Portuguese cities, found on the map

Every one on the map

Every place listed below can be asked in this game. Places you find in a passed round drop out of your remaining pool. Grouped into 3 learning regions, matching the rounds on the Portugal guide.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find each one. Reading them first is not cheating.

Lisbon

Lisbon is a city of about 550,000 in a metropolitan area of nearly 3 million. The earthquake, tsunami and fire of 1 November 1755 destroyed most of it, and the grid of the Baixa below the castle hill is the rebuilding the Marquis of Pombal ordered, using an early system of earthquake-resistant timber frames.

Porto

Porto climbs a granite bank above the Douro, and its riverside Ribeira quarter is on the World Heritage list. Six bridges cross the river here; the double-decked Dom Luís I bridge was built in 1886 by a partner of Gustave Eiffel. The port wine lodges are on the other bank, in Vila Nova de Gaia.

Braga

Braga was Bracara Augusta under the Romans and has had a cathedral since the eleventh century. It now has one of the youngest populations of any Portuguese city, with a large university and a growing technology sector.

Viana do Castelo

Viana sits at the mouth of the Lima, a river the Romans were afraid to cross because they took it for the Lethe, the river of forgetting. Its festival each August, the Romaria d’Agonia, fills the streets with gold filigree and embroidered costume.

Vila Real

Vila Real is the gateway to the port wine country of the upper Douro. The Mateus palace just outside the town is the baroque house on the label of Mateus Rosé, one of the best-selling wines in the world in the decades after 1942.

Bragança

Bragança is built around a walled citadel with its keep intact. At midwinter the villages in the hills around it hold the festivals of the caretos, young men in fringed costumes and painted masks who run through the streets, a tradition older than Christianity.

Aveiro

Aveiro’s center is threaded with canals from the lagoon, and its famous sweet is ovos moles, egg yolk and sugar in wafer shells shaped like fish and shells. Just outside the town, the striped beach houses of Costa Nova are among the most photographed buildings in the country.

Viseu

Viseu was the home of Vasco Fernandes, called Grão Vasco, the leading Portuguese painter of the sixteenth century, and the museum named for him stands beside the cathedral. The city regularly tops Portuguese surveys of the best place in the country to live.

Guarda

Guarda stands a little over 1,000 meters up on the edge of the Serra da Estrela, and its granite cathedral looks more like a fortress than a church. It was founded in 1199 to guard the frontier with León and Castile, which is what the name says.

Covilhã

Covilhã was the wool town of Portugal, spinning cloth from the flocks of the Serra da Estrela for centuries, and its old factories now house the University of Beira Interior. It is the base for the only ski slopes in the country, a short way up the mountain at Torre.

Coimbra

Coimbra’s university sits at the top of the hill in the old royal palace, and the city has its own form of fado, sung only by men, often by students in black capes. The first two kings of Portugal are buried in the Santa Cruz monastery in the lower town.

Leiria

Leiria has a castle on a hill in the middle of the town and grew as a market for the pine forest planted along the coast to hold back the sand. The Pinhal de Leiria was begun under King Dinis around 1300 and supplied timber for the ships of the age of discovery.

Castelo Branco

Castelo Branco is known for its bishop’s garden, a baroque terrace of box hedges and granite statues of apostles and kings. The town also gives its name to a style of embroidered silk bedspread, the colchas de Castelo Branco.

Santarém

Santarém stands on a bluff above the Tagus and the plain of the Ribatejo, and it is full enough of Gothic churches to be called the capital of the style in Portugal. Afonso Henriques took it from the Moors in 1147, seven months before he took Lisbon.

Setúbal

Setúbal is a fishing and industrial port on the Sado estuary, backed by the limestone ridge of the Arrábida hills. It is known for fried cuttlefish and for Moscatel de Setúbal, a sweet fortified wine made from muscat grapes.

Portalegre

Portalegre was a textile town, and its tapestry workshop, founded in 1947, weaves with a stitch of its own that can reproduce a painting in thousands of shades of wool. The town sits at the foot of the Serra de São Mamede.

Évora

The Roman temple in Évora’s main square has fourteen of its Corinthian columns standing, and the walled center around it is on the World Heritage list. The Chapel of Bones in the church of São Francisco carries a warning over its door that the bones inside are waiting for yours.

Beja

Beja is the capital of the lower Alentejo, one of the hottest and driest parts of the country. In the convent here, according to a seventeenth-century book of letters, the nun Mariana Alcoforado wrote to a French officer who had left her, and the Letters of a Portuguese Nun are still in print.

Faro

Faro is the capital of the Algarve and the airport most of its visitors arrive through. The town faces the Ria Formosa, a lagoon of channels and barrier islands running along 60km of coast, which is a natural park and a stopover for migrating birds.

Portimão

Portimão was a sardine canning town and is now a resort at the mouth of the Arade, with the beach of Praia da Rocha beside it. The cliffs and sea caves nearby, Benagil among them, are what most of the photographs of the Algarve show.

Funchal

Funchal is named for the wild fennel, funcho, the first settlers found growing there. It is the largest city outside the mainland, about 100,000 people, and the home town of Cristiano Ronaldo, whose name is now on the island’s airport.

Ponta Delgada

Ponta Delgada is on São Miguel, the biggest of the Azores, and is the regional capital along with Angra and Horta, which share the job. The island’s crater lakes at Sete Cidades and Furnas, and the tea plantations on its north coast, which have been producing tea since the nineteenth century, are close by.

Angra do Heroísmo

Angra, on Terceira, was the mid-ocean port where the fleets from India and the Americas put in for centuries, and its old town is on the World Heritage list. The heroism in its name was added for the island’s support of the liberal side in the civil war of the 1830s.

Horta

Horta, on Faial, is the harbor almost every yacht crossing the Atlantic stops at, and crews paint their boat’s name on the marina wall for luck. Peter’s Café Sport by the harbor has been their meeting place for a century. In the 1930s it was also a stop for transatlantic flying boats.

How this one works

The other maps of Portugal

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All three together on the Portugal atlas page, the country itself on the Portugal guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.