Portugal's culture: what it speaks, sings and builds with

How Portuguese became a world language

Portuguese is the sole official language of a country of 10.35 million people and is spoken as a first language by more than 250 million worldwide, which is a ratio no other European language comes close to.

The reason is the sequence of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Portuguese ships reached the Atlantic islands, the West African coast, India, Southeast Asia, China and Brazil within a hundred years, and the language went with the trading posts and the settlements. What resulted is a language whose demographic centre is Brazil rather than Portugal, and whose institutional life is shared: the orthography has been negotiated across the Portuguese-speaking states, and the Community of Portuguese Language Countries links Portugal to Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, East Timor and Equatorial Guinea.

The language itself grew out of Galician-Portuguese, the medieval speech of the north-west of the peninsula, and its earliest literature is written in that form. Mirandese, spoken in a small area of the north-east, holds official recognition as a second language of the country.

What The Lusiads did to Portuguese self-description

Portuguese literature begins in the twelfth century with troubadour lyric in Galician-Portuguese, in two established genres of love song and two of mockery, performed rather than read.

Its central work arrived in the sixteenth century. The Lusiads is an epic on the voyage to India, built on the structure and mythology of classical epic, and it did for Portuguese what Dante did for Italian: fixed the literary language and supplied the country with a self-account it has argued with ever since. A national epic written at the height of expansion, by a man who had lost an eye in North Africa and been shipwrecked, gave Portugal a heroic register and a melancholic one at the same time.

The twentieth century produced the other pole. Portuguese modernism centred on a poet who wrote through dozens of invented authors with separate biographies and incompatible philosophies, and whose principal prose work is an unfinished book of fragments assembled after his death. A novelist took the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, for work that reworks Portuguese history as a set of counterfactuals and refuses conventional punctuation.

The pairing is the point. The literature carries an epic of arrival and a modernism of disquiet, and Portuguese cultural criticism has spent a century reading the second as the consequence of the first.

Why fado has two cities and two audiences

Fado is the national music and it exists in two distinct traditions attached to two cities.

The applause convention is the detail that carries the difference. Clapping in Coimbra reads as a category error, and the cough is the accepted response to a performance treated as closer to serious music than to entertainment.

The form's standing in the country is not a matter of taste. When the singer regarded as the greatest interpreter of Lisbon fado died in October 1999, the state declared three days of national mourning, which is an unusual thing for a democracy to do for a performer.

Fado sits alongside a genuinely regional folk tradition, with dance groups and repertoires distinct from district to district, and beside music from the former African colonies that has been part of the capital's sound since the 1970s and produced its own local rap and hip hop.

What azulejos and Manueline architecture are

Two visual forms are specific enough to Portugal that they function as identifiers.

The azulejo is the glazed ceramic tile, used at architectural scale rather than as decoration around a fireplace. Church interiors, railway stations, palace walls, ordinary apartment blocks and whole building façades are surfaced in it, in blue and white or in polychrome, sometimes as pattern and sometimes as narrative panels running the length of a wall. The practice arrived from the Islamic world through Spain and became a national manner that has not stopped.

Manueline is the late Gothic of the decades around 1500, and it is the architecture of the maritime expansion made literal. Ropes, anchors, coral, armillary spheres, seaweed and knots are carved into window surrounds and portals, so a monastery doorway records the technology that paid for it. It appears in a small number of buildings over a short period and is unmistakable in all of them.

The third form is at ground level. Portuguese pavement is a mosaic of small cut limestone and basalt blocks laid by hand into patterns, covering pavements and squares across the country and exported to Brazil and Macau. It is laid by a specialist trade, it is slippery in rain, and the argument about whether to keep laying it is a recurring municipal one.

Modern Portuguese architecture has a standing out of proportion to the country's size. Two Portuguese architects have taken the profession's principal international prize, both working from Porto, in a manner built on white rendered concrete, careful sequences of movement and close attention to how a building meets sloping ground. The school around them has made the northern city an architectural destination in its own right.

What the Portuguese table is built on

Portuguese cooking is regional first and national second, and the regional dishes rarely travel even within the country.

The constants are fish and pork. Dried salted cod is the national staple, prepared in a very large number of documented ways, and it is eaten most in a country that has fresh Atlantic fish available every day, which follows from centuries of cod fishing off Newfoundland and the preservation that made it transportable. Fresh sardines, octopus and shellfish carry the coast. Inland the cooking is pork, game and bean stews, and a boiled dinner of several meats and vegetables is the closest thing to a national dish.

The sweet tradition came out of the convents, which had egg yolks in quantity because the whites were used to starch habits and to clarify wine. The result is a family of egg-and-sugar pastries with conventual names, of which the custard tart is the one that left the country.

Wine is grown almost everywhere and in an unusual number of native varieties. The fortified wine of the Douro valley carries the name of the second city, the valley is a World Heritage site for a terraced cultivation that is centuries old, and the light green wine of the north-west is drunk young and locally.

What saudade means and why it is untranslatable

Portuguese has a word that Portuguese culture treats as its own property, and the claim is worth examining rather than repeating.

Saudade describes a longing for something absent, held with affection rather than only with pain, and directed at a person, a place or a time that may never return or may never have existed. Comparable words exist in other languages, and the argument for the Portuguese case rests less on the concept being unique than on the culture having organised itself around it: the national music is built on it, the national epic ends in it, and the modernist prose of the twentieth century is a sustained examination of it.

The historical explanation usually offered is emigration. A country that sent its men to sea for five centuries, that lost a third of a generation to the colonial wars of the 1960s, and that has 1.8 million citizens living abroad in 2024 has had a great deal of practice at missing people. Whether that produced the sentiment or merely gave it something to attach to is not answerable.

The related concept is fado itself, meaning fate, which is what the music is named for. Taken together the two describe an attitude to circumstances that Portuguese cultural criticism has treated as a national characteristic and that Portuguese writers have spent a century disputing.

How Catholicism sits in the country now

Portugal is nominally Catholic to a very high proportion and observant to a much lower one, and the two figures have been diverging for decades.

The institutional position is unusual in Europe for a specific reason. The republic declared in 1910 was aggressively anticlerical and separated church and state sharply; the dictatorship that followed reversed much of that and rebuilt the relationship; and the constitution written after 1974 restored the separation while leaving the church in possession of the social role it had reacquired. Religious instruction in state schools is optional, and the church runs a substantial part of the country's charitable and elderly care provision.

Practice is concentrated by geography and by age. The rural north is markedly more observant than the south or the cities, a division that predates the twentieth century and shows in voting as well as in attendance. The change since 1974 is that the social sanction attached to non-practice has gone, and that the country legislated for divorce, abortion and same-sex marriage without the institutional resistance that comparable Catholic countries produced.

Fátima remains the exception to any account of decline. The shrine draws numbers that a falling attendance figure does not predict, from Portugal and from the wider Portuguese-speaking world, and the pilgrimage on foot along the roads to it every May is the largest public act of devotion in the country.

What the calendar actually celebrates

The festival year is organised around saints rather than around the state, and the largest celebrations are municipal.

The popular saints of June are the biggest of them. Lisbon takes Saint Anthony on 12 and 13 June and Porto takes Saint John on the night of 23 June, and both are street festivals of grilled sardines, paper decorations, music until morning and a set of local rituals that have no religious content left in them. The Porto celebration involves hitting strangers on the head with a plastic hammer.

Pilgrimage runs on a different scale. The shrine at Fátima, where three shepherd children reported apparitions in 1917, draws very large numbers on 13 May and 13 October and is one of the principal Catholic pilgrimage sites in the world.

Three Portuguese cities have held the European Capital of Culture title, in 1994, 2001 and 2012, and the programmes attached to them are visible in the cultural infrastructure of each.

Two further fixtures belong to the state rather than to the church. The Day of Portugal falls on 10 June and is formally the day of the death of the author of the national epic, so the country's national day commemorates a poet rather than a battle or a constitution, and its full title names Portugal, the poet and the Portuguese communities abroad together. And 25 April marks the coup that ended the dictatorship, celebrated as Freedom Day with a parade down the Lisbon avenue named after it.

The distinction between the two is a live one. A national day named for a sixteenth-century epic and a national day named for a twentieth-century revolution describe different countries, and which one a household observes with more attention has, at times, been legible as a political position.