Portuguese districts and island regions, 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

The district holds about 2.3 million people, the capital and the towns along the Estoril coast and up the north bank of the Tagus. Cabo da Roca at its western tip is the westernmost point of mainland Europe, and the palaces of Sintra sit in the wooded hills just inland of it.

Porto

Porto is the second district by population, about 1.8 million, in a fraction of the space Lisbon’s has. The city gave the country its name, from the Roman port of Portus Cale, and the wine its name as well: port is made from grapes grown upriver and was aged in the lodges across the water in Vila Nova de Gaia.

Braga

Braga has been the seat of an archbishop since the early Middle Ages and is still called the country’s religious capital. The stairway of Bom Jesus do Monte climbs the hill above the city in zigzags of chapels and fountains. Guimarães, in the same district, is remembered as the place Portugal began.

Viana do Castelo

The northernmost coastal district, bounded by the Minho on the north and Galicia across it. It is green, wet and small-farmed, the heart of the Minho region that vinho verde comes from, and the Peneda-Gerês National Park, the only national park in the country, reaches into its eastern hills.

Vila Real

Vila Real takes in the upper Douro valley, where the terraces for port wine are cut into schist slopes above the river. The Alto Douro wine region, demarcated in 1756, is one of the oldest regulated wine regions in the world and is on the World Heritage list.

Bragança

Bragança is the high, cold, thinly peopled corner of the country the Portuguese call Trás-os-Montes, behind the mountains. The Braganza family that ruled from 1640 to 1910 took its name from the town, and Miranda do Douro in the same district is where Mirandese, a locally recognized language, is still spoken.

Aveiro

Aveiro sits on a lagoon behind a long sandbar, the Ria de Aveiro, and its canals and painted moliceiro boats get it called a Portuguese Venice, which is a stretch. Salt and seaweed once paid for the town; ceramics and the cork industry around Santa Maria da Feira keep the district among the most industrial in the country.

Viseu

Viseu is the heart of the Dão wine region, on a plateau ringed by mountains. It is also the district of the country’s oldest founding legend: Viriathus, the Lusitanian shepherd who fought Rome in the second century BC, is said to have camped here, and his statue stands in the town.

Guarda

Guarda is the highest city in the country, a little over 1,000 meters up, and its district takes in the northern side of the Serra da Estrela, the highest range on the mainland. The chain of fortified villages along this border was built to hold the frontier with Castile.

Coimbra

Coimbra was the capital from 1131 to 1255 and holds the country’s oldest university, founded in Lisbon in 1290 and settled here for good in 1537. Its baroque Joanina Library is kept free of insects by a colony of bats that lives in it.

Leiria

Leiria holds two of the great monasteries of the country a short drive apart: the Dominican one at Batalha and the Cistercian abbey at Alcobaça, where the tragic lovers Pedro and Inês are buried. On its coast, the undersea canyon off Nazaré builds the largest waves ever surfed.

Castelo Branco

Castelo Branco is a big district with few people in it, cork and olive country falling south from the Serra da Estrela. The Tagus enters Portugal along its southern edge, forming the border with Spain for about 50km before it turns into the country.

Santarém

Santarém is the Ribatejo, the flat, fertile flood plain of the Tagus, and the country of bulls and horses: the Lusitano breed and the Portuguese bullfight, where the bull is not killed in the ring, both belong to it. Tomar, in the north of the district, holds the castle and convent of the Knights Templar and their successors, the Order of Christ.

Setúbal

Setúbal takes in the south bank of the Tagus, joined to Lisbon by the 25 de Abril bridge and the Vasco da Gama bridge, and runs down the Alentejo coast beyond it. The Sado estuary beside the city has one of the few resident groups of bottlenose dolphins in Europe.

Portalegre

Portalegre is the least populated district on the mainland, a little over 100,000 people. Its hill town of Marvão sits on a granite crag over 800 meters up with walls that follow the rock, and Elvas on the border is ringed by star-shaped bastions that make it one of the largest fortified towns of its kind in the world.

Évora

Évora is the Alentejo at its most classic, rolling wheat fields and cork oak around whitewashed towns. The walled city at its center has a Roman temple in its main square and a chapel lined with the bones of about 5,000 people, and its university was founded by the Jesuits in 1559.

Beja

Beja is the largest district on the mainland and among the emptiest. The Alqueva dam on the Guadiana, closed in 2002, flooded a lake of about 250 square kilometers on the line between Beja and Évora, the largest artificial lake in western Europe, and turned dry wheat country into olive groves under irrigation.

Faro

The district is the Algarve, taken from the Moors in 1249 and the last piece of the country to be reconquered. Its south-facing coast of cliffs and coves draws more foreign visitors than anywhere else in Portugal, and Sagres at its western tip is linked by legend with Henry the Navigator’s school of seafaring.

Azores

Nine volcanic islands straddling the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, uninhabited when the Portuguese reached them in the 1420s. Mount Pico on the island of the same name, at 2,351 meters, is the highest point in Portugal. The islands govern themselves as an autonomous region, with Ponta Delgada as the largest city.

Madeira

Madeira was settled from 1420 and made its fortune first on sugar and then on the fortified wine named after it. Its steep slopes are farmed with the help of levadas, irrigation channels carved along the mountainsides for more than 2,000km. The region also takes in Porto Santo and the uninhabited Savage Islands.

How this one works

The other maps of Portugal

Bhutan has the same map in Districts of Bhutan. Israel has the same map in Districts of Israel. Libya has the same map in Districts of Libya. Monaco has the same map in District locations. Suriname has the same map in Surinamese districts. All three together on the Portugal atlas page, the country itself on the Portugal guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.