Figure 6. Estimated Population Distribution by Age and Sex, 2000

Source: Based on information from Grande Enciclopédia Portuguesa e Brasileira, 9, Lisbon, 1987, 40.

By the early 1990s, Portugal's population was just over 10 million, a little more than triple the 3.1 million estimated to live in the country in 1801. The main causes for this slow growth were a high infant mortality rate for much of these two centuries and an emigration rate so extreme that in one decade, the 1960s, the country's population actually fell. These trends have reversed in recent decades. The country's infant mortality rate at the beginning of the 1990s--10 per 1,000 in 1992--remained somewhat higher than the European average but was one-fifth of that registered two decades earlier. Emigration also slowed markedly as prosperity appeared in Portugal in the second half of the 1980s. Moreover, a massive influx of refugees from former Portuguese colonies in Africa in the second half of the 1970s caused a population surge.

Data as of January 1993