Where the Portuguese live: the population — Geography, 11–13
How the population is distributed in Portugal, what explains it and how to read it on a map.
A population unevenly spread
Portugal has about 10 million inhabitants, but they are not spread evenly. The population is concentrated on the coast, above all in the Lisbon and Porto metropolitan areas, and is very sparse across much of the interior. To describe this distribution we use population density: the number of inhabitants per square kilometre.
What explains the distribution
There are natural factors and human factors. The natural ones are relief, climate, soils and access to water: it is easier to live where the land is flat, fertile and close to the sea or rivers. The human ones are jobs, services, transport and industry: people go where there is work, schools and hospitals. In Portugal, both groups point to the coast.
A case: reading a density map
Step 1: read the title and legend — the colours tell how many inhabitants there are per km². Step 2: darker colours mean more people per square kilometre. Step 3: you see a dark strip on the coast, around Lisbon and Porto, and pale colours in the interior. Step 4: conclude and explain: more people where there are jobs, ports and services, fewer where the terrain is hard and there is less work.
The trap: the average misleads
If you divide Portugal's population by the country's area, you get an average of about 110 inhabitants per km². But that average hides everything: the Lisbon metropolitan area has close to a thousand inhabitants per km², and many interior municipalities have fewer than ten. So when talking about population, always look at the distribution, not just the average.
Where you see this today
Every ten years the National Statistics Institute (INE) runs the Census, which counts the whole population and shows how it changes. The results appear in maps and charts, for example on Pordata. You can look up your own municipality and see whether its population is growing, shrinking or ageing.
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