Portugal is a beautiful country with a rich history, vibrant culture, stunning landscapes, and delicious cuisine. Reading books about Portugal offers a rich exploration of its culture, history, and landscapes. From captivating fiction to insightful non-fiction, these books provide a deeper understanding of Portuguese traditions, the beauty of its scenery, and the complexities of its past, enriching your travel experience and global perspective. Here are some books that might make you want to pack your bags and explore this enchanting destination:

Books to Inspire You to Visit Portugal

“The High Mountains of Portugal” by Yann Martel

Lost in Portugal.
Lost to grief.
With nothing but a chimpanzee.

A man thrown backwards by heartbreak goes in search of an artefact that could unsettle history. A woman carries her husband to a doctor in a suitcase. A Canadian senator begins a new life, in a new country, in the company of a chimp called Odo. From these stories of journeying, of loss and faith, Yann Martel makes a novel unlike any other: moving, profound and magical.

“Night Train to Lisbon” by Pascal Mercier

“The Book of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa

The Book of Disquiet is one of the great literary works of the twentieth century. Written over the course of Fernando Pessoa’s life, it was first published in 1982, pieced together from the thousands of individual manuscript pages left behind by Pessoa after his death in 1935.

Now this fragmentary modernist masterpiece appears in a major new edition that unites Margaret Jull Costa’s celebrated translation with the most complete version of the text ever produced. It is presented here, for the first time in English, by order of original composition, and accompanied by facsimiles of the original manuscript.

Narrated principally by an assistant bookkeeper named Bernardo Soares – an alias of sorts for Pessoa himself – The Book of Disquiet is ‘the autobiobraphy of someone who never existed’, a mosaic of dreams, of hope and despair; a hymn to the streets and cafés of 1930s Lisbon, and an extraordinary record of the inner life of one of the century’s most important writers. This new edition represents the most complete vision of Pessoa’s genius.

“The Maias” by José Maria de Eça de Queirós

Carlos is the talented heir to a notable family in fin-de-siecle Lisbon. He aspires to serve his fellow man in his chosen profession of medicine, in the arts and in politics. But he enters a society affected by powerful international influences – French intellectual developments, English trading practices – that trouble and frustrate him and in the end he is reduced to a kind of spiritual helplessness. Carlos’ good intentions decline, amiably, into dilettantism; his passionate love affair itself begins to suffer a devastating constraint.

“The Maias” tells a compelling story of characters whose lives become as real and engrossing as any in Flaubert, Balzac or Dickens. This is his masterpiece, a novel of intellectual depth, historical compassion and great wit. Hailed as a masterpiece in the Paris of Flaubert, Balzac and Zola, this remains Eca’s most popular novel.

“A Small Death in Lisbon” by Robert Wilson

A Portuguese bank is founded on the back of Nazi wartime deals.

Over half a century later a young girl is murdered in Lisbon.

1941. Klaus Felsen, SS, arrives in Lisbon and the strangest party in history where Nazis and Allies, refugees and entrepreneurs dance to the strains of opportunism and despair. Felsen’s war takes him to the bleak mountains of the north where a brutal battle is being fought for an element vital to Hitler’s blitzkrieg.

Late 1990s, Lisbon. Inspector Ze Coelho is investigating the murder of a young girl with a disturbing sexual past. As Ze digs deeper he overturns the dark soil of history and unearths old bones. The 1974 revolution has left injustices of the old fascist regime unresolved. But there’s an older, greater injustice for which this small death in Lisbon is horrific compensation, and in his final push for the truth, Ze must face the most chilling opposition.

“The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis” by José Saramago

The world’s threats are universal like the sun but Ricardo Reis takes shelter under his own shadow.

Back in Lisbon after sixteen years practising medicine in Brazil, Ricardo Reis wanders the rain-sodden streets. He longs for the unattainably aristocratic Marcenda, but it is Lydia, the hotel chamber maid who makes and shares his bed. His old friend, the poet Fernando Pessoa, returns to see him, still wearing the suit he was buried in six weeks earlier. It is 1936, the clouds of Fascism are gathering ominously above them, so they talk; a wonderful, rambling discourse on art, truth, poetry, philosophy, destiny and love.

These books offer diverse perspectives on Portugal, its history, and its people, and are sure to inspire a sense of wanderlust for this captivating destination.