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Eight easy questions about the essentials of Portugal, from the map to the dinner table. Everyone can join in, so give it a go!
Olá, Portugal! 0–3 · Confident explorer 4–6 · Basically Portuguese 7–8
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Spain lies to the north and east of Portugal; everything else is coastline. Their shared border is about 1,200 kilometres long, the longest unbroken border between two countries inside the European Union. It even has a nickname: 'the Stripe'.
Photo: peterichman from York, Yorkshire, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
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Green fills the side by the pole and red the rest, with a golden armillary sphere and the national shield in the middle. That sphere was an important instrument for Portuguese sailors exploring unknown seas. Before 1910, when Portugal still had kings, its flags were mostly blue and white.
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All of mainland Portugal's coast faces the Atlantic, even the sunny beaches of the Algarve in the south. Cabo da Roca, about 40 kilometres west of Lisbon, is the most westerly point of mainland Europe, and a lighthouse has stood guard there since 1772.
Photo: Olga1969, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.
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Salted cod, called bacalhau, is so loved in Portugal that people like to say there is a different way to cook it for every day of the year, and some claim there are over a thousand. Funny enough, the cod is not caught off Portugal: most of it comes from far to the north, from countries such as Norway and Iceland.
Photo: Karl Ragnar Gjertsen Krg This photo was taken by Karl Ragnar Gjertsen . Please c, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
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Cork comes from the cork oak. Workers carefully strip the thick bark about every nine years and the tree simply grows a new layer, so it does not have to be cut down. Cork floats and keeps out water, and it ends up in noticeboards, shoe soles, floors and even the heat shields of spacecraft.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.5.
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Lisbon's small yellow trams are one of the city's best-loved sights. Their design dates from the early twentieth century, and they are small on purpose: only a short tram fits through the narrow streets and up the steep hills of the old centre. The first electric trams came from the United States, so people called them 'americanos'.
Photo: Ajay Suresh from New York, NY, USA, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
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Azulejos are glazed ceramic tiles: some walls show a simple pattern, others a huge picture made from thousands of tiles. They are pretty, but practical too, because they help keep houses cool. The name comes from an Arabic word for 'polished stone', as the first ones copied the look of mosaics.
Photo: Alvesgaspar, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.5.
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Cristiano Ronaldo was born in 1985 in Funchal, on the Portuguese island of Madeira out in the Atlantic. Since 2017 the island's airport has even officially carried his name. His great rival Lionel Messi comes from Argentina.
Photo: Bryan Berlin, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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