Early Lusitania
Portugal has been inhabited for at least 500,000 years, first by pre-human species such as Neanderthals and then by modern people coming from Africa less than 100,000 years ago. Early ancient Greek explorers named the region Ophiussa (Greek for Land of Serpents) because the native worshiped the serpents. In the early first millennium BC, several waves of Celts invaded Portugal from Central Europe and inter-married with local peoples, the Iberians, forming the Celt-Iberians. Two of the new tribes formed by the inter-marrying were the Lusitanians, who lived between the Douro and Tagus rivers, and the Calaicians who, lived north of the Douro river with several other tribes. A Phoenician colony was established in southern Portugal, the Conii. The Celtics, a later wave of Celts, settled in Alentejo.
Lusitania Romana
In 219 BC, the first Roman troops invaded the Iberian Peninsula. Within 200 years, almost the entire Peninsula was dominated and Romanised. The Carthaginians, Rome's adversary in the Punic Wars, were expelled from their colonies.
In Portuguese territory, the conquest started from the south, where the Romans found friendly natives, the Conii. Within several decades, the Romans had conquered the entire territory. But in 194 BC a rebellion began in the north. The Lusitanians and other native tribes, under the leadership of Viriathus, successfully wrested control of all entire Portugal from the Romans. Rome sent numerous legions and its best generals to Lusitania to quell the rebellion, but to no avail — the Lusitanians gained more and more territory. The Roman leaders decided to change their strategy. They bribed an ambassador sent by Viriathus, convincing him to kill his own leader. Viriathus was assassinated, and the resistance was soon over.
Germanic kingdoms
In the 5th century, Germanic tribes, known as Barbarians, invaded the peninsula. One of these, the Suevi, stopped fighting and founded a kingdom whose domains were, approximately, in today's Portugal. They fixed their capital in Bracara. Later, the Visigoths conquered this kingdom, unifying the Peninsula.
Moorish rule and the Reconquista
An Islamic invasion took place in 711, destroying the Visigothic Kingdom. Many of the ousted nobles took refuge in the unconquered north Asturian highlands. From there they aimed to reconquer their lands from the Moors: this war of reconquest is known as the Reconquista.
Affirmation of Portugal
At the end of the 11th century, a knight from Burgundy named Henry became count of Portugal. Henry was a strong supporter of independence. Under his leadership, the County of Portucale and the County of Coimbra merged. Henry declared independence for Portugal while a civil war raged between Leon and Castile.
Henry died without reaching his aims. His son, Afonso Henriques, took control of the county. The city of Braga, the unofficial Catholic centre of the Iberian peninsula, faced new competition from other regions. The lords of the cities of Coimbra and Porto (then Portucale) with the Braga's clergy demanded the independence of the renewed county.
Portugal traces its national origin to 24 June 1128 with the Battle of São Mamede. Afonso proclaimed himself first as Prince of Portugal and in 1139 as the first King of Portugal. By 1143, with the assistance of a representant of the Holy See at the conference of Zamora, Portugal was formally recognized as independent, with the prince recognized as Dux Portucalensis. In 1179, Afonso I was declared, by the pope, as King. After the Battle of São Mamede, the first capital of Portugal was Guimarães, from which the first King ruled. Later, when Portugal was already officially independent, he ruled from Coimbra. From 1249 to 1250, the Algarve was finally reconquered by Portugal from the Moors. In 1255, the capital shifted to Lisbon.
Portugal has always been turned towards the sea; its land-based treaties are notably stable. The border with Spain has remained almost unchanged since the 13th century. A 1373 treaty of alliance between England and Portugal has never been broken to this day. Since early times, fishing and overseas commerce have been the main economic activities. Henry the Navigator's interest in exploration together with some technological developments in navigation made Portugal's expansion possible and led to great advances in geographic knowledge.Portugal suffered a crisis during the 1383-85 years when he almost lost his independnce from castille. The most important battle
of that period was The Battle of Aljubarrota when a 8'000 men Portuguese army crushed a 25'000 Castillian one. In 1411 peace was finnaly signed.
Discoveries Odyssey: Glory of the Empire
During the 15th and 16th centuries, Portugal eclipsed most other nations in terms of economic, political, and cultural influence and it had an extensive empire throughout the world.
July 25, 1415, marked the beginning of the Portuguese Empire, when the Portuguese Armada along with King John I and his sons Prince Duarte (future king), Prince Pedro, Prince Henry the Navigator and Prince Afonso, also with the mythical Portuguese hero Nuno Alvares Pereira departed to Ceuta in North Africa, a rich trade Islamic centre. On August 21, the city was conquered by Portugal, and the long-lived Portuguese Empire was founded. Further steps were taken which expanded the Empire even more.
In 1418 two of the captains of Prince Henry the Navigator, João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira, were driven by a storm to an island which they called Porto Santo, or Holy Port, in gratitude for their rescue from the shipwreck. In 1419, João Gonçalves Zarco disembarked on Madeira Island. Between 1427 and 1431 most of the Azorean islands were discovered.
In 1434, Gil Eanes turned the Cape Bojador South of Morocco. The trip marked the beginning of the Portuguese exploration of Africa. Before the turn, very little information was known in Europe about what lay around the cape. At the end of the 13th century and the beginning of the 14th, those who tried to venture there became lost, which gave birth to legends of sea monsters. Some setbacks occurred: in 1436 the Canaries were recognized as Castilian by the Pope, earlier they were recognized as Portuguese. Also, in 1438 in a military expedition to Tangier, the Portuguese were defeated.
However, the Portuguese did not give up their exploratory efforts. In 1448, on a small island known as Arguim off the coast of Mauritania an important castle was built, working as a feitoria (a tradepost) for commerce with inland Africa, some years before the first African gold was brought to Portugal, circumeventing the Arabic caravans that crossed the Sahara. Some time later, the caravels explored the Gulf of Guinea which lead to the discovery of several uninhabited islands: Cape Verde, Fernão Poo, São Tomé, Príncipe and Annobón. Finally, in 1471, the Portuguese captured Tangier, after years of trying. Eleven years later, the fortress of São Jorge da Mina in the Gulf was built. In 1483, Diogo Cão reached the Congo River.
A remarkable achievement was the turning of the Cape of Good Hope by Bartholomew Diaz (Bartolomeu Dias) in 1487 and the richness of India was now nearby, hence the name of the cape. Portugal, three years earlier, did not accept Christopher Columbus' idea of reaching India from the west, because it was seen as unreasonable. In 1489, the King of Bemobi gave his realms to the Portuguese King and became Christian. Between 1491 and 1494, Pêro de Barcelos and João Fernandes Lavrador explored North America. At the same time, Pêro da Covilhã reached Ethiopia. Vasco da Gama sailed for India, and arrived at Calecut on May 20, 1498, returning in glory to Portugal the next year. The Monastery of Jerónimos was built, and dedicated to the discovery of the route to India. In 1500, Pedro Álvares Cabral sighted the Brazilian coast; ten years later, Afonso de Alburquerque conquered Goa, in India, Mallaca in Malasya and Hormuz in Persia.
João da Nova discovered Ascension in 1501 and Saint Helena 1502; Tristão da Cunha was the first to sight the archipelago still known by his name 1506. In East Africa small Islamic states along the coast of Mozambique, Kilwa, Brava and Mombasa were destroyed or became subjects or allies of Portugal.
The two million Portuguese people ruled a vast empire with hundreds of millions of inhabitants in the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. From 1514, the Portuguese had reached China and Japan. In the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea, one of Cabral's ships discovered Madagascar (1501), which was partly explored by Tristão da Cunha (1507); Mauritius was discovered in 1507, Socotra occupied in 1506, and in the same year D. Lourenco d'Almeida visited Ceylon.
On the Asiatic mainland the first trading-stations were established by Cabral at Cochin and Calicut (1501); more important, however, were the conquest of Goa (1510) and Malacca (1511) by Albuquerque, and the acquisition of Diu (1535) by Martim Afonso de Sousa. East of Malacca, Albuquerque sent Duarte Fernandes as envoy to Thailand (1511), and dispatched to the Moluccas two expeditions (1512, 1514), which founded the Portuguese dominion in the Malay Archipelago. Fernão Pires de Andrade visited Canton in 1517 and opened up trade with China, where in 1557 the Portuguese were permitted to occupy Macao. Japan, accidentally reached by three Portuguese traders in 1542, soon attracted large numbers of merchants and missionaries. In 1522 one of the ships in the expedition that Ferdinand Magellan organized in the Spanish service completed the first voyage around the world.
In 1578, a very young king Sebastian died in battle without an heir (the body was not found), leading to a dynastic crisis. The Cardinal Henry became ruler, but died two years after. Portugal was worried about the maintenance of its independence and sought help to find a new king. Because Philip II of Spain was the son of a Portuguese princess, Spain invaded Portugal and the Spanish ruler became Philip I of Portugal in 1580; the Spanish and Portuguese Empires were under a single rule. Imposters claimed to be King Sebastian in 1584, 1585, 1595 and 1598. "Sebastianism", the myth that the young king will return to Portugal on a foggy day has prevailed until modern times, and most people even at the end of the 19th century believed in it.
Decline of the Empire
From the 16th century, Portugal gradually saw its wealth decreasing. Even if Portugal was officially an autonomous state, the country was a Spanish puppet and Portuguese colonies were attacked by Spain's opponents, especially the Dutch and English.
At home, life was calm and serene with the first two Spanish kings; they maintained Portugal's status, gave excellent positions to Portuguese nobles in the Spanish courts and Portugal maintained an independent law, currency and government. It was even proposed to move the Spanish capital to Lisbon. But Philip III tried to make Portugal a Spanish province, and Portuguese nobles lost power. Because of this, on December 1, 1640, the native king, John IV, was acclaimed, and a Restoration war against Spain was made. Ceuta governors didn't accept the new king and maintained their allegiance to Spain.
Lisbon was destroyed in 1755 by an earthquake.
In 1807 Portugal refused Napoleon's demand to accede to the Continental System of embargo against Great Britain; a French invasion under Marshal Junot followed, and Lisbon was captured on 1 December 1807. British intervention in the Peninsular War restored Portuguese independence, the last French trroops being expelled in 1812. The war cost Portugal the province of Olivença, now governed by Spain.
The Kingdom of Brazil proclaimed its independence in 1822.
The death of John VI in 1826 led to a crisis of royal succession. His eldest son, Peter I of Brazil briefly became Peter IV of Portugal, but neither the Portuguese nor the Brazilians wanted a unified monarchy; consequently, Pedro abdicated the Portuguese crown in favor of his seven-year-old daughter, Maria da Glória, on the condition that when of age she marry his brother, Miguel. Dissatisfaction at Pedro's constitutional reforms led the "absolutist" faction of landowners and the church to proclaim Miguel as king in February 1828. This led to the Liberal Wars in which Pedro, with British assistance, eventually forced Miguel to abdicate and go into exile in 1834, and placed his daughter on throne as Queen Maria II.
The First Republic and The New State
A 1910 revolution deposed the Portuguese monarchy starting the First Republic. It was marked by chaos, and came to an end in 1926 when a nationalist military coup d'etat gave birth to the New State, a period of almost fifty years of repressive rule. For most of this period, Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar ruled as a dictator, from 1932 to 1968. Although a stable period financially and economically, it saw the beginning of the end of the Portuguese Empire. India annexed Portuguese India, including Goa, in 1961. Independence movements also became active in Angola, Mozambique, and Portuguese Guinea, and an increasingly costly series of colonial wars failed to defeat the guerrillas. Despite the Salazar's incapacitation in 1968 (followed by his death in 1970), and Marcelo Caetano's marcelist spring, discontent about the war was one of the factors leading to the 1974 Revolution.
The Second Republic
The Carnation Revolution of 1974, an effectively bloodless left-wing military coup, installed the Third Republic. Broad democratic reforms were implemented. In 1975, Portugal granted independence to its Overseas Provinces in Africa (Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe). In 1976, Indonesia invaded and annexed the Portuguese province of Portuguese Timor (East Timor) in Asia before independence could be granted. The Asian dependency of Macau, was returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1999. Portugal applied international pressure to secure East Timor's independence from Indonesia, as East Timor was still legally a Portuguese dependency, and recognized as such by the United Nations. After a referendum in 1999, East Timor voted for independence and Portugal recognized its independence in 2002.
With the 1975-76 independence of its colonies (except Macau, because it hadn't any independentist movement), the 560 year old Portuguese Empire had already effectively ended. Also many Portuguese returned from the colonies, coming to comprise a sizeable sector of the population and starting an economic recovery, thus opening new paths for the country's future just as others closed. In 1986, Portugal entered the European Union.
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Portugal has been inhabited for at least 500,000 years, first by pre-human species such as Neanderthals and then by modern people coming from Africa less than 100,000 years ago. Early ancient Greek explorers named the region Ophiussa (Greek for Land of Serpents) because the native worshiped the serpents. In the early first millennium BC, several waves of Celts invaded Portugal from Central Europe and inter-married with local peoples, the Iberians, forming the Celt-Iberians. Two of the new tribes formed by the inter-marrying were the Lusitanians, who lived between the Douro and Tagus rivers, and the Calaicians who, lived north of the Douro river with several other tribes. A Phoenician colony was established in southern Portugal, the Conii. The Celtics, a later wave of Celts, settled in Alentejo.
Lusitania Romana
In 219 BC, the first Roman troops invaded the Iberian Peninsula. Within 200 years, almost the entire Peninsula was dominated and Romanised. The Carthaginians, Rome's adversary in the Punic Wars, were expelled from their colonies.
In Portuguese territory, the conquest started from the south, where the Romans found friendly natives, the Conii. Within several decades, the Romans had conquered the entire territory. But in 194 BC a rebellion began in the north. The Lusitanians and other native tribes, under the leadership of Viriathus, successfully wrested control of all entire Portugal from the Romans. Rome sent numerous legions and its best generals to Lusitania to quell the rebellion, but to no avail — the Lusitanians gained more and more territory. The Roman leaders decided to change their strategy. They bribed an ambassador sent by Viriathus, convincing him to kill his own leader. Viriathus was assassinated, and the resistance was soon over.
Germanic kingdoms
In the 5th century, Germanic tribes, known as Barbarians, invaded the peninsula. One of these, the Suevi, stopped fighting and founded a kingdom whose domains were, approximately, in today's Portugal. They fixed their capital in Bracara. Later, the Visigoths conquered this kingdom, unifying the Peninsula.
Moorish rule and the Reconquista
An Islamic invasion took place in 711, destroying the Visigothic Kingdom. Many of the ousted nobles took refuge in the unconquered north Asturian highlands. From there they aimed to reconquer their lands from the Moors: this war of reconquest is known as the Reconquista.
Affirmation of Portugal
At the end of the 11th century, a knight from Burgundy named Henry became count of Portugal. Henry was a strong supporter of independence. Under his leadership, the County of Portucale and the County of Coimbra merged. Henry declared independence for Portugal while a civil war raged between Leon and Castile.
Henry died without reaching his aims. His son, Afonso Henriques, took control of the county. The city of Braga, the unofficial Catholic centre of the Iberian peninsula, faced new competition from other regions. The lords of the cities of Coimbra and Porto (then Portucale) with the Braga's clergy demanded the independence of the renewed county.
Portugal traces its national origin to 24 June 1128 with the Battle of São Mamede. Afonso proclaimed himself first as Prince of Portugal and in 1139 as the first King of Portugal. By 1143, with the assistance of a representant of the Holy See at the conference of Zamora, Portugal was formally recognized as independent, with the prince recognized as Dux Portucalensis. In 1179, Afonso I was declared, by the pope, as King. After the Battle of São Mamede, the first capital of Portugal was Guimarães, from which the first King ruled. Later, when Portugal was already officially independent, he ruled from Coimbra. From 1249 to 1250, the Algarve was finally reconquered by Portugal from the Moors. In 1255, the capital shifted to Lisbon.
Portugal has always been turned towards the sea; its land-based treaties are notably stable. The border with Spain has remained almost unchanged since the 13th century. A 1373 treaty of alliance between England and Portugal has never been broken to this day. Since early times, fishing and overseas commerce have been the main economic activities. Henry the Navigator's interest in exploration together with some technological developments in navigation made Portugal's expansion possible and led to great advances in geographic knowledge.Portugal suffered a crisis during the 1383-85 years when he almost lost his independnce from castille. The most important battle
of that period was The Battle of Aljubarrota when a 8'000 men Portuguese army crushed a 25'000 Castillian one. In 1411 peace was finnaly signed.
Discoveries Odyssey: Glory of the Empire
During the 15th and 16th centuries, Portugal eclipsed most other nations in terms of economic, political, and cultural influence and it had an extensive empire throughout the world.
July 25, 1415, marked the beginning of the Portuguese Empire, when the Portuguese Armada along with King John I and his sons Prince Duarte (future king), Prince Pedro, Prince Henry the Navigator and Prince Afonso, also with the mythical Portuguese hero Nuno Alvares Pereira departed to Ceuta in North Africa, a rich trade Islamic centre. On August 21, the city was conquered by Portugal, and the long-lived Portuguese Empire was founded. Further steps were taken which expanded the Empire even more.
In 1418 two of the captains of Prince Henry the Navigator, João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira, were driven by a storm to an island which they called Porto Santo, or Holy Port, in gratitude for their rescue from the shipwreck. In 1419, João Gonçalves Zarco disembarked on Madeira Island. Between 1427 and 1431 most of the Azorean islands were discovered.
In 1434, Gil Eanes turned the Cape Bojador South of Morocco. The trip marked the beginning of the Portuguese exploration of Africa. Before the turn, very little information was known in Europe about what lay around the cape. At the end of the 13th century and the beginning of the 14th, those who tried to venture there became lost, which gave birth to legends of sea monsters. Some setbacks occurred: in 1436 the Canaries were recognized as Castilian by the Pope, earlier they were recognized as Portuguese. Also, in 1438 in a military expedition to Tangier, the Portuguese were defeated.
However, the Portuguese did not give up their exploratory efforts. In 1448, on a small island known as Arguim off the coast of Mauritania an important castle was built, working as a feitoria (a tradepost) for commerce with inland Africa, some years before the first African gold was brought to Portugal, circumeventing the Arabic caravans that crossed the Sahara. Some time later, the caravels explored the Gulf of Guinea which lead to the discovery of several uninhabited islands: Cape Verde, Fernão Poo, São Tomé, Príncipe and Annobón. Finally, in 1471, the Portuguese captured Tangier, after years of trying. Eleven years later, the fortress of São Jorge da Mina in the Gulf was built. In 1483, Diogo Cão reached the Congo River.
A remarkable achievement was the turning of the Cape of Good Hope by Bartholomew Diaz (Bartolomeu Dias) in 1487 and the richness of India was now nearby, hence the name of the cape. Portugal, three years earlier, did not accept Christopher Columbus' idea of reaching India from the west, because it was seen as unreasonable. In 1489, the King of Bemobi gave his realms to the Portuguese King and became Christian. Between 1491 and 1494, Pêro de Barcelos and João Fernandes Lavrador explored North America. At the same time, Pêro da Covilhã reached Ethiopia. Vasco da Gama sailed for India, and arrived at Calecut on May 20, 1498, returning in glory to Portugal the next year. The Monastery of Jerónimos was built, and dedicated to the discovery of the route to India. In 1500, Pedro Álvares Cabral sighted the Brazilian coast; ten years later, Afonso de Alburquerque conquered Goa, in India, Mallaca in Malasya and Hormuz in Persia.
João da Nova discovered Ascension in 1501 and Saint Helena 1502; Tristão da Cunha was the first to sight the archipelago still known by his name 1506. In East Africa small Islamic states along the coast of Mozambique, Kilwa, Brava and Mombasa were destroyed or became subjects or allies of Portugal.
The two million Portuguese people ruled a vast empire with hundreds of millions of inhabitants in the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. From 1514, the Portuguese had reached China and Japan. In the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea, one of Cabral's ships discovered Madagascar (1501), which was partly explored by Tristão da Cunha (1507); Mauritius was discovered in 1507, Socotra occupied in 1506, and in the same year D. Lourenco d'Almeida visited Ceylon.
On the Asiatic mainland the first trading-stations were established by Cabral at Cochin and Calicut (1501); more important, however, were the conquest of Goa (1510) and Malacca (1511) by Albuquerque, and the acquisition of Diu (1535) by Martim Afonso de Sousa. East of Malacca, Albuquerque sent Duarte Fernandes as envoy to Thailand (1511), and dispatched to the Moluccas two expeditions (1512, 1514), which founded the Portuguese dominion in the Malay Archipelago. Fernão Pires de Andrade visited Canton in 1517 and opened up trade with China, where in 1557 the Portuguese were permitted to occupy Macao. Japan, accidentally reached by three Portuguese traders in 1542, soon attracted large numbers of merchants and missionaries. In 1522 one of the ships in the expedition that Ferdinand Magellan organized in the Spanish service completed the first voyage around the world.
In 1578, a very young king Sebastian died in battle without an heir (the body was not found), leading to a dynastic crisis. The Cardinal Henry became ruler, but died two years after. Portugal was worried about the maintenance of its independence and sought help to find a new king. Because Philip II of Spain was the son of a Portuguese princess, Spain invaded Portugal and the Spanish ruler became Philip I of Portugal in 1580; the Spanish and Portuguese Empires were under a single rule. Imposters claimed to be King Sebastian in 1584, 1585, 1595 and 1598. "Sebastianism", the myth that the young king will return to Portugal on a foggy day has prevailed until modern times, and most people even at the end of the 19th century believed in it.
Decline of the Empire
From the 16th century, Portugal gradually saw its wealth decreasing. Even if Portugal was officially an autonomous state, the country was a Spanish puppet and Portuguese colonies were attacked by Spain's opponents, especially the Dutch and English.
At home, life was calm and serene with the first two Spanish kings; they maintained Portugal's status, gave excellent positions to Portuguese nobles in the Spanish courts and Portugal maintained an independent law, currency and government. It was even proposed to move the Spanish capital to Lisbon. But Philip III tried to make Portugal a Spanish province, and Portuguese nobles lost power. Because of this, on December 1, 1640, the native king, John IV, was acclaimed, and a Restoration war against Spain was made. Ceuta governors didn't accept the new king and maintained their allegiance to Spain.
Lisbon was destroyed in 1755 by an earthquake.
In 1807 Portugal refused Napoleon's demand to accede to the Continental System of embargo against Great Britain; a French invasion under Marshal Junot followed, and Lisbon was captured on 1 December 1807. British intervention in the Peninsular War restored Portuguese independence, the last French trroops being expelled in 1812. The war cost Portugal the province of Olivença, now governed by Spain.
The Kingdom of Brazil proclaimed its independence in 1822.
The death of John VI in 1826 led to a crisis of royal succession. His eldest son, Peter I of Brazil briefly became Peter IV of Portugal, but neither the Portuguese nor the Brazilians wanted a unified monarchy; consequently, Pedro abdicated the Portuguese crown in favor of his seven-year-old daughter, Maria da Glória, on the condition that when of age she marry his brother, Miguel. Dissatisfaction at Pedro's constitutional reforms led the "absolutist" faction of landowners and the church to proclaim Miguel as king in February 1828. This led to the Liberal Wars in which Pedro, with British assistance, eventually forced Miguel to abdicate and go into exile in 1834, and placed his daughter on throne as Queen Maria II.
The First Republic and The New State
A 1910 revolution deposed the Portuguese monarchy starting the First Republic. It was marked by chaos, and came to an end in 1926 when a nationalist military coup d'etat gave birth to the New State, a period of almost fifty years of repressive rule. For most of this period, Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar ruled as a dictator, from 1932 to 1968. Although a stable period financially and economically, it saw the beginning of the end of the Portuguese Empire. India annexed Portuguese India, including Goa, in 1961. Independence movements also became active in Angola, Mozambique, and Portuguese Guinea, and an increasingly costly series of colonial wars failed to defeat the guerrillas. Despite the Salazar's incapacitation in 1968 (followed by his death in 1970), and Marcelo Caetano's marcelist spring, discontent about the war was one of the factors leading to the 1974 Revolution.
The Second Republic
The Carnation Revolution of 1974, an effectively bloodless left-wing military coup, installed the Third Republic. Broad democratic reforms were implemented. In 1975, Portugal granted independence to its Overseas Provinces in Africa (Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe). In 1976, Indonesia invaded and annexed the Portuguese province of Portuguese Timor (East Timor) in Asia before independence could be granted. The Asian dependency of Macau, was returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1999. Portugal applied international pressure to secure East Timor's independence from Indonesia, as East Timor was still legally a Portuguese dependency, and recognized as such by the United Nations. After a referendum in 1999, East Timor voted for independence and Portugal recognized its independence in 2002.
With the 1975-76 independence of its colonies (except Macau, because it hadn't any independentist movement), the 560 year old Portuguese Empire had already effectively ended. Also many Portuguese returned from the colonies, coming to comprise a sizeable sector of the population and starting an economic recovery, thus opening new paths for the country's future just as others closed. In 1986, Portugal entered the European Union.
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