The Portuguese Americans of P-Town

The transition from fishing village to LGBTQ+ resort town

The Provincetown Portuguese Festival. Photo by Andreas Faessler on Wikimedia Commons here.

At the tip of Cape Cod in Massachusetts is the small town of Provincetown (about 4,000 residents). From the late 1800s to the 1950s almost half of the population was made up of Portuguese American immigrants from the Azores and from Continental Portugal, primarily engaged in fishing and fish processing. Over time the fishing industry declined along with the town’s population. Although there is still a fleet of fishing boats, many owned by Portuguese Americans, the major focus of the town’s economy has shifted to tourism.

Cape Cod in eastern Massachusetts. Circles show the locations of Provincetown, Plymouth and New Bedford, a city with 50,000 residents of Portuguese American descent. Boston is just slightly to the north of Plymouth. Map from Wikipedia; red markings added by the author.

The town’s most significant landmark, the Pilgrim Tower, has connections to the Portuguese. The 253-foot tall (77 m) granite structure was modeled on a tower in Siena, Italy built in 1309. We all know the story of Plymouth Rock near where the Pilgrims settled in 1620. Less commonly known is that the Pilgrims first landed at what is now Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod. They spent five weeks exploring the Cape and Cape Cod Bay while the group wrote their governing document, the Mayflower Compact, and then decided to settle across Cape Cod Bay at Plymouth.