Portugal

Where Portugal ends and the Atlantic begins

Portugal occupies the western edge of the Iberian peninsula and two Atlantic archipelagos, covering 92,225 square kilometres with 10,347,892 people counted in the 2021 census. It has one land border, 1,214 kilometres of it, shared entirely with Spain, and the whole of its Atlantic coast beyond that.

The mainland divides on the Tagus. North of the river the ground is higher, wetter, greener and much more densely settled; south of it the Alentejo runs flat and hot across roughly a third of the country with among the lowest population densities in western Europe. The highest point of Portugal is not on the mainland at all: Mount Pico in the Azores reaches 2,351 metres. Portugal: geography goes into the rivers and the two archipelagos.

Portuguese is the only official language on the mainland, with Mirandese recognised in a small north-eastern area. The land border has not moved in any substantial way since the thirteenth century, which makes it among the oldest in Europe.

How the oldest border in Europe was drawn

A county on the northern edge of the peninsula separated from the kingdom of León and was recognised as a kingdom in its own right in the twelfth century, and the state has existed continuously since apart from a period under the Spanish crown between 1580 and 1640.

What made Portugal exceptional came afterwards. From the early fifteenth century Portuguese ships worked down the West African coast, reached India by sea in 1498 and Brazil in 1500, and built a network of trading posts from the Atlantic islands to Macau. That empire supplied the wealth, the language spread and eventually the crises: an earthquake destroyed Lisbon in 1755, Brazil became independent in 1822, and the African territories were held until 1975.

The twentieth century is short and sharp. A republic replaced the monarchy in 1910, a dictatorship took power in the late 1920s and held it for close to half a century, and army officers removed it on 25 April 1974 in a coup that met almost no resistance. Portugal: history follows the sequence from the county to the revolution.

How a young democracy governs itself

The constitution dates from 1976 and Portugal is a unitary semi-presidential republic. Legislative power sits with a single chamber of 230 seats and there is no upper house.

A directly elected president holds what Portuguese constitutional practice calls a moderating power: appointing the prime minister, returning laws to parliament, referring bills to the Constitutional Court before signature, and dissolving parliament. That last power has been used often, with early elections in 2004, 2011, 2023 and 2025, and minority government is the normal condition rather than the exception.

The Azores and Madeira hold autonomy written into the constitution, with their own governments and assemblies, and the mainland is administered through 18 districts under appointed governors. Portugal: politics sets out the chambers and the regions.

How Portugal earns its living

Portugal took an assistance programme worth €78 billion from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund in April 2011, contracted for three straight years, and reached record unemployment of 17.7% in early 2013. By 2025 it was running a budget surplus of 0.7% of output and public debt had fallen to 89.7%.

Goods exports were €79.22 billion in 2024, with Spain taking 27%, and the composition has moved from the canned fish, cork, textiles and wine of 1960 to chemicals, pharmaceuticals, vehicle components, moulds and electronics. Tourism closes the goods trade deficit, and the housing shortage it has helped create is now the country's most contested economic problem. Portugal: economy deals with the crisis, the recovery and what the country actually produces.

What Portugal speaks and sings

Portuguese is spoken by more than 250 million people as a first language, a ratio to the home population that no other European language approaches, and the community of Portuguese-speaking states spans four continents.

The literary tradition holds an epic of maritime arrival written in the sixteenth century and a modernism of disquiet written in the twentieth, and a novelist took the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. The national music, fado, exists in two traditions attached to Lisbon and Coimbra, with different singers and different ways of applauding.

Two visual forms identify the country on sight: the azulejo, glazed tiling used at the scale of whole façades, and Manueline late Gothic, which carves ropes, anchors and armillary spheres into doorways. Portugal: culture takes up the language, the music, the tiling and the table.

What there is to see

Portugal received 29 million international visitors in 2024, close to three for every resident, which is among the highest ratios in Europe.

Lisbon and Porto are three hours apart and read as different countries: one rebuilt on a grid after the 1755 earthquake, the other denser, steeper and darker in its granite. The Algarve is three coasts rather than one, the Douro is the oldest demarcated wine region in the world, and the Alentejo is a third of the mainland that most visitors never reach.

Madeira and the Azores offer entirely different holidays: a subtropical island of walking routes without beaches, and nine volcanic islands 1,400 kilometres out into the Atlantic. Portugal: travel sets out the regions, the seasons and where the pressure of tourism shows.

Where Portugal stands

Portugal is a founding member of NATO, joined the European Community in 1986 alongside Spain, adopted the euro at its introduction and is in the Schengen area, the OECD and the World Trade Organization.

Two relationships have no European equivalent. The Community of Portuguese Language Countries links Portugal to Brazil, Angola, Mozambique and five smaller states, giving a country of ten million a diplomatic reach out of proportion to its size. And the alliance with England, dating from the fourteenth century, is the oldest continuously active alliance between any two states.

Around 1.8 million Portuguese citizens lived abroad in 2024, and they vote in their own parliamentary constituencies, which makes the diaspora a formal part of the political system rather than only a demographic fact.