Portugal 🇵🇹

Portugal is a sovereign country in Southern Europe, in the wider region of Europe. Its full official name is Portuguese Republic. Government sits in Lisbon.

The land area is 92,090 km², which ranks it 112th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Hungary and just ahead of Jordan. That makes it almost exactly the same size as Hungary.

The population is about 10.7 million, placing it 90th of 250 by population — between Honduras above it and Tajikistan below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 4th of 10 in size and 3rd in population.

The coordinates the dataset gives are 39.5° N, 8.0° W, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 4,397 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

The United States, Türkiye and Turkmenistan sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

Its land neighbours number 1: Spain.

With both a coast and land borders, it has the trade options a landlocked country does not.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 116 people per square kilometre, which makes it more crowded than the typical entry on this list. The median across all 250 entries here is about 90 per square kilometre.

People from Portugal are called Portuguese.

Officially it is monolingual: Portuguese. Another 9 entries list Portuguese too — among them Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde and Equatorial Guinea.

Against Europe as a whole it is the 13th most populous of 53 entries, and it accounts for 8.2% of everyone living in Southern Europe.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Portugal ranks 112th of 250 by area and 90th by population. That works out at 0.061% of the combined land area of all 250 entries and 0.13% of their combined population. Those denominators matter: this list includes territories and dependencies as well as UN member states, so a rank here is not the same as a rank among sovereign countries.

For a sense of scale, the entries immediately either side of Portugal in the size ordering are Hungary at 93,028 km² and Jordan at 89,342 km², against Portugal's 92,090 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Portugal averages 116 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 105th of the 248 entries that have both a population and a measured area. Total area includes inland water, so the true figure for habitable land is higher than this.

Zoom in from the world to Southern Europe and Portugal sits 3rd of 10 by population and 4th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Spain just above and Greece just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

Italy is the largest of the group by population, and every entry in Southern Europe has its own page here if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time.

• 🇪🇸 Spain
• 🇬🇷 Greece
• 🇮🇹 Italy

Portugal does not have the Euro to itself. It is one of 38 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is EUR, and the others include listed below. A shared currency usually points at something real — a monetary union, a currency board, a former colonial administration, or a small economy pegging itself to a large neighbour's money — and it means a price quoted in EUR travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. Portuguese is listed for 10 entries here, Portugal among them, so a visitor who speaks it can be understood across a large part of the map. Shared language tends to outlive the empires, trade routes and migrations that spread it, which is why the linguistic map and the political one rarely line up.

It uses the Euro (€, EUR). Another 37 entries use the same currency — Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria and Croatia among them — so exchange rates move for reasons that have nothing to do with Portugal.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Portugal, the answer is Lisbon.

The top-level domain is .pt. Calls from overseas start with +351. Its ISO codes are pt and PRT, which is what most databases and flag files use.

It holds a seat at the United Nations, one of 193 entries here that do. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 250 rather than the familiar 195.