Recently, Portugal has emerged as a popular venue for rock festivals, drawing the biggest international names. Highlights include Nos Alive and Super Bock Super Rock, held in July near Lisbon, and the Nos Primavera Sound, held in June in Porto. The Rock in Rio festival is held every other May in Lisbon; the next is in 2020. Recent performers have included Bruce Springsteen, Ed Sheeran, and Katy Perry.
Street parties to celebrate Lisbon’s patron saint, Santo António, on June 12 and 13, are a joyous celebration. Neighborhoods compete to produce the best marcha, a musical promenade in costume down the Avenida da Liberdade, then head home to eat grilled sardines, drink red wine or sangria, and dance the night away in squares decked with fairy lights and paper decorations. Similar scenes are repeated in Porto when the second city honors São João on June 23 and 24. The Azores island of Terceira celebrates St. John with the 10-day Sanjoaninas festival in late June. Portugal’s biggest agricultural fair, the Feira Nacional da Agricultura, is held every June in Santarém, the heart of cattle country. Expect bullfights, displays of horsemanship, and opportunities to consume heaps of regional food.
Farther down the River Tagus, Vila Franca de Xira holds its Festa do Colete Encarnado, featuring Pamplona-style bull-running through the riverside streets, in early July. Portugal’s bullfighting season reaches its height in the summer. There are weekly performances at Lisbon’s exotic Campo Pequeno ring. Unlike in Spain, the bulls are not killed in Portuguese bullfighting, but the spectacle can be disturbing for animal lovers.
One of the most striking traditional events is the Festa dos Tabuleiros, held every 4 years in Tomar, which features a procession of young women in traditional costume balancing trays laden with 30 stacked loaves of bread, decorated with flowers and topped with crowns. The next is due in early summer 2023.
The Portuguese soccer season runs from August through May. Catching a clássico game between the top clubs—Benfica, Sporting Lisbon, or FC Porto—in a packed stadium of impassioned fans is a powerful experience, showing just how deeply engrained the love of club is for most Portuguese.
September sees the Romaria da Nossa Senhora festival in Nazaré, Portugal’s most famed fishing town, where a sacred statue is carried to the sea, followed by folk dancing, singing, and bullfights. A relatively recent tradition is the Santa Casa Alfama festival in September, where top fado singers perform in venues throughout Lisbon’s Alfama neighborhood.
Horse lovers should head to Golegã in early November for the Feira Nacional do Cavalo, a celebration of all things equine, where the beautiful Lusitano breed holds pride of place. Christmas (Natal) is a family affair. Midnight masses fill churches up and down the country.
Eating & Drinking
In his delectable cookbook My Lisbon, Chef Nuno Mendes gets to the heart of the Portuguese diet. “Simplicity sums up the best of Portuguese cooking: taking fantastic produce and letting its own natural flavor be the main player on the plate,” he writes. “Ours is one of the most overlooked cuisine in Europe, and I believe it is time to truly shout about the food of Portugal.”
Dining Customs Most Portuguese breakfast lightly: milky coffee with toast, fresh bread rolls with preserves, perhaps a pastry—variations on croissants are common, sometimes filled with ham and cheese, an innovation considered scandalous by the French.
Short shots of espresso, known here as bica, are ingested throughout the day, often accompanied by the sweet, sticky pastries on show in all cafes. In Lisbon, custard tarts (pasteis de nata) are the calorie fix of choice.
Lunch is often the main meal of the day, and working people fill restaurants throughout the week to tuck in. Portions in traditional restaurants are large. In all but the poshest places, it’s completely acceptable to share a main course or ask for a half-portion (meia-dose). Aside from their printed menus, most restaurants offer dishes of the day (pratos do dia), which are usually a good bet, with market-fresh products at a bargain price.
Many people will take lanche in the afternoon—a light meal with tea or coffee. Dinner is usually eaten between 8pm and 9pm, although Spanish-style late-night dining is catching on. People drink wine with both lunch and dinner.
In restaurants, waiters often bring a selection of appetizers unbidden—they can range from a few olives or bread with a pot of sardine pâté, to an array of cheeses, sausage, and seafood. Most of the time, you’ll be charged a cover fee for what you eat (so say “no” if you don’t want any of these nibbles).
Cuisine Portuguese cooking is one of Europe’s best gourmet secrets. There’s great regional variation, with a more Mediterranean feel to Algarve cuisine and heartier, meatier options as you go farther north and farther away from the coast.
The Portuguese are among the world’s biggest fish eaters. The coastal waters produce a rich variety of seafood that is served super-fresh in markets and restaurants up and down the country. One of the country’s great treats is enjoying fresh, charcoal-grilled fish—gilt-head bream (dourada) and bass (robalo) are among the most popular species—with a splash of olive oil and lemon juice and a glass of chilled white wine in a beachside restaurant. Fish served this way is usually priced by weight on the menu.
Long considered the most humble of fish, sardines (sardinhas) are grilled in the streets during the summer season, bringing a pungent scent to the old neighborhoods of Lisbon and other cities. They are eaten by the boatload during Lisbon’s Santo Antonio festival in June and are a particular specialty in the fishing ports of the Algarve. They are usually accompanied by roasted bell peppers, green salad, and boiled potatoes drenched in olive oil, and best washed down with cold beer or red wine. Fresh sardines should only be eaten during the summer season, when they are at their fattest. After the weather turns cooler, sardines come from a can.
Another much-cherished fish dish is caldeirada, the Portuguese version of bouillabaisse, a fish stew enriched with tomatoes, bell peppers, and potatoes. Hake (pescada) is eaten “boiled with everything” (cozida com todos), meaning potatoes, carrots, green beans, and a boiled egg. In Madeira and the Algarve, tuna steaks (bifes de atum) are a specialty, pan-fried in olive oil with garlic and onions.
Despite the panoply of fresh local seafood, Portugal’s favorite fish is cod, caught in the waters of Norway or Iceland and preserved by drying and salting. Bacalhau, or salt cod, is as close to the Portuguese soul as soccer or fado music. It dates back to pre-refrigeration times, when salting enabled bacalhau to become a staple on long sea journeys or deep into the interior of the country. They say Portugal has more ways of serving bacalhau than there are days in the year. Popular versions include bacalhau à brás, a Lisbon treat with scrambled eggs, olives, and fries; pastéis de bacalhau, fishcakes often served with black-eyed peas; and bacalhau com broa, crumbled with cornbread.
Shellfish is generally excellent, best enjoyed in specialist restaurants called marisqueiras, which are often bright, busy places where customers slurp cilantro-and-garlic-steamed clams (amêijoas à bulhão pato) from their shells, smash crab claws with mallets to get at the flesh within, or pry shrimp in spicy sauce from their shells with fingers sticky. There’s a tradition of finishing off a seafood feast with a steak sandwich, or prego. A classic shellfish main course is arroz de marisco, a pot of rice and seafood in broth flavored with garlic, cilantro, tomato, and just a touch of piri-piri—a fiery chili sauce of African origin that’s a favorite condiment in Portugal.
A Coffee survival guide
From Brazil to East Timor, many of Portugal’s former colonies happened to produce wonderful coffee (café), so coffee culture runs deep. The Portuguese imbibe inordinate amounts of the stuff in an array of styles. Here’s what to order:
Bica: Thimble-size shots of strong black espresso. Portugal’s
