Talk:List of cities in Portugal

Flawed Methodology

Cities do not coincide with freguesia boundaries. You can use http://sig.ine.pt/ to verify Caldas da Rainha's boundaries, for example. For population data, see http://www.ine.pt/xportal/xmain?xpid=INE&xpgid=ine_indicadores&indOcorrCod=0000348&contexto=bd&selTab=tab2 and drill down. You will find that the "statistical city" of Caldas da Rainha has a population of 25,316 as of 2008, a large difference from the 30,006 listed in this article. (The lookup is quirky, though: you can only search at the municipality level, so if a municipality has multiple cities, this table will not give a breakout.) --Nricardo (talk) 04:29, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Prestige and real cities

• Some issues should be discussed in the article, with a source supporting it:
• Historical cities and towns in Portugal are currently municipalities. Very different from the current title. So it is plain obvious that it does not have the same prestige. it is not the same thing!

And several cities and towns are not real cities or towns:

• Several of these so called-cities or towns are just titles given to parishes with dispersed settlement in one case, and in other cases are just suburbs, neither function as cities. And most of the population do not consider these places as such, only politicians do, but still not all, only when they try to be nice. Are the politicians that hold the truth? especially the Portuguese ones ("the Banana Republic syndrome"), that approve city and town status always without a single person in parliament questioning or objecting, and some status are given without any proper reasoning and some even includes incorrect data. Yep, even with so low-quality criteria, many places do not even met criteria needed but still get the status. It is like a chinese factory producing fake electronics similar to famous brands.
• The article states that it was the 1980s expansion that created several cities: is that the only or main reason? I dont think so.

---Pedro (talk) 14:54, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

The use of "city/town/village" in the Portuguese context implies a politico-administrative reality that does not exist. The Portuguese constitution does not recognize these entities, but rather the administrative regions, municipalities and civil parishes. These definitions were likely imposed by North American editors where those definitions are implied legal authorities. As you know Pedro, the definition is based on size and catchment for social services, and not on political entity (which the other groups are). ^{ruben jc} ZEORYMER (talk) 17:07, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

• Occasionally incorrect/insufficient data is being used, such as incorrect borders (virtual inhabitants) and services located in other parishes and a confusion between parishes and localities. The current Administration reform may led to indirect extinction of some of these town and city status, similarly to what happened in the 19th century. The issue here may not be important for administrative terms, but it is for a correct presentation of the country and of social importance. And this list is not accurately reproducing the Portuguese reality, it is not even similar to situations like in the UK, where they have historical cities, that kept the status, like the City of London. In Portugal, most of these places are not historical, and on a demographic (any criteria you want to use) arent even a separate entity. --Pedro (talk) 10:29, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

And the Template:Largest cities of Portugal seems to have a different approach to their population. Some figures are quite close to which this list has, for example Lisbon and Amadora, others have much larger figure in the template. Biggest difference on a quick look was Loures: here 26,000; on the template some 205,000. That's almost 8 times more... 85.217.42.90 (talk) 07:27, 8 September 2013 (UTC)