Portugal

The country with the oldest fixed borders in Europe and the longest-lived colonial empire. Portugal's frontiers have barely moved since 1249, and its alliance with England, formalised in 1386, is the oldest active alliance in the world. Its size and its Atlantic position pushed it outward: Henry the Navigator's captains worked down the African coast from the 1420s, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape in 1488, and Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498, giving a country of about a million people control of the sea route to Asia. The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 divided the non-European world with Spain on a line drawn by the pope. Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Goa, Malacca and Macau followed. Spain absorbed Portugal from 1580 to 1640. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 destroyed the capital and prompted an early scientific investigation of a disaster. Salazar's Estado Novo ran from 1932 to 1974 and fought colonial wars in three African countries until the Carnation Revolution ended both, with soldiers carrying flowers in their rifles. Macau was handed to China in 1999, the last European colony in Asia. Port wine and cork are its emblematic exports. The country has about ten million people. Portuguese is spoken by around 260 million worldwide, mostly in Brazil. Its Atlantic islands, the Azores and Madeira, are autonomous regions. Fado, its urban song tradition, is recognised by Unesco. Portugal decriminalised all drug possession in 2001, a policy widely studied since. Lisbon and Porto are the two largest cities, and the country has one of the oldest populations in Europe.

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