The Portuguese people ( generic plural, Português (male), or Portuguesa(s) (female(s)) are a Romance ethnic group and nation indigenous to Portugal, a country that occupies the west side of the Iberian Peninsula in south-west Europe, who share culture, ancestry and language.

The Portuguese state began with the founding of the County of Portugal in 868. Following the Battle of São Mamede (1128), Portugal gained international recognition as a kingdom through the Treaty of Zamora (1143) and the papal bull Manifestis Probatum (1179). This Portuguese state paved the way for the Portuguese people to unite as a nation.

The Portuguese explored distant lands previously unknown to Europeans—in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania (southwest Pacific Ocean). Starting in 1415, with the conquest of Ceuta, the Portuguese took a significant role in the Age of Discovery, which culminated in a colonial empire. It was one of the first global empires and one of the world's major economic, political and military powers in the 15th and 16th centuries, with territories that became part of numerous countries.Melvin Eugene Page, Penny M. Sonnenburg, p. 481 Portugal helped to launch the spread of Western civilization to other geographies.

During and after the period of the Portuguese Empire, the Portuguese diaspora spread across the world.

Ancestry

The Portuguese people's heritage largely derives from the Indo-European (Lusitanians, Conii),"the Indo-European but clearly non-Celtic language that we today call Lusitanian.(...)": Book Reviews: Alejandro G. Sinner, Javier Velaza (eds.). Palaeohispanic Languages and Epigraphies, Oxford University Press, 2019, Juan Luis García Alonso, University of Salamanca, Spain, Journal of Language Relationship, № 19/3-4, 2021 and Celtic peoples (Gallaecians, Turduli and Celtici). They were later Romanized after the Roman conquest. The Portuguese language–the native language of the overwhelming majority of Portuguese people–stems from Vulgar Latin.

A number of male Portuguese lineages descend from Germanic tribes who arrived as ruling elites after the Roman period, starting in 409. These included the Suebi, Buri, Hasdingi Vandals and Visigoths. The pastoral North Caucasus' Alans left traces in a few central-southern areas (e.g. Alenquer, from "Alen Kerke" or "Temple of the Alans").Milhazes, José. Os antepassados caucasianos dos portugueses  – Rádio e Televisão de Portugal in Portuguese.Ivo Xavier Fernándes. Topónimos e gentílicos, Volume 1, 1941, p. 144.

The Umayyad conquest of Iberia, between the early 8th century until the 12th century, also left small Moorish, Jewish and Saqaliba genetic contributions.

Other minor influences include Viking settlements between the 9th and 11th centuries, made by Norsemen who raided coastal areas mainly in the northern regions of Douro and Minho. Low-incidence, pre-Roman influence came from Phoenicians and Greeks in southern coastal areas.

Name The name Portugal is a portmanteau that comes from the Latin word Portus (meaning port) and a second word Cale, whose meaning and origin are unclear. Cale is probably a reminder of the Gallaeci (also known as Callaeci), a Celtic tribe that lived in part of Northern Portugal.

Alternatively the name may have come from the early settlement of Cale (today's Gaia), situated on the mouth of the Douro River on the Atlantic coast (Portus Cale). The name Cale seems to come from the Celts – perhaps from one of their specifications, Cailleach – but which, in everyday life, was synonymous with shelter, anchorage or door. Among other theories, some suggest that Cale may stem from the Greek word for kalós (beautiful). Another theory for Portugal postulates a French derivation, Portus Gallus "port of the Gauls".

During the Middle Ages, the area around Cale became known through the Visigoths as Portucale. Portucale could have evolved in the 7th and 8th centuries, to become Portugale, or Portugal, from the 9th century. The term denoted the area between the Douro and Minho rivers.

Early inhabitants

Portuguese origins are predominantly from Southern and Western Europe. The earliest modern humans inhabiting Portugal are believed to have arrived in the Iberian Peninsula 35,000 to 40,000 years ago. Y-chromosome and mtDNA data suggest that modern Portuguese trace a proportion of these lineages to the Paleolithic peoples who began settling the European continent at the end of the last glaciation around 45,000 years ago.

Northern Iberia is believed to have been a major Ice age refuge from which Paleolithic humans later colonized Europe. Migrations from northern Iberia during the Paleolithic and Mesolithic link modern Iberians to much of Western Europe, particularly the British Isles and Atlantic Europe.

Y-chromosome haplogroup R1b is the most common haplogroup in the Iberian peninsula and western Europe. One of the best-characterized of Iberian haplotypes is the Atlantic Modal Haplotype (AMH). This haplotype reaches the highest frequencies there and in the British Isles. In Portugal it reckons generally 65% in the South, ranging from 87-96% northwards.

Neolithic

The Neolithic colonization of Europe from Western Asia and the Middle East, beginning around 10,000 years ago, reached Iberia after reaching the rest of the continent. According to the demic diffusion model its impact was greatest in the southern and eastern regions.

Celts and Indo-Europeans

In the 3rd millennium BC, during the Bronze Age, the first wave of migrations by Indo-European language speakers into Iberia occurred. The expansion of haplogroup R1b in Western Europe, most common in many areas of Atlantic Europe, was primarily due to massive migrations from the Pontic–Caspian steppe of Eastern Europe during the Bronze Age, along with carriers of Indo-European languages like proto-Celtic and proto-Italic. Unlike older studies on uniparental markers, large amounts of autosomal DNA were analyzed in addition to paternal Y-DNA. An autosomal component was detected in modern Europeans that was not present in the Neolithic or Mesolithic, and which entered Europe with paternal lineages R1b and R1a, as well as the Indo-European languages. The first immigrations of Indo-European language speakers were followed by waves of Celts. The Celts arrived in Portugal about 3,000 years ago. Migration was particularly intense from the 7th to the 5th centuries BC.

These two processes defined Iberia's cultural landscape "Continental in the northwest and Mediterranean towards the southeast", as historian José Mattoso described.Mattoso, José (dir.), História de Portugal. Primeiro Volume: Antes de Portugal, Lisboa, Círculo de Leitores, 1992. (in Portuguese)

The northwest–southeast cultural shift also shows in genetic differences: based on 2016 findings, haplogroup H, a cluster within the haplogroup R category, is more prevalent along the Atlantic façade, including the Cantabrian Coast and Portugal. Its highest frequency is in Galicia (northwestern corner of Iberia). The frequency of haplogroup H shows a decreasing trend from the Atlantic façade toward the Mediterranean.

This finding adds strong evidence that Galicia and Northern Portugal was a cul-de-sac population, a kind of European edge for a major ancient central European migration. An interesting pattern of genetic continuity exists along the Cantabria coast and Portugal, a pattern observed previously when minor sub-clades of the mtDNA phylogeny were examined.

Given the Paleolithic and Neolithic origins, as well as Bronze Age and Iron Age Indo-European migrations, the Portuguese ethnic origin was mainly a mixture of pre-Celts or para-Celts, such as the Lusitanians of Lusitania, and Celtic peoples such as Gallaeci of Gallaecia, the Celtici and the Cynetes of Alentejo and the Algarve.

Pre-Roman populations

Lusitanians

The Lusitanians (or Lusitānus – singular – Lusitani – plural – in Latin) were an Indo-European people living in the Western Iberian Peninsula long before it became the Roman province of Lusitania (modern Portugal, Extremadura and part of Salamanca). They spoke Lusitanian, of which only a few short written fragments survive. Most Portuguese consider Lusitanians as their ancestors, although the northern regions (Minho, Douro, Trás-os-Montes) identify more with Gallaecians. Linguists such as Ellis Evans claimed that Gallaecian-Lusitanian was one language (thus not separate languages) of the "p" Celtic variant. They were a large tribe who lived between Douro and Tagus rivers.

The Lusitanians may have originated in the Alps and settled in the region in the 6th century BC. Scholars such as Dáithí Ó hÓgáin consider them to be indigenous. He claimed they were initially dominated by the Celts, before gaining full independence. Romanian archaeologist , active in Portugal for many years, proposed that they were originally a tribal Celtic group, related to the Lusones.

The first area settled by the Lusitanians was probably the Douro Valley and the region of Beira Alta; they subsequently moved south, and expanded on both sides of the Tagus river, before the Roman conquest.

The Lusitanians originated from either Proto-Celtic or Proto-Italic populations who spread from Central Europe into western Europe after Yamnaya migrations into the Danube Valley, while Proto-Germanic and Proto-Balto-Slavic may have developed east of the Carpathian Mountains, in present-day Ukraine, moving north and spreading with the Corded Ware culture in Middle Europe (third millennium BCE). One theory claimed that a European branch of Indo-European dialects, termed "North-west Indo-European" and associated with the Bell Beaker culture, may have been ancestral to Celtic, Italic, Germanic, and Balto-Slavic lanaguages.

The Lusitanians' Celtic root, is further emphasized by research by the Max Planck Institute on the origins of Indo-European languages. One study identified one common Celtic branch of peoples and languages spanning most of Atlantic Europe, including Lusitania, at around 7,000 BC. This work contradicts previous theories that excluded Lusitanian from the Celtic linguistic family.

In Roman times, the Roman province of Lusitania was extended north of the areas occupied by the Lusitanians to include the territories of Asturias and Gallaecia, but these were soon ceded to the jurisdiction of the Provincia Tarraconensis in the north, while the south remained the Provincia Lusitania et Vettones. After this, Lusitania's northern border was along the Douro river, while its eastern border passed through Salmantica and Caesarobriga to the Anas (Guadiana) river.

Other Pre-Roman groups

As the Lusitanians fought the Romans, the name Lusitania was adopted by the Gallaeci, tribes living north of the Douro, and other surrounding tribes, eventually spreading as a label to the nearby peoples fighting Roman rule in western Iberia. This led the Romans to name their original province in the area, which initially covered the entire western side of the Iberian peninsula, Lusitania.