Ok, so we're talking stereotypes, but do you find the Portuguese a bit more insular and less brash? Always surprises me to find out their per capita gdp is well below that of the Spanish, yet they tend to speak English better (or at least it seems so).

Perhaps a question for the Portugese forum.

Or the Spanish forum? 50-50 either way, although we're looking at British opinion here.

The Portugese put butter on the table in restaurants, Spanish dont.

But the biggest difference is that the Portugese were born in Portugal and the Spanish were born in Spain.

All in all, another unanswerable question, because if we cant agree about things that are going on in Spain, when most live here and do have some contact with the Spanish, they how are we going to form an opinion about the inhabitants of a country that we have decided not to live in?

In the World Cup final, the Portuguese I know (in London) were definitely not rooting for Spain, and in fact were very disappointed that Spain won. This may be a natural consequence of living next door to a bigger, more powerful neighbour. I suspect that if Eire had got to a WC final then plenty of English would have cheered them on; I suspect a far low proportion of Irish would cheer on an England team

Human nature the World over.

From what I've seen during my few trips to various parts of Portugal, you could no more stereotype them, than you could the Spanish.

How long is a piece of string?

You may be right, but...If you were to ask a Portuguese person,"are you similar in behaviour/beliefs to a Spaniard" you'd get a very forceful NO. Put it this way, you can point out differences between the English and the Scots, and they speak (more or less given a few dialect differences) the same language. Or do you think you're the same as a Scot? I know the Scots would never admit to being similar to an Englishperson, in fact they go out of their way to protest their differences.

Once again human nature for most ppl.to emphasise their own national identity,though some much more than others.
The range of variation within each country is probably greater than that from one country to the next.

I have no idea what the difference between the people is - but they never seem to have any weather in Portugal - good or bad

where did my picture go??


try again!




edit - that's weird - I can see the link in the quote but not the post??

Having lived in both countries (Spain & Portugal, that is) I have to say that although to a Brit the languages might seem similar, there are not just a few dialect differences. Surely the Spanish & Portuguese who live in the border areas will have a better understanding of eachothers language, but the many Portuguese from Lisbon & Porto I have met nearly always asked me to speak English to them instead of Spanish.

There´s a huge difference between most (trying not to generalize) Portuguese from the Algarve and from Lisbon, but that´s a different subject.

I know that I'm showing my ignorance here and also being too lazy to find out for myself but would someone be kind and explain the history of how Spain and Portugal came to speak different languages and why Portugal appeared to end up being less well off when they were both once great colonising nations?

Do the people who live on either side of the border get on generally - do they intermarry etc?

"The First Global Village" by Martin Page will answer your questions about history.

And yes, we all get along fine here, in our area (Ayamonte-Vila Real de St.Antonio) we don´t really care where one´s from......

Thank you - will check that out