Portugal

Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic, holds the southwestern corner of Iberia with Spain its only land neighbour, plus Madeira and the Azores far out in the Atlantic, eleven million people round the capital Lisbon. Settled since deep prehistory and held by Muslims from 711, the land became a county of León in 868 and a kingdom in its own right in 1179 as the Reconquista rolled south. Then came the seaborne turn: Portuguese pilots learned the Atlantic winds, rounded Africa, reached India and Brazil, and raised the first empire on which the sun never set, with the Carthaginians and Romans behind it and missionaries, forts and trading posts girdling three oceans. The kingdom turned republic in 1910, dictatorship in 1926, and democracy again only after the officers' Carnation Revolution of 1974 toppled the Estado Novo. A unitary multi-party republic of seven mainland regions, Portugal lives on services, industry and tourism, keeps a stable foreign policy shaped by its colonial past, and speaks a language shared by more than two hundred and fifty million people. Neutral through the Second World War, it entered 1945 intact but poor.