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Country guide
Portugal fits 11.4 million people into 92,225 square kilometres on the western edge of Iberia, plus the Madeira and Azores archipelagos far out in the Atlantic. Sea does much of the work: internal waters and territorial sea together account for two-fifths of the country's territory. On the mainland the difference that matters runs north to south — Porto and the Douro valley are granite, green and wine, Lisbon sits mid-coast on its estuary, and the Algarve at the bottom is dry, low and built for summer. The whole mainland can be driven in a day, which is why most visits combine two cities rather than choose one.
Every city catalogued in this country so far, ranked by how much there is to see.
Photograph · Lacobrigo · CC BY-SA 4.0
Ranked by importance — sitelinks, pageviews and heritage status, not editor preference.
The Royal Monastery of Santa Maria de Belém, known as the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos because it was built for the Order of Saint Jerome, stands on the Belém waterfront where a hermitage had served departing sailors since the fifteenth century.
Castelo de São Jorge is the fortified citadel on the highest of Lisbon's hills, and it is a defensive system rather than a single building.
The National Pantheon is the Church of Santa Engrácia, a Baroque monument standing on Campo de Santa Clara on a hill in eastern Lisbon, above the Tagus and behind the Alfama.
The Calouste Gulbenkian Museum on Avenida de Berna holds one man's collection, kept together as he assembled it.
The Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga is Portugal's national collection of art made before the twentieth century, and the first thing a visitor planning a trip to Lisbon needs to know about it is that it is shut.
Padrão dos Descobrimentos stands on the Belém waterfront as a 56-metre wedge of concrete and rose-tinted Leiria stone, shaped like a caravel putting out into the Tagus.
The Oceanário de Lisboa is a large public aquarium on the Doca dos Olivais, in the Parque das Nações district on the eastern waterfront of Lisbon.
The National Tile Museum is Portugal's museum of the azulejo, the glazed tile that covers the country's churches, palaces, station halls and ordinary stairwells, and it is installed in a building that is itself part of the exhibit: the former…
Sé de Lisboa is the cathedral of the Portuguese capital and the oldest church in it.
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