Food & drink in Portugal

Whether you’re perusing the menus in Lisbon or exploring the vineyards of Douro, Portuguese food and drink tells a few thousand years’ worth of history. Iberian ingredients mix with spices and sweets plucked from a 600-year-long empire that stretched from South America to the Indian Ocean.

With wines and recipes changing from region to region, the choice seems overwhelming. But you won’t be exploring menus alone – Portuguese food is made to be shared. Even if you travel solo, you won’t be short of people to guide you through menus and there are always welcoming tables to dine at.

Hosts at guest houses stock the larder with freshly baked bread, cured meats and cheese, while chefs at quintas cook up small plates called petiscos (we dare you to call it tapas) using olive oil grown in the silvery groves on their doorsteps. They’ll be very happy to take you for a spin around their farm.

The best vacations to Portugal immerse you thoroughly in one region, so you’ll get to know its specialities well, cooked by local people – whether that’s a family bacalhau recipe, a vegan take on the fabled Portuguese custard tart, or wine tasting in Porto and the Douro Valley. Great gastronomy is everywhere.

Take our tour through some of the best food and drink in Portugal to find out more.

What is a main dish without a generous glug of olive oil? Nothing, if you ask the Portuguese. Olive trees have coated these hillsides since at least the Bronze Age, but they were only cultivated as precious crops when the Romans and Visigoths arrived. The Umayyad (Omíada) empire that ruled much of the Mediterranean from the 8th to the 13th centuries gave the Portuguese the word for this ubiquitous ingredient: azeite, from az-zait, Arabic for olive juice.

These days, you’ll see long stripes of farmed olive trees along Portugal’s eastern edge. Cycling vacations wheel through the Douro Valley, where some of the best olive oil in the world is produced. Working quinta estates welcome guests for the night, offering the chance to taste the olives at their freshest – alongside a platter of cheese and a decanter of Douro port.

Portugal has long been a fishing nation, with over 900km of coastline on the mainland and flags planted on Atlantic archipelagos Azores and Madeira. Seafood appears on every menu, even in the interior; nowhere is too far from the ocean.

Responsible Travel writer, Rob Perkins, especially loved the seafood when he lived in Portugal. He says: “Nothing beats a plate of king prawns, octopus salad or clams with garlicky toast and a cold bottle of beer on the beach. Except if you have them all on the same table. And it’s said they have a different bacalhau recipe for every day of the year.”

Bacalhau is codfish – usually salted and dried just as it was in the 16th century, when Portuguese sailors brought the technique back from Newfoundland in Canada. Bacalhau recipes are simple, with cod often barbecued, baked or fried. The most popular version, bacalhau à brás, is chopped up and mixed with potatoes, eggs, onions, olives, garlic and herbs. Other recipes douse the cod in a cream sauce or pile them up in fish cakes or fritters.

Lucifer’s fingers (percebes) are notorious. The people who harvest these gnarled, finger-like barnacles in the south-west of the country are said to have one of the most dangerous jobs in Portugal, dicing with the crashing Atlantic to hand-pick them from rocky tide pools and caves while tethered with ropes. As such, Lucifer’s fingers are considered a delicacy, sold for up to €100 a plate at fancy restaurants in the cities.

Portuguese fish stew (caldeirada) is much more down to earth. Anything caught that day is thrown into the mix, from prawns and mussels to squid and fish. It’s named after the pot it’s ladled from, usually shared with family and friends around the table.

Grilled sardines (sardinhas assadas) are another easy favourite; you’ll smell them being barbecued on the beach less than a mile away from where they were caught throughout the summer. They’re most famously eaten in Lisbon during the fiery celebrations of the Feast of St Anthony over 12-13 June.

Portuguese desserts use a vast range of spices, including cloves, cumin, nutmeg, pepper, vanilla and cardamom. These flavours all tell the tale of Portugal’s interests in the spice trade. Over the centuries, this grew into the establishment of sugar and cocoa plantations in colonies like Cape Verde, Madeira and the Azores – all fuelled by slave labour until the 1870s, when slavery was abolished in the Portuguese colonies… before being swiftly replaced with forced labour.

Cinnamon, in particular, is sprinkled in almost every Portuguese dessert. When the growing empire gradually took control of Sri Lanka during the 16th and 17th centuries, it also commanded the treasured cinnamon trade. The spice flavours almost every Portuguese dessert, including the famous pastel de nata – or the Portuguese custard tart, a flaky puff pastry filled with caramelised cinnamon custard. Don’t be fooled by the queues at the famous Pastéis de Belém in Lisbon; the neighbouring bakeries make the tarts just as well.

Arroz doce is a traditional Portuguese comfort food – a rich and creamy rice pudding with lemon zest and sprinkled with cinnamon. Cream-filled doughnuts are a great pick-me-up. You’ll smell them sizzling everywhere from markets to beach food stalls. Meanwhile, salame de chocolate is a more-delicious-than-it-sounds chocolate salami.

Sweet almond cakes and tortes line the shelves of every pastelaria. The pale pink and white blossoms of almond trees are the first sign of spring across the Douro and Algarve countryside in February and March. Or go in September to see farmworkers with long poles whacking the ripe almonds to the ground for harvest.

Formed in 1716, Douro is one of the oldest protected wine regions in the world after Italy’s Chianti and Hungary’s Tokaj. The granite mountains and sheltered river valley form a unique microclimate ideal for producing port – usually served as an aperitif in Portugal. It’s red, sweet and fortified, with servings small but mighty.

Douro is also full of small-scale winemakers. There’s something particularly impressive about the way vineyards cling to the vertiginous sides of the Douro Valley. The grapes here are high in harsh tannins, so winemakers are dab hands at keeping things fruity and turning them into excellent table wines. Some wine tasting tours pair Douro with a hop over the Spanish border, so you can compare tipples.

The Romans left sandal prints all over Alentejo, scattering behind them temples in Evora and the ghosts of mosaiced villas in the sunburned countryside. They also left behind their distinctive techniques for winemaking, with some vineyards still using clay pots for storage.

Sizzling summers have traditionally resulted in some distinctive but not exactly swiggable Alentejo reds. Newer vineyards have been popping up since the 1990s, however, blending native grapes like Touriga Franca with Cabernet Sauvignon to get a fruity blend that’s easy to sip alongside a bowl of lamb stew.

Seeing the cork oak trees that provide the stoppers in your wine bottles is as fascinating as visiting the vineyards. A farmer can take you for a tour through the trees, pointing out the trunks stripped of thick layers of bark. Amazingly, it doesn’t damage the tree – the year of the harvest is painted on the trunk and the famers come back in nine years, when the bark has grown back.