Porto is the second-largest city in Portugal, characterized by a small, dense urban core and a sprawling metropolitan area that has become increasingly diverse in recent years. It’s a marvelous combination of old and new sprinkled with fairy dust.
As of 2024/2025, the municipality of Porto has approximately 252,687 residents within its compact 15-square-mile area. It’s definitely ten pounds in a five-pound sack, but it still isn’t as crowded as Lisbon.
Stairs leading down to the Douro River in Porto
The broader metro area is significantly larger, with a population of roughly 1.8 million people. And the sprawl actually begins on the south side of the Douro River, where the town of Vila Nova de Gaia sits like a shiny reflection of its sister city, Porto. Gaia has its own mayor and government. And the warehouses along Gaia’s riverbanks have historically housed the wine shipments from the Douro Valley. Many still do, like the port king Sandeman.
Like much of Portugal, Porto has an aging population. Approximately 26% of residents are aged 65 or older, while roughly 12% are under 14. The median age is approximately 45.9 years.
The population is predominantly female, comprising about 55% of residents.
While roughly 93.7% of inhabitants were born in Portugal, the city has seen a massive surge in international residents. The foreign-born population grew by over 210% between 2012 and 2022. Major foreign communities include residents from Brazil (the largest group), India, Angola, Italy, and Ukraine. And the anti-immigration bug is rapidly spreading. But given Portugal’s ethnic diversity and the large number of dark-skinned people, it’s hard to tell who’s who.
These days, determining who the “real” Portuguese is has become a tricky proposition. The water has been muddied repeatedly for thousands of years.
The Celts settled in the region 900 years before Christ. But no one can agree where they came from.
There are two prevailing theories.
There’s the Central European Origin (Traditional Theory). Most historical evidence suggests these tribes originated in Central Europe (specifically the Hallstatt culture of modern-day Austria and southern Germany). They migrated to the Iberian Peninsula in waves between 900 BC and 600 BC.
But then, there’s the Atlantic Bronze Age Theory. Some modern researchers argue for an “Atlantic” origin, suggesting Celtic culture and language developed along the Western European coastline (including Portugal and Spain) and spread from there, rather than being imported solely from the east.
Everyone agrees that Roman presence in Hispania began around 218 BC during the Second Punic War. By 54 BC, it was more associated with Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul (France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and parts of Germany, the Netherlands, and Northern Italy). But where did these Romans originally come from? The first Romans to occupy Portugal (then part of Hispania) were a diverse group whose origins shifted as the conquest progressed. While the top leadership originated in Rome and Central Italy, the vast majority of soldiers and settlers came from other parts of the Mediterranean.
As Roman authority crumbled in the 5th century AD, several Germanic tribes (often called “barbarians”) moved in to fill the power vacuum. This is a fascinating part of Portuguese history and in many ways, changed the face of Portugal
From 407 to 409 AD, an alliance of Germanic Vandals, Iranian Alans, and Elbe Germanic Suebi crossed the frozen Rhine and swept across modern France and into the Iberian Peninsula. This wasn’t a planned invasion so much as a cascading refugee crisis — the Huns pushing peoples west, each group shoving the next.
Of all the groups that poured into Iberia, the Suebi left the deepest mark on what would become Portugal. The Suebi, a Germanic people, established their kingdom in the northwest, encompassing what is now northern Portugal and Galicia. They founded a Suebi kingdom with its capital in Braga — a city that remains one of Portugal’s most historically significant.
The Vandals and Alans also swept through what is now Portugal, but they didn’t stick around. By 429, the Vandals and the Alans moved to North Africa, where they established a kingdom. Their passage was violent and destabilizing, but they left little lasting cultural imprint on the territory — though the name “Al-Andalus” (the Arabic name for Iberia) is widely believed to derive from “Vandalusia,” land of the Vandals.
The Visigoths are often the headline act in this story, but for Portugal specifically, they arrived later and from the south. The Visigoths occupied the south after they were routed from Gaul in 507, and from 470, conflict between the Suebi and Visigoths increased. In 585, the Visigothic King Leovigild conquered Braga, annexing Gallaecia and unifying the Iberian Peninsula. So the Suebi kingdom in the northwest held out independently for roughly 175 years before being absorbed.
So after all this death and mayhem, what did these German invaders leave behind in Portugal? The legacy is subtler than you might expect. Despite the fact that the Visigoths ruled a kingdom in what is now Spain and Portugal for upwards of 250 years, there are almost no recognizable Gothic words borrowed into Spanish or Portuguese. Conversely, many common given names in the Iberian Peninsula, and the surnames derived from them, are of Germanic origin — names like Álvaro, Rodrigo, Fernando, Gonçalo. Half the traditional Portuguese names you encounter today trace back to these tribes.
Under the Visigoths, a new class emerged unknown in Roman times — a nobility — which played a tremendous social and political role during the Middle Ages. Also, under the Visigoths, the Church began to play a very important role in the state. Since the Visigoths did not learn Latin from the local people, they had to rely on Catholic bishops to continue the Roman system of governance. That Church-nobility power structure would define Portugal for the next thousand years.
In the spring of 711, a force of mainly North African Berbers led by Tariq ibn Ziyad, under the command of the Umayyad Caliphate based in Syria, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar. This army completely defeated the forces of the Visigothic King Rodrigo near Algeciras in southern Spain. Rodrigo’s forces may have been weakened by a recent civil war among the Visigoths. Rodrigo and most of his nobility were annihilated, and the Visigothic capital in Toledo was swiftly abandoned.
The whole Visigothic kingdom — which had taken centuries to build — collapsed in roughly three years. Towns were given the choice to surrender and keep their faith, property, and local autonomy in return for paying taxes as unbelievers. That’s a critical point, and one that complicates the later Christian narrative of heroic reconquest, which is essentially: the Muslim heathens came, they conquered, and then we drove them out. End of story.
The word “Moors” is a broad, somewhat imprecise label. The invading forces were mostly Berbers — the indigenous people of North Africa who had recently converted to Islam — with a smaller Arab leadership class. They were not a monolith. Large parts of Portugal were occupied by Islamic rulers from 711 until 1294. That’s nearly 600 years — longer than the United States has existed as a nation.
Lisbon, then known as Al-Ushbuna, was conquered by the Muslims around 714. During Muslim rule, Lisbon experienced a period of prosperity and development. The city became an important urban center, with a multicultural population and an economy based on trade, agriculture, and fishing. The Moors fortified the city and expanded its infrastructure, including irrigation systems and roads.
Here’s where Portuguese history gets complicated, and where modern historians are pushing back against the old nationalist narrative. Research has suggested that by the 10th century, half the population of the Iberian Peninsula was Muslim.
Some historians believe Islam spread across the region through centuries of trade and economic relations and not as a result of violent conquest — which may explain why Muslims managed to conquer most of the territory with little difficulty. Generous surrender terms meant there were more peaceful capitulations than violent battles.
The subject is largely avoided in Portuguese schools, with more emphasis placed on the Reconquista and the later Age of Discovery. Which is itself a revealing choice.
The Moorish imprint on Portugal is everywhere, once you know to look:
The Moors introduced advanced irrigation, new crops like citrus and rice, and contributed significantly to the Portuguese language — many words come from Arabic. Arroz (rice), laranja (orange), azeitona (olive), almofada (pillow), alface (lettuce) — all Arabic. Hundreds of Portuguese place names beginning with “Al-” are Arabic in origin.
The Alfama district’s winding, unplanned street layout mirrors medieval Islamic urban planning. The Castelo de São Jorge originally began as a Moorish fortress. The Lisbon Cathedral itself was built on a former mosque.
The Moors’ love for art and beauty is evident in the intricate tilework known as azulejos — derived from the Arabic “al-zulaycha” — that adorns Portuguese buildings to this day. The thing most tourists identify as quintessentially Portuguese was an Arab innovation.
The Christian pushback began almost immediately in the north, where Moorish control was always thinnest. The pivotal moment was 1147, when King Afonso I of Portugal, with the help of European crusaders — English, French, Flemish, Norman — recaptured Lisbon from Moorish control after a brutal siege. Those crusaders were on their way to the Holy Land and conveniently stopped to help. Many of them never left after Afonso offered them land.
In 1139, after a victorious battle, Afonso declared himself King Afonso III of Portugal, and thus began the slow process of driving the Moors out. It wasn’t until 1249 that the city of Faro, the last Moorish stronghold, fell to Christian forces, marking the end of Moorish rule in the country.
Since then, Portuguese identity has been constructed in opposition to the Moors, who have historically been depicted as enemies. But a great part of the population had converted to Islam, and nationalist narratives built on a Catholic identity gloss over centuries of coexistence between Muslims, Jews, and Christians.
The irony is profound: the very things that make Portugal feel distinctly Portuguese — the tiles, the winding Alfama alleys, the oranges and rice in the cuisine, hundreds of common words — are Moorish. The “enemy” is baked into the national identity at every level.
After the Islamic Moors established control in the 8th century, a long period of conflict known as the Reconquista followed, ultimately leading to the birth of Portugal as an independent nation in 1143.
During the peak of Portuguese colonial expansion (15th–18th centuries), the primary groups entering Portugal were enslaved Africans brought unwillingly and European merchants and financiers arriving willingly. By the mid-16th century, enslaved people — largely from Sub-Saharan Africa — made up approximately 10% of Lisbon’s population.
Portugal was the first European power to establish a significant Atlantic trade in enslaved people, bringing thousands to the metropole for domestic, agricultural, and urban labor.
Sub-Saharan Africans made up the largest forced group, originating from regions such as Arguim, Guinea, Cape Verde, São Tomé, Angola, and Mozambique. Between the mid-15th and early 16th centuries, an estimated 140,000 to 150,000 Africans entered Portugal.
Asians also became a part of the racial mix. Smaller but notable numbers of enslaved people were brought from India (Goa, Malabar, Gujarat), Sri Lanka (Ceylon), China, and Japan. In 16th-century Lisbon, they were often employed as domestic workers or cooks.
Captives from North Africa and the Iberian Reconquista remained a significant enslaved population, though they were eventually outnumbered by Sub-Saharan Africans.
A limited number of people from Brazil were also traded in Portugal.
Willing immigrants came in large numbers from across Europe.
Attracted by the wealth generated from the “Age of Discovery,” various European groups settled in Portugal to manage finances, trade, and maritime technology.
Italian Merchants from Genoa and Florence established influential communities. They provided the financial experience and capital necessary for early naval expeditions.
Flemish and German Traders were active in the spice and sugar trades, often settling in Lisbon or the Azores.
Portugal was a popular destination for Jewish Refugees (Sephardim). Before the forced conversions and expulsions of 1496–1497, Jewish communities from Spain moved to Portugal seeking refuge, though many were later forced to leave or convert.
By 1551, the concentration of immigrants in major cities was stark.
Lisbon: Roughly 10,000 of its 100,000 residents (10%) were black Africans.
Algarve: Enslaved populations reached approximately 8.4% in some parishes.
Other Cities like Évora, Oporto (Porto), and Setúbal also saw populations of enslaved people ranging from 5% to 9%
But if the truth be told, Portugal has historically been far more a country of emigration than immigration. More folks leave than come. And that only reversed in recent decades.
In the late 1950s, Portuguese emigration shifted direction, following labor demand toward the expanding economies of northern and central Europe — particularly France. In the 15 years leading up to 1974, more than 1.5 million Portuguese emigrated abroad for low-wage jobs. Some also fled the right-wing dictatorship that lasted from 1926 to 1974.
Meanwhile, the early 20th century saw the government permit large-scale white settlement in African colonies — Angola had up to 172,000 Portuguese settlers by 1960, rising to around 350,000 as the Angolan war of independence escalated after 1961.
The fall of the Salazar dictatorship in 1974 triggered a dramatic shift. The largest single wave of immigration to date began in 1974, when over a million Portuguese citizens from Portugal’s African territories — mostly from Angola and Mozambique — returned to the mainland. The 1960s also saw the first arrival of African colonial workers, with Cape Verdeans recruited for construction and manufacturing to address the labor shortage caused by emigration. By the 1990s, immigrants from Brazil and other African countries were arriving in growing numbers, and Ukrainian migration also began in the late 1990s.
Due to declining emigration and rising immigration in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Portugal’s population grew steadily, peaking in December 2009. However, following the 2008 financial crisis, emigration surged, and immigration declined.
Between 2008 and 2013, unemployment rose from 7.6% to 17.1%, and around 412,000 people left the country, half of them permanently. Recovery came later: immigration steadily increased in the 2020s, with the number of foreign residents rising from about 590,000 at the start of 2020 to nearly 782,000 by the end of 2022. Yet emigration never truly stopped. In 2023, Portugal had the highest emigration rate in the EU, with 15% of its population having emigrated over the prior 20 years.
So, given the steady coming and going of people through Portugal from all around the globe for more than a thousand years, who exactly belongs in Portugal in 2026? And who has to leave and never come back?
