The Alternative Guide to… Portugal
Portugal at a Glance
Capital city: Lisbon
Population: 10.3 million
Local currency: euro (£1 = 1.31€). But the Banco de Portugal will continue to exchange escudo banknotes until 28 February, 2022
Famous face: Cristiano Ronaldo. Semi-famous footballer, earns a casual £15 million a year
5 things you never knew about Portugal
Portugal has the longest bridge in Europe; the Vasco da Gama (main picture, above) is 10.5 miles long.
When a Portuguese person is suspicious, if the idiom is to be believed, he is said to have "little monkeys in his head" or macaquinhos na cabeça.
Portugal once had a dead Queen. When Pedro I was crowned King of Portugal in 1357, he ordered his court to swear allegiance to their new queen, his lover Inês de Castro, although she’d died two years earlier. This is her tomb:
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UNESCO recognises Fado music on its World’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list. It’s a sort of mournful folk music that originates in urban Lisbon, with songs that tell of love, loss, hope and desperation accompanied by melancholic mandolins, guitars and violins.
Lisbon was hit by one of the most powerful earthquakes in modern European history in 1755. On 1 November, a monumentally powerful earthquake struck the city. It was All Saints Day, an important day in the Catholic year, when all the churches were filled with burning candles, leading to major blazes that destroyed 85% of the buildings in Lisbon and killed and estimated 60,000, leaving the Catholics with a lot of explaining to do on behalf of their God.
National dish
Bacalhau (salt cod) is a Portuguese staple that originated in the days before mod cons like, you know, refrigeration. It's tastier than it looks, you'll be relieved to hear, and there are hundreds of different ways of preparing it.
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If you see one thing in Portugal, make sure it’s…
... the Santuário de Santa Luzia, a ludicrously extravagant, 20th-century, neo-Byzantine shrine in Viana do Castelo in the north of country.
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