The history of the Kingdom of Portugal from the Illustrious Generation of the early 15th century to the fall of the House of Aviz in the late 16th century has been named the "Portuguese golden age" and the "Portuguese Renaissance". During this period, Portugal was the first European power to begin building a colonial empire as Portuguese sailors and explorers discovered an eastern route to India as well as several Atlantic archipelagos and colonized the African coast and Brazil. They also explored the Indian Ocean and established trading routes throughout most of southern Asia, sending the first direct European maritime trade and diplomatic missions to Ming China and to Japan, at the same time installing trading posts and the most important colony: Portuguese Macau. The Portuguese Renaissance produced a plethora of poets, historians, critics, theologians, and moralists. The Cancioneiro Geral by Garcia de Resende is taken to mark the transition from Old Portuguese to the modern Portuguese language.
Portuguese music includes many different styles and genres, as a result of its history. These can be broadly divided into classical music, traditional/folk music and popular music and all of them have produced internationally successful acts, with the country seeing a recent expansion in musical styles, especially in popular music.
The culture of Portugal is a very rich result of a complex flow of many different civilizations during the past millennia. From prehistoric cultures, to its Pre-Roman civilizations, passing through its contacts with the Phoenician-Carthaginian world, the Roman period, the Germanic invasions of the Suebi, Buri and Visigoths, Viking incursions, Sephardic Jewish settlement, and finally, the Moorish Umayyad invasion of Hispania and the subsequent expulsion, during the Reconquista, all have made an imprint on the country's culture and history.
João is the Portuguese equivalent of the given name John. The diminutive is Joãozinho and the feminine is Joana. It is widespread in Portuguese-speaking countries. Notable people with the name are enumerated in the sections below.
Gonçalves is a Portuguese surname. Origin: Germanic patronymic Gundisalvis. Notable people with the surname include:
Menezes, sometimes Meneses, was originally a Portuguese toponymic surname which originated in Montes Torozos, a region in Tierra de Campos, northeast of Valladolid and southeast of Palencia. The ancestor of the Meneses lineage was Tello Pérez de Meneses. The family wealth and power grew remarkably in the 13th and 14th centuries, through several marriages with the Castilian and Portuguese royal families.
Teixeira is a Galician-Portuguese surname based on the toponym Teixeira, derived from teixo "yew tree". The progenitors of the name were a "Noble Portuguese Marrano family, originally bearing the surname of Sampayo," and the Teixeira coat of arms was conferred "in accordance with a decree of King Philip IV of Spain" in 1643. A less frequent variant spelling is Texeira. The variant Técher is common in the highlands of Reunion Island, notably in the Cilaos area.
Oliveira is a surname in Portuguese-speaking countries, such as Brazil and Portugal, and to a lesser extent in former Portuguese colonies. In Portuguese, 'de Oliveira' means 'of the Olive Tree' and/or 'from the Olive Tree'.
The Camões family were descendants of the 14th-century Portuguese nobleman Vasco Pires de Camões.
Portuguese maritime exploration resulted in the numerous territories and maritime routes recorded by the Portuguese as a result of their intensive maritime journeys during the 15th and 16th centuries. Portuguese sailors were at the vanguard of European exploration, chronicling and mapping the coasts of Africa and Asia, then known as the East Indies, and Canada and Brazil, in what came to be known as the Age of Discovery.
Events in the year 1890 in Brazil.
Diogo is a Portuguese masculine given name and surname.
