The history of Portugal

Portugal, on the Atlantic edge of the Iberian Peninsula, grew out of a small county on the Douro that broke away from the kingdom of León in the twelfth century. Its borders, fixed in 1297, are among the oldest in Europe. From the fifteenth century Portuguese sailors opened sea routes along Africa, to India and to Brazil, and built an empire of trading posts and colonies that lasted, in part, until 1999. That empire was also built on the Atlantic slave trade, in which Portugal was the largest carrier. After centuries of monarchy, a short-lived republic and nearly half a century of dictatorship, the Carnation Revolution of 1974 brought democracy, decolonisation and, in 1986, membership of the European Community.

Humans have lived in the west of Iberia for hundreds of thousands of years; a skull of Homo heidelbergensis about 400,000 years old was found in the Aroeira cave north of Lisbon. Neanderthals followed, and modern humans arrived perhaps 35,000 years ago. In the Côa Valley in the northeast, Upper Palaeolithic hunters carved thousands of figures of horses, aurochs and ibex into open-air rocks, one of the largest such collections in the world, now a UNESCO World Heritage site. Neolithic farmers raised dolmens and stone circles, such as the Almendres Cromlech near Évora, part of the Atlantic megalithic tradition.

In the first millennium BCE the north was home to the Castro culture, named after its hilltop settlements of round stone houses, such as Citânia de Briteiros near Braga. Celtic-speaking groups, related to the Celts of central Europe, mixed with older peoples, and the Romans later knew the main peoples as the Gallaeci in the north, the Lusitanians in the centre and the Conii or Cynetes in the Algarve. The Conii left inscriptions in the Southwest Script, among the oldest writing in Iberia. Traders from Phoenicia, and later Carthage, set up posts along the southern coast, and Greeks also visited.

The Roman Republic arrived in Iberia in 218 BCE during the Second Punic War against Carthage, and the conquest of the west took two centuries. The Lusitanians resisted fiercely; their leader Viriathus, a shepherd and guerrilla commander, defeated several Roman armies before being murdered by his own envoys, bribed by Rome, around 139 BCE. Later Portuguese nationalists would claim him as a founding hero. The north was subdued only in the Cantabrian Wars under Augustus, who organised the province of Lusitania with its capital at Emerita Augusta, now Mérida in Spain.

Under the Roman Empire the land was linked by roads and bridges and dotted with cities and villas. Olisipo, the future Lisbon, Bracara Augusta, now Braga, and Conímbriga near Coimbra were important towns, and the mines of the south produced copper, silver and gold. Coastal factories exported garum, a fish sauce, across the empire. Latin replaced the native languages, laying the base of Portuguese, and Christianity spread from the third century. Diocletian made the northwest a separate province, Gallaecia, with Braga as its capital.

As the Western Roman Empire broke down, Germanic groups crossed the Pyrenees in 409. The Suebi founded a kingdom in Gallaecia with its capital at Braga, one of the first post-Roman kingdoms in western Europe, and their king Rechiar was among the first Germanic rulers to mint coins and to become a Catholic. Bishop Martin of Braga led the conversion of the Suebi from Arianism in the sixth century. The Visigoths, ruling from Toledo, conquered the Suebic kingdom in 585, and the whole peninsula came under one Visigothic crown.

In 711 Arab and Berber armies of the Umayyad Caliphate crossed from North Africa and destroyed the Visigothic kingdom within a few years. The southern and central lands became the Gharb al-Andalus, the western part of Muslim Iberia, where Islam took root and Christians and Jews lived under Muslim rule as protected communities. Cities such as Silves, the capital of the Algarve, Santarém and al-Ushbuna, as Lisbon was called, flourished with irrigation, new crops such as citrus and rice, and Arabic learning, leaving hundreds of words in the Portuguese language. The region later passed under the taifa kingdoms and then the Berber dynasties of the Almoravids and the Almohads.

In the northwest, the Christian kingdom of Asturias, later León, expanded southward in what became known as the Reconquista. In 868 Vímara Peres took the town of Portus Cale, at the mouth of the Douro, and the land between the Minho and the Douro became the County of Portugal, named after it. In 1096 Alfonso VI of León granted the county to Henry of Burgundy, husband of his daughter Teresa. Their son Afonso Henriques defeated his mother's party at São Mamede in 1128, won a celebrated victory over Muslim forces at Ourique in 1139, and began calling himself king. León recognised him in the Treaty of Zamora in 1143, and the papacy confirmed the title in 1179.

Afonso took Santarém and, in 1147, Lisbon, after a siege with the help of English, Flemish and German crusaders bound for the Holy Land during the Crusades; many of the city's Muslim inhabitants were killed or expelled. The military orders, including the Templars and later the Order of Christ, settled and defended the frontier. Afonso III completed the conquest of the Algarve with the capture of Faro in 1249, and the Treaty of Alcañices with Castile in 1297 set a border that has hardly changed since. King Dinis, who reigned from 1279 to 1325, founded a university in Lisbon in 1290, later moved to Coimbra, made Portuguese the language of government, planted pine forests and built up a navy with Genoese help.

The Black Death struck in 1348. When Fernando I died in 1383 leaving only a daughter married to the king of Castile, Lisbon's merchants and much of the lesser nobility backed João, master of the Order of Avis and the late king's half-brother. With English archers, his army defeated a much larger Castilian force at Aljubarrota in 1385, ending the threat of annexation by the Crown of Castile. The Treaty of Windsor in 1386 confirmed an alliance with the Kingdom of England, first agreed in 1373, that is the oldest still in force in the world.

Portugal's expansion overseas began with the capture of Ceuta, in present-day Morocco, in 1415. João's son Prince Henry, known as Henry the Navigator, sponsored voyages down the African coast. Sailors in caravels settled the uninhabited islands of Madeira from about 1420 and the Azores from the 1430s, rounded Cape Bojador in 1434 and reached the Gulf of Guinea. These voyages opened the Age of Discovery and, from the 1440s, the trade in enslaved Africans, first sold at Lagos in the Algarve. Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488. After Christopher Columbus sailed west for Castile, the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 divided the non-European world between the two Iberian crowns along a line west of Cape Verde. In 1497 and 1498 Vasco da Gama sailed around Africa to Calicut, and in 1500 Pedro Álvares Cabral, bound for India, touched the coast of Brazil and claimed it.

Under Manuel I and João III, the Portuguese Empire became a network of fortified trading posts from East Africa to Asia. Afonso de Albuquerque seized Goa in 1510, Malacca in 1511 and Hormuz in 1515, aiming to control the spice trade of the Indian Ocean by force. Portuguese traders reached China, settling at Macau from 1557 under the Ming dynasty, and Japan from 1543. Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese navigator in Spanish service, led the first voyage around the world. Lisbon grew rich on pepper and spices, and the Manueline style of architecture, seen in the Jerónimos Monastery, celebrated the sea. Luís de Camões's epic The Lusiads, published in 1572, gave the voyages their national poem.

The wealth came with violence and persecution. In Africa, Portugal allied with and then waged war on the Kingdom of Kongo, and from the 1570s it conquered Angola from Luanda, where Queen Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba resisted for decades in the seventeenth century. Ships under the Portuguese and later Brazilian flags carried more people in the Atlantic slave trade than those of any other nation, around 5.8 million according to modern estimates, most of them to colonial Brazil, whose sugar plantations around Salvador depended on enslaved labour. Brazil's Indigenous peoples were devastated by disease, enslavement and war. At home, Manuel I, under pressure from Spain, ordered Portugal's Jews and Muslims to leave in 1496, then forcibly baptised most Jews instead; a massacre of converted Jews in Lisbon followed in 1506, and the Inquisition, established in 1536, pursued "New Christians" for more than two centuries.

In 1578 the young King Sebastião led a crusade into Morocco and was killed with much of the nobility at Alcácer Quibir. His elderly successor died in 1580, and Philip II of Spain, Manuel I's grandson, made good his claim by invasion, becoming Philip I of Portugal. The Iberian Union kept Portugal's laws and institutions separate, but drew it into the wars of the Spanish Empire. During and after the union, the Dutch Republic seized much of the Asian trade, Ceylon, the Gold Coast fort of Elmina and, for a time, northeastern Brazil and Luanda. On 1 December 1640 nobles in Lisbon rose against Spanish rule and proclaimed the Duke of Braganza king as João IV. The Restoration War lasted until Spain recognised independence in 1668, and Brazil and Angola were recovered from the Dutch.

Gold discovered in Brazil in the 1690s and diamonds soon after funded the lavish court of João V, while the Methuen Treaty of 1703 exchanged Portuguese wine, especially port, for English cloth. On 1 November 1755 an earthquake, followed by a tsunami and fires, destroyed much of Lisbon and killed tens of thousands of people, shocking thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment. The chief minister, the Marquis of Pombal, rebuilt the lower city on a grid, expelled the Jesuits in 1759, curbed the Inquisition, abolished the legal distinction between Old and New Christians and, in 1761, banned the import of enslaved people into Portugal itself, though slavery continued in the colonies.

When Napoleon's army invaded in November 1807, the royal family and court sailed under British escort to Brazil, and Rio de Janeiro became the capital of the empire. Anglo-Portuguese forces under Wellington drove out the French by 1811, during the Napoleonic Wars, but Portugal was left impoverished and under British military supervision. A liberal revolution in Porto in 1820 forced João VI to return in 1821 and accept a constitution. His son Pedro, left behind as regent, declared Brazil independent on 7 September 1822 and became emperor of the Empire of Brazil.

A civil war, the Liberal Wars of 1828 to 1834, pitted Pedro's daughter Maria II and the liberals against her absolutist uncle Miguel, and ended with liberal victory and the dissolution of the religious orders. The constitutional monarchy that followed alternated between rival parties and saw railways and roads built, but the economy lagged far behind northern Europe and emigration, above all to Brazil, was heavy. The slave trade was outlawed by stages and slavery formally ended in the colonies in 1869, though forced labour continued in Africa long after. In the Scramble for Africa, Portugal claimed a belt of land linking Angola and Mozambique, but a British ultimatum in 1890 forced it to back down, a humiliation that fed republican anger. On 1 February 1908 King Carlos and his heir were shot dead in Lisbon.

A revolution on 5 October 1910 sent Manuel II into exile and created a republic, which separated church and state, expelled the Jesuits again and introduced secular education and divorce. It was deeply unstable, with dozens of governments in sixteen years. Portugal entered the First World War on the Allied side in 1916, partly to protect its African colonies, and suffered heavy losses in Flanders at La Lys in 1918. A military coup on 28 May 1926 ended the republic. The economics professor António de Oliveira Salazar became finance minister in 1928 and prime minister in 1932, and the constitution of 1933 created the Estado Novo, or New State, a Catholic, corporatist and authoritarian regime. It censored the press, banned parties other than the official National Union and used the political police, the PIDE, and prison camps such as Tarrafal in Cape Verde against opponents.

Salazar supported Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War but kept Portugal neutral in the Second World War, while allowing the Allies to use bases in the Azores from 1943. In 1940 the consul in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, defied orders to issue thousands of visas to refugees, including many Jews, and was dismissed for it. Portugal was a founding member of NATO in 1949, a sign of its place in the Western camp during the Cold War. As other European empires withdrew in the era of the decolonisation of Africa, Salazar insisted the colonies were "overseas provinces" of a single nation. India took Goa by force in 1961, and the same year war began in Angola, followed by Guinea-Bissau in 1963 and Mozambique in 1964. The wars absorbed a large share of the budget and drove hundreds of thousands of young men to emigrate, many to France. Salazar was incapacitated by a stroke in 1968 and replaced by Marcelo Caetano, who offered limited reform.

On 25 April 1974 junior officers of the Armed Forces Movement, weary of the colonial wars, overthrew the regime in an almost bloodless coup; crowds put carnations in the soldiers' rifles, giving the Carnation Revolution its name. A turbulent revolutionary period followed, with nationalisations, land occupations in the south and rivalry between communists and moderates, until a failed left-wing coup attempt on 25 November 1975 confirmed the path to parliamentary democracy. A new constitution came in 1976, and the Socialist Mário Soares formed the first elected government. Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, Mozambique and Angola became independent in 1974 and 1975, and around half a million or more settlers, the retornados, came to Portugal. Angola and Mozambique soon fell into long civil wars. Indonesia invaded Timor-Leste in December 1975, an occupation Portugal never recognised; the territory voted for independence in 1999 and became independent in 2002. Macau was handed to China in 1999, the last act of the empire.

Portugal joined the European Economic Community with Spain in 1986, and European funds helped transform roads, schools and health care during the governments of Aníbal Cavaco Silva. It adopted the euro from its launch in 1999, and Lisbon hosted Expo 98. After a decade of slow growth, the debt crisis led to a €78 billion bailout from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund in 2011, with years of austerity, before recovery from the mid-2010s, aided by tourism. The former prime minister António Guterres became secretary-general of the United Nations in 2017.

The Socialists under António Costa governed from 2015, winning an absolute majority in 2022, but Costa resigned in November 2023 amid a corruption investigation linked to lithium and hydrogen contracts. Snap elections in March 2024 brought Luís Montenegro's centre-right Democratic Alliance to power as a minority government, while the right-wing populist party Chega rose to 50 seats. Montenegro lost a confidence vote in March 2025 over questions about his family business, and in the election of May 2025 his alliance won again, with Chega becoming the second-largest party in parliament. In January 2026 Storm Kristin caused severe destruction, damaging some 205,000 homes, with the Leiria district worst hit. In the presidential election of early 2026, the Socialist-backed former party leader António José Seguro defeated Chega's André Ventura in the second round with about two-thirds of the vote, and took office on 9 March 2026.