Portugal — Foundational understanding for the interested immigrant (Part 1)
Welcome to Portugal. This is your new home.
Now that you are living here, please enjoy it. Grab a beer. Find a park bench. Close your eyes and face the sun. You may feel relaxed and awake. You may want to start reading.
If you seek advice on weekend getaways and nice dinners, look for a blogger or an instagram influencer.
If you seek guidance on housing, schools, or healthcare, ask other foreigners on Facebook.
If you seek a basic understanding of the locals around you and how they might perceive you, look no further.
Let’s begin.
Part 1 — A thousand years of brutal, messy history
Portugal is one of the oldest countries in the world, founded in 1143. It was born from a dispute between mother and child. The first king Afonso Henriques, our George Washington, took his mother Teresa and his stepfather to battle and won, becoming the ruler of the then Portuguese county. He was just 19. It was a rather extreme teenage rebellion, but fully warranted — his mother wanted to merge us with Galicia. Ten years later, fighting fearful odds against the moors (muslims from northern Africa), he celebrated an impossible victory and was rewarded by the Pope with a proper kingdom. He wasn’t even 35.
The following hundred years, until 1249, were of ongoing war in the south. It took that long to secure the Algarve from the moors. Even today, the farther south you go in Portugal, the more you hear words that start with “al” (such as “Algarve” itself) — they have Arabic origin. It is also common for people from the north, namely Oporto, to call folks from Lisbon and further south “mouros” (moors) in jest.
Then came a hundred years of relative peace and prosperity, started by a king called Diniz. During almost 50 years as king, which was an eternity for the time, he established the first Portuguese university in Coimbra, planted most of the beloved pine tree forest around Leiria (that sadly burned in 2017), and largely got the kingdom in order. His son Afonso IV was also solid, hanging in there during the Black Plague, around 1350, and investing in the naval technology that later led to the famous Portuguese exploration of the World.
Between roughly 1350 and 1450, Portugal was mostly alternating fights with Spain (Castilla) with internal disputes around who should be king. At some point, a bastard called João I took over the kingdom. He signed a treaty with the brits (that still holds today, the oldest in the world) and with their help beat the spaniards. A few decades later Afonso V, the then rightful king, if there is such a thing, killed his uncle Pedro in battle after attempted usurpation. It’s all very Game of Thrones, with the same drama but fewer dragons.
Also in the 1400s, Portugal began exploring the seas. The motivation was not so much to discover new territories — it was more to find better commercial routes to known places. India had expensive spices that made their way by land. China had precious textiles that had to cross Europe to get here. Sub-saharan Africa had ivory that was hard to get to. Ships were an elegant way of beating traffic and making an easy buck. While at it, Portuguese explorers, tenacious and brutal, prone to engaging in slavery and human traffic, discovered several islands, such as in the Azores and Madeira, and Brazil in 1500.
One may wonder why the Portuguese stayed in that sliver of South America and let the spaniards take over the rest of the continent, including farther north. Well, in 1494, shortly after Spain reached the Bahamas, the Portuguese and the Spaniards, arrogantly believing themselves to be rulers of the Universe, signed a treaty called “Tratado de Tordesilhas” that split the “world” in half: Portugal had rights over the African and Indian routes, while Spain got most of these new territories in the Americas. The line was drawn very closely to today’s Brazilian border. The Portuguese were not allowed to pass beyond it. (When President Trump called NAFTA the worst trade deal ever negotiated, he clearly had not looked far enough back nor studied Iberian history in depth.)
In the late 1500s, succession did its thing. Sebastião, a 21-year-old king without children, got into a fight in Morocco and never made it back. His uncle took over, but being old and single (and reputedly in the closet), he died without a heir. The throne was up for grabs. In 1580, Filipe, the king of Spain, took over. Since his mother was the daughter of a prior king of Portugal, he had some legitimacy (royals in southern Europe were all cousins anyway). More importantly, he was also bathing in gold from south America, which gave him power. For the following sixty years, Portugal was part of Spain.
Eventually, Spain started to implode, struggling with the Thirty Year War in Central Europe and an embarrassing king who could not govern. Other countries started eyeballing the Americas — it was during this time, in 1620, that the Mayflower reached Plymouth. Portugal regained its independence relatively easily in 1640, after twenty years of small fights with Spain.
Shortly after, in the late 1600s, Portugal hit the jackpot. Gold was found in Brasil, particularly in Minas Gerais. That triggered another boom in construction of large monuments, namely the gigantic Convento de Mafra and the roman-style aqueduct in Lisbon. This second-wind euphoria lasted until around 1750, when the Brazilian gold mines dried up and a massive earthquake destroyed half of Lisbon.
In the second half of the 1700s, while the USA was fighting for their 1776 independence, Portugal had an iron-fist prime-minister called Marquês de Pombal. He rebuilt the downtown of Lisbon and was a strong defender of entrepreneurship and of the rule of law for both peasants, who appreciated it, and noblemen, who frowned upon it. After an attempted murder of the king José I, who supported him, Marquês de Pombal went after Portuguese nobility in revenge and killed them in the hundreds. The noble family allegedly behind the attempted murder, the Távoras, were the first to go. They were publicly executed in a variety of terrible and gory ways, from decapitation, to strangling, to being burned alive. The statue of Marquês de Pombal, in central Lisbon, faces the river and has a lovely park behind it. Suitably, he has a fierce lion by his side.
After a couple of good decades, with queen Maria I in charge, the early 1800s got messy. In 1807, Napoleon invaded Portugal, who was still an ally of the United kingdom. The Portuguese royal court had to flee to Brazil to escape the guillotine, which made it hard to govern effectively in a pre-WFH world without Zoom. The brits later beat the French, leaving Portugal theoretically unmanaged, but practically under British control. There were small revolts by those who didn’t want British rule, resulting in prompt executions that further fueled public outrage. This eventually led to a revolution in 1820 that pushed away the brits, brought back the royal court from Brazil and turned Portugal into a constitutional monarchy (taking absolute power away from the king). Prince Pedro decided to stay behind in sunny Brazil, where he eventually became emperor of Brazil and secured its independence in 1822. He sent his daughter Maria II to be the queen of Portugal. She had to earn it over a few succession fights with her uncle Miguel, who upon losing went into exile.
There wasn’t even a century of constitutional monarchy. It started well, with lovely queen Maria II holding the throne for almost 20 years (overlapping with the early days of the reign of queen Victoria of England). For a few decades, kings and queens mostly dedicated their time to the arts, science and foreign relations. Then, king Carlos saw the brits take over Zambia and Zimbabwe, which was considered a sign of weakness, and opposed the Republican movement, which was seen as strong but out of fashion. King Carlos was shot dead, together with his eldest son, in 1908. His youngest 19-year-old son was not able to contain the tides of history, so Portugal became a republic after a successful revolution that happened just two years later, in 1910.
The first attempt at a republic was also short-lived, since it was quite anarchic. In just 16 years there were 45 governments, with internal fighting among revolutionaries and wide-spread corruption. At the same time, Portugal participated in World War I, losing over 10 thousand men and gaining very little from it, despite being, on paper, one of the victorious Allies. A relatively long-lasting leader, Sidónio Pais, who shifted the country towards a presidencial system and stayed in power for over a year, was murdered. This “First Republic” lasted until a successful military coup in 1926 turned the country into a dictatorship.
For most of the following 50 years, called “Second Republic” or “Estado Novo”, Portugal was under the rule of António de Oliveira Salazar. As far as dictators go, the gentleman was relatively palatable. He did torture a few people, but stayed away from the macabre and reputably never took human lives (although Humberto Delgado, a rival, was the victim of an unsolved murder). Salazar was stoic and not corrupt. He was hard-working, demanding, with a plan towards Portuguese greatness. Portuguese real GDP per capita grew at an average pace of 5% per year between 1947 and 1973, when this regime ended. Portugal managed to stay out of World War II, while being friendly with the other dictatorial regimes, and took advantage of that relative neutrality to allow thousands of European jews to escape to the Americas. On the other hand, Salazar also started unpopular wars with Angola and Mozambique to try to keep the colonies under Portuguese control, which was painful to both sides, morally unacceptable, and quite myopic in retrospect. And he imposed censorship and propaganda. But overall, Salazar was never really contested while he was in charge and his strong regime even outlived him by about five years. Then, came the revolution.
There you go — almost a thousand years in two pages. This brutal, messy history makes us Portuguese both proud and self-deprecating. Excited to talk about those forgotten centuries of greatness, while embarrassed with our fall and present insignificance. The expectation is that foreigners will pretend to be interested and impressed by our history, while the Portuguese will pretend to be humble and minimize its real importance for the world.