel and, above all, the Biblioteca Joanina, an 18th-century baroque library of dazzling opulence, with gilded, carved shelving and a famous colony of bats that protects the books from insects at night. For centuries the intellectual elite of Portugal and its empire passed through its lecture halls.
In 2013 the University of Coimbra, with its Alta and the Rua da Sofia, was declared a Unesco World Heritage Site. The city keeps a strong student spirit, with its centuries-old academic traditions: the students' black capes, the tunas, the serenades and the fado of Coimbra — different from Lisbon's, sung only by men — that echoes through its nights. "Coimbra studies", says the proverb, and it is indeed the city of learning par excellence in Portugal.
Fátima is today one of the largest Catholic pilgrimage centres in the world, but until the early 20th century it was an anonymous village in rural central Portugal. Everything changed in 1917, in the middle of the First World War. According to the account, between May and October of that year three shepherd children — Lúcia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto — said they saw the Virgin Mary several times at a place called Cova da Iria. The Virgin is said to have given them messages and three "secrets".
The event that cemented the devotion was the so-called "miracle of the sun" of 13 October 1917, when a crowd of tens of thousands of people, gathered in the rain, described the sun "dancing" and spinning in the sky. The Catholic Church investigated for years and in 1930 officially authorised the cult. Fátima quickly became a magnet for pilgrims, especially after the building of the great basilica and the enormous sanctuary.
The sanctuary gained worldwide standing in the 20th century, especially through the figure of Pope John Paul II, who attributed to Our Lady of Fátima his survival of the assassination attempt of 13 May 1981 — the same calendar date as the first apparition — and who canonised the two shepherd children who died in childhood. Every 13 May and 13 October, hundreds of thousands of the faithful, many on their knees, come to Fátima, which has become a symbol of Portuguese popular Catholicism and one of the great Marian centres on the planet.
Nazaré was for centuries a typical fishing village on the central Portuguese coast, famous for its seafaring traditions: the colourful boats drawn up on the beach, fishing with nets hauled from the sand, the fish drying in the sun and, above all, its women dressed in the characteristic seven skirts (as sete saias) and their headscarves. The town is arranged on two levels: the beach at sea level and, on top of a cliff, the Sítio quarter, linked by a funicular, with the sanctuary of Nossa Senhora da Nazaré, an old place of pilgrimage.
Since the start of the 21st century, Nazaré has become world famous for another reason: its giant waves. Off Praia do Norte, an enormous submarine canyon opens in the ocean floor, the Nazaré canyon, one of the largest in Europe, which concentrates and amplifies the energy of the Atlantic swell and produces, in winter, colossal waves. There, in 2011, the Hawaiian surfer Garrett McNamara astonished the world by riding a giant wave, and since then the beach has established itself as the world mecca of big-wave surfing.
World records for the biggest wave ever surfed have been set at Nazaré, with walls of water more than 20 metres high. Every winter, when the conditions line up, the best surfers on the planet come to take on the ocean, towed in by jet ski, before crowds watching from the lighthouse at the São Miguel Arcanjo fort. The old fishing village has thus become, without losing its roots, a symbol of the power of the Atlantic.
Aveiro, on the central coast, has earned the nickname "the Portuguese Venice" for the canals crossing its town centre, plied by moliceiros, traditional high-prowed boats decorated with often risqué paintings. But what defines Aveiro is not so much the town as the Ria de Aveiro, a vast coastal lagoon of channels, creeks and islands formed where the river Vouga meets the Atlantic.
Aveiro's history is tied to the whims of the sandbar separating the lagoon from the sea. In 1575 a violent storm closed the lagoon's link with the ocean: the port was ruined, the water stagnated, fevers decimated the population and the town entered a long decline. Only in 1808, after centuries of attempts, was a new bar opened artificially, today's Barra de Aveiro, which brought the lagoon and the port back to life and allowed the town to recover.
That lagoon gave rise to Aveiro's two traditional activities: salt production in the pans, by evaporating seawater in the marshes, and the harvesting of seaweed (the moliço) that gave the moliceiros their name and served as fertiliser. To these was added, in the 20th century, cod fishing on the far-off banks of Newfoundland, where Aveiro had a notable fleet. Rich also in tiles and in early 20th-century art nouveau architecture, and famous for its ovos moles sweets, Aveiro today combines its heritage with the appeal of a lagoon unique in Portugal.
Óbidos is one of the best-preserved medieval villages in Portugal: a cluster of whitewashed houses, cobbled streets and flowers, entirely enclosed within a ring of walls crowned by a castle, on a hill overlooking the plain. Its look of a scene frozen in time has made it one of the most visited and photographed villages in the country.
Its history has one singular feature. After the Christian conquest from the Muslims in 1148, the town grew in importance, and in 1282 King Dinis gave it as a wedding present to his wife, Queen Isabel of Aragon (Saint Isabel). From then on and for more than five centuries, Óbidos and its district formed part of the "Casa das Rainhas": they belonged directly to the queens of Portugal, who drew their rents from them. Hence its name, "a Vila das Rainhas", the village of the queens.
Today Óbidos lives on tourism and its traditions. It is famous for the ginja of Óbidos, a sour-cherry liqueur usually served in small edible chocolate cups, and for the festivals that fill the walled town through the year: the Medieval Market in summer, which turns the village into a re-enactment of the Middle Ages, and the Vila Natal in winter. Recognised by Unesco as a City of Literature, Óbidos is proof of how a small medieval village in central Portugal has kept its old-world charm intact.
Lisbon is one of the oldest cities in western Europe, with more than three millennia of history. Phoenicians and Greeks frequented its magnificent natural harbour in the Tagus estuary; the Romans called it Olisipo and made it a prosperous municipium; the Muslims, who ruled it for more than four centuries, knew it as al-Ushbūna and ringed it with walls whose line can still be sensed in the maze of Alfama, the city's oldest quarter. In 1147 Afonso Henriques took it with the help of crusaders and added it to the young kingdom.
With the Discoveries, Lisbon lived its golden age. In the 16th century, ships sailed from the Belém district for India and Brazil and returned laden with spices, gold and slaves, turning the city into one of the great trading centres of the world. From that opulence remain the Jerónimos Monastery and the Torre de Belém, jewels of the Manueline style and today World Heritage Sites. The 1755 earthquake destroyed much of the city, which the Marquis of Pombal rebuilt on the geometric plan of the Baixa.
Today Lisbon combines that imperial inheritance with the charm of its seven hills, the yellow trams climbing its slopes, the miradouros, the fado spilling out of the taverns of Alfama and Mouraria, and a vibrant cultural life. Capital of a country that once ruled half the planet, it keeps in its stones the memory of greatness and of the fall, and that bittersweet feeling, saudade, that runs through its music and its character.
A short way from Lisbon, the Serra de Sintra has always fascinated for its damp, cool microclimate, its exuberant vegetation and its mists, an absolute contrast with the dryness around it. The Romans already associated it with lunar cults (Mons Lunae) and the Muslims built a castle here. From the Middle Ages it was the summer retreat of the kings of Portugal, who built in the old centre the National Palace of Sintra, recognisable by its two enormous conical chimneys.
In the 19th century, Sintra became the great stage of Portuguese Romanticism. The king consort Fernando II, cousin of German royalty, turned the ruins of a monastery into the Pena Palace, an eclectic fantasy of loud colours and mixed styles, perched on a hilltop within a park of trees brought from all over the world. The English poet Lord Byron, who visited, called it "the glorious Eden". Aristocrats and millionaires filled the range with estates and gardens, such as the enigmatic Quinta da Regaleira, with its initiation well and its Masonic symbols.
That exceptional ensemble of palaces, parks and mountains led, in 1995, to the cultural landscape of Sintra being declared a Unesco World Heritage Site, as a pioneering example of romantic landscape architecture in Europe. Today it is one of the most visited destinations in Portugal, a place where royal history and romantic imagination merge in the mist.
On the coast west of Lisbon, where the Tagus meets the Atlantic, Cascais was for centuries a modest fishing village. Its fortunes changed at the end of the 19th century: in 1870 King Luís I chose the citadel of Cascais as the Portuguese royal family's summer residence, and the court followed. The arrival of the railway and the first sea-bathing facilities turned Cascais and neighbouring Estoril into the fashionable resort of the aristocracy.
The most singular period came during the Second World War. As Portugal was neutral, Estoril and Cascais filled with exiles, refugees, fallen aristocrats, spies and diplomats from both sides. Dethroned kings from half of Europe — Spain, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria — made their home here, and the air of intrigue at the Casino Estoril is said to have inspired the writer Ian Fleming, who worked for British intelligence, in creating his character James Bond.
Today Cascais is an elegant coastal town combining its marina, its beaches and its old quarter with museums and an intense tourist life, while keeping corners of its seafaring past. Very close by, Cabo da Roca, the westernmost point of continental Europe, marks the place where, in Camões's words, "the land ends and the sea begins": the edge from which Portugal looked out at the ocean it was about to conquer.
Inland, on the vast golden plains of the Alentejo, Évora is a museum-city that sums up the layers of Portuguese history like few others. It was already important in Roman times, when it was called Ebora Liberalitas Julia: from that period comes its most famous monument, the so-called "Temple of Diana", a 1st-century Roman temple whose Corinthian columns still stand, miraculously, right in the centre. Under Muslim rule, as Yābura, it was a stronghold of the Gharb al-Andalus until its Christian conquest in 1165.
In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Évora lived its heyday as the seat of the court of several kings and of a Jesuit university. The city filled with palaces, churches, convents and a Gothic cathedral, all ringed by walls. Its most striking corner is the Capela dos Ossos, the "chapel of bones", whose walls are lined with the remains of thousands of skeletons and an inscription reminding the visitor: "Nós ossos que aqui estamos, pelos vossos esperamos" ("We bones that are here await yours").
In 1986 the historic centre of Évora was declared a Unesco World Heritage Site as an exceptionally well-preserved urban ensemble. Around it stretches the deep Alentejo, a region of great estates, cork, olive groves, vineyards and white villages, the setting of a strong farming and day-labouring tradition and, after the Carnation Revolution, of the land reform of the 1970s. It is the slowest and widest Portugal, of long horizons and dry heat, very different from the green, mountainous north.
The Lisbon and south-central region has been, for almost all of the country's modern history, the centre of Portugal's political, economic and cultural power. The reason is geographical: the Tagus estuary, one of the best natural harbours on the Atlantic, able to shelter whole fleets from the open sea. From there the empire was governed, and through there came and went the wealth that made the kingdom great.
This region holds the great landmarks of national memory. At Belém, beside the river, stand the monuments of the age of Discovery and, facing them, the modern Padrão dos Descobrimentos, raised under the Estado Novo to exalt the maritime epic. It was also in Lisbon that the decisive moments of contemporary history broke out: the proclamation of the Republic in 1910 and, above all, the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974, whose key episodes — the taking of the Carmo barracks, Caetano's surrender, the crowd in the Rossio square — were played out in the streets of the capital.
Today the Lisbon metropolitan area holds close to a third of the Portuguese population and is the country's engine: seat of government, of finance, of the universities and of a growing technology and tourism sector. The region combines the weight of history with the life of a dynamic European capital, stretched between the hills of the old city, the beaches of the Estoril coast and the endless plains of the Alentejo.
No Portuguese city carries a motto as emphatic as Guimarães: "Aqui nasceu Portugal", "Portugal was born here". And it is not tourist hyperbole. It was in this corner of the north, between the Minho and the Douro, that the kingdom took shape at the start of the 12th century. Countess Teresa held her court here; here, tradition says, her son Afonso Henriques, the first king, was born around 1109; and very close by, on the hill of São Mamede, he fought in 1128 the battle that gave him control of the county and opened the way to independence.
The historic centre of Guimarães keeps that founding air. Above the town rises the Castle of Guimarães, from the 10th century, with its keep, where legend places the first king's baptism in the neighbouring church of São Miguel. Beside it stands the 15th-century Palace of the Dukes of Bragança, and at the foot of the hill spreads an exceptionally well-preserved medieval centre of lanes, squares and arcaded houses, one of the most authentic examples of a medieval town in the peninsula.
For that value, the historic centre of Guimarães was declared a Unesco World Heritage Site in 2001, recognised as evidence of the evolution from the medieval to the modern house type. In 2012 the city was European Capital of Culture. For the Portuguese, Guimarães remains a place of patriotic pilgrimage: the spot where a nation almost nine centuries old took its first steps.
Braga is one of the oldest cities in Portugal and its great religious capital. Founded by the Romans as Bracara Augusta in the time of Emperor Augustus, it was an important road junction and the capital of a judicial district. In the 5th century it became the capital of the Suebic Kingdom, one of the first Christianised Germanic kingdoms in Europe, which gave it an early ecclesiastical importance it never lost.
Its archbishop became one of the most powerful figures in the peninsula: the prelates of Braga claimed for centuries the primacy over all the churches of Hispania, in rivalry with Toledo and Santiago de Compostela. That pre-eminence filled the city with churches, chapels, convents and episcopal palaces; its cathedral, the Sé de Braga, is the oldest in the country. The popular saying sums up the character of the main northern cities: "Braga prays, Porto works, Coimbra studies and Lisbon has fun".
The monument that made Braga famous worldwide is the sanctuary of Bom Jesus do Monte, on the outskirts: an imposing baroque zigzag stairway, adorned with fountains, statues and chapels depicting the Passion, climbing the hillside to the church in a spectacular piece of Counter-Reformation staging. In 2019 it was declared a World Heritage Site. Braga today is a young university city, but it remains the spiritual heart of the north and the setting for famous Holy Week celebrations.
Porto is Portugal's second city and, in a sense, the one that gave the country its name: from the old Roman and medieval port of Portus Cale, at the mouth of the Douro, came "Portugal". A working, proud city and capital of the north, it spreads across an amphitheatre of houses packed onto the steep slopes above the river, with the Ribeira — the old riverside quarter — as its heart. Famous iron bridges cross the Douro, among them the Ponte Dom Luís I, from the late 19th century, inspired by the Eiffel school.
The historic centre of Porto, with its Romanesque cathedral, the Clérigos tower, São Bento station lined with tiles and the tangle of lanes in the Ribeira, was declared a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1996. The city played a leading role in the liberal history of the 19th century: it withstood a long absolutist siege in 1832-1833 (the "Cerco do Porto") in defence of the constitutional cause, which earned it the title of "Cidade Invicta", the unvanquished city.
But Porto's worldwide fame is tied to its wine. On the opposite bank of the river, in Vila Nova de Gaia, stand the lodges ("caves") where port wine ages, the famous sweet fortified dessert wine that for centuries was shipped in casks down the Douro. That industry explains one of the city's hallmarks: its old, close relationship with the English.
Port wine was born of the meeting between the vineyards of the Upper Douro valley and English trade. The old Anglo-Portuguese alliance, sealed in the Treaty of Windsor of 1386, and above all the wars between England and France, meant that at the end of the 17th and the start of the 18th century British merchants, cut off from French wine, looked to Portugal for a substitute. They found the strong red wines of the Douro and, so they would survive the sea voyage, began adding brandy, which halted the fermentation and produced a sweet, alcoholic wine: port.
The Methuen Treaty (1703) between Portugal and England cut tariffs on Portuguese wine in exchange for opening the Portuguese market to English textiles, and exports took off. Powerful British merchant firms — Taylor's, Graham's, Sandeman, Croft — set up in Porto and Gaia, and their names still appear on the lodges. Demand grew so much that in 1756 the Marquis of Pombal created a monopoly company and officially demarcated the Douro region: one of the first regulated wine appellations of origin in the world.
That landscape of terraced vineyards on the vertiginous slopes of the Upper Douro, shaped by centuries of human labour, was declared a Unesco World Heritage Site in 2001. The English presence left its mark on Porto — clubs, surnames, a taste for wine and even a fondness for football — and made the city a place of double culture. From the Douro to the world, port became one of the emblems of Portugal and the livelihood of a whole region.
The north of Portugal, between the rivers Minho and Douro, is the historic and demographic heart of the country and the place where traditions are most strongly kept. It is a green, rainy, mountainous land of smallholdings, granite villages, religious festivals and intense popular piety. Here too are the Peneda-Gerês National Park, Portugal's only national park, and wine regions such as that of vinho verde, the young, fruity wine typical of the Minho.
Culturally, the north has a strong sense of identity. It shares with neighbouring Galicia Celtic and Suebic roots, a very similar landscape and religiosity, and even linguistic features: medieval Galician-Portuguese, the common language of the troubadours, was born precisely in this strip on both sides of the Minho. In the far north-east, in Miranda do Douro and the Terras de Miranda, Mirandese is still spoken, Portugal's second official language, related to Asturleonese.
Economically, the north was through the 20th century the country's most industrial region, with textiles and footwear around Porto, Braga and Guimarães, and also one of the biggest senders of emigrants to France, Germany, Switzerland and the Americas. That character of a hard-working, tenacious land attached to its customs — salt cod, caldo verde, the São João festivals of Porto and Braga — defines the soul of a north that considers itself, with reason, the origin of Portugal.