Holidays in Portugal

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Portugal

The Country That Changed Its Clock Twice and Regretted It Both Times

Continental Portugal has spent more of the last sixty years reversing its own time-zone decisions than almost any country in Europe. Mainland time was first standardised in 1911, replacing local Lisbon mean time, and settled onto Western European Time, the same offset as Britain and Ireland. In 1966, under the Estado Novo dictatorship, the government began observing daylight saving year-round, which in practice shifted the whole country onto Central European Time without ever formally calling it that. Winter mornings grew dark enough that schoolchildren were arriving for nine o'clock classes before sunrise, and by 1976, two years after the fall of the dictatorship, the new democratic government reversed the change and returned the country to Western European Time.

Sixteen years later the experiment was repeated, this time deliberately and for explicitly European reasons. In 1992, the government of Aníbal Cavaco Silva switched mainland Portugal to Central European Time by decree, aiming, according to the law itself, to have the country "follow, in work schedules, the countries with which it maintains more frequent contacts." For four years Lisbon shared a time zone with Berlin, Paris and, for part of the year, briefly matched clocks as far away as Damascus, while sunrise crept later and later into the working morning. The same complaints resurfaced, this time loud enough that incoming prime minister António Guterres reversed the policy in February 1996, declaring that it was "wrong to go against nature." Portugal has kept Western European Time ever since, remaining, alongside Britain and Ireland, one of the few countries in continental Europe still on the meridian of Greenwich rather than the one fifteen degrees to its east.

Nine Forty in the Morning

On the morning of 1 November 1755, All Saints' Day, most of Lisbon's roughly quarter of a million residents were inside its churches for morning mass when, at approximately 9:40, the ground began to shake. The tremor, now estimated at somewhere between magnitude 7.7 and 9.0, lasted between three and six minutes in several distinct pulses, opening fissures reportedly five metres wide through the city centre and bringing down churches that had been built to hold their largest congregations of the year for precisely this holy day.

The timing compounded the disaster in ways a quake on an ordinary weekday would not have. Thousands of candles, lit across the city in observance of the feast, were knocked over as buildings collapsed, igniting fires that would burn largely unchecked for six days and destroy structures the earthquake itself had spared, including the Royal Library and its irreplaceable archive of Age-of-Discovery records. Roughly forty minutes after the first shock, survivors gathered on the newly exposed harbour mud, where the sea had briefly withdrawn, watched a tsunami arrive in its place. Because the event was documented in unusual detail by contemporary observers and, later, systematically investigated for its geographic pattern of damage, historians of science generally credit it as the disaster that gave rise to modern seismology as a discipline in its own right.

Twenty Minutes Past Midnight

The end of Western Europe's longest-running dictatorship was triggered not by gunfire but by two songs, played at two pre-arranged times on two different radio stations. Shortly before eleven on the night of 24 April 1974, the Eurovision entry "E Depois do Adeus" aired on Emissores Associados de Lisboa, a coded signal telling the military officers of the clandestine Armed Forces Movement to move to their assigned positions and stand by. The operation's actual go-ahead came a little over an hour later.

At twenty minutes past midnight on 25 April, Rádio Renascença broadcast "Grândola, Vila Morena," a song about solidarity and equal voice among ordinary people, written by José Afonso and banned under the regime for its politics. Its airing was the confirmed signal that the coup was underway. By dawn, troops sympathetic to the movement had occupied Lisbon's key installations with almost no resistance, and Prime Minister Marcelo Caetano surrendered by early afternoon, ending forty-eight years of authoritarian rule in a single day remembered for the carnations civilians placed in soldiers' rifle barrels rather than for any of the violence such collapses usually bring.

The Almanac That Replaced the Pole Star

Portuguese ships sailing south along the African coast in the fifteenth century eventually ran into a navigational problem no amount of skill could solve: once they crossed the equator, the Pole Star, on which European navigators had long relied to fix their position, dropped below the horizon and disappeared. The solution came from an astronomer who was, by the time it mattered most, a refugee rather than a courtier. Abraham Zacuto, formerly of the University of Salamanca, fled to Portugal in 1492 after the expulsion of Spain's Jewish population and was taken on as royal astronomer by King John II.

His Almanach Perpetuum, printed in the town of Leiria in 1496 and among the first books ever published in Portugal, supplied detailed tables of the sun's declination, its precise angular position for every day of the year, which let a navigator anywhere on Earth calculate latitude simply by measuring the sun's height at local noon and cross-referencing the date. Vasco da Gama personally consulted Zacuto before departing for India in 1497 and carried the tables with him on the voyage that opened a direct sea route to Asia. What the almanac offered, in effect, was a way to convert the calendar itself into a navigational instrument, letting a ship's location be read from where the sun stood on a given day rather than from a star that vanished the moment it was needed most.

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