Portugal

Scene from the Siege of Lisbon, by Pereira Cão, Palácio da Rosa, Lisbon, 19th century.

The Conquest of Lisbon

The city surrendered to Afonso I of Portugal and a group of crusaders on 25 October 1147.

Palace of Communications: the Lisbon Post Office, known as Palácio das Comunicações, early 1950s.

Soft Fascism

The buildings that came out of Portugal’s New State were described as an ‘architectural lie’.

Lisbon After The Earthquake

A readable history of the Portuguese capital emphasises the modern at the expense of the city’s deeper past.

Salazar: Portugal’s Great Dictator

A contemporary of Hitler, Franco and Mussolini, Salazar is remembered by some of his compatriots as the greatest figure in the nation’s history. Why?

King Sebastian of Portugal, by Cristóvão de Morais, 16th century.

Habsburg Iberia Points West

The 16th century was a time of crisis and change for Portugal’s empire.

A Portuguese merchant is greeted by his Indian household, early 16th century.

The First Global Empire

Poor and small, Portugal was at the edge of late medieval Europe. But its seafarers created the age of ‘globalisation’, which continues to this day.

The Count of Ericeira and the Pirates

C.R. Boxer describes how the cultivated Viceroy of Portuguese India, on his way home from Goa, had a costly misadventure in the Indian Ocean.

The Portuguese in Southeast Africa

In the coastal regions of the modern colonies of Kenya and Tanganyika, the Portuguese, first among Europeans, came into contact with the Arab-African civilization that flourished on the edges of the Indian Ocean.

Mozambique: Vicissitudes of an East African Colony, 1505-1955

Portugal's colonial empire was, at the C.R. Boxer wrote this article in 1956, the oldest in the world, with Mozambique as its most prosperous possession.