400,000 BCE – 237 BCE

Prehistory & Iron Age

The far west of Europe was inhabited for hundreds of thousands of years before any state existed, and its peoples left some of Europe's oldest art and monuments.

The Aroeira skull, about 400,000 years old, is the oldest human fossil found in Portugal. Neanderthals gathered shellfish on the Atlantic coast long before modern humans arrived some 40,000 years ago, and Ice Age hunters engraved thousands of animals on the rocks of the Côa Valley.

Farming reached the west around 5500 BCE. Its communities raised the Almendres Cromlech and the great dolmens of the Alentejo, and Copper Age towns such as Zambujal were ringed with walls.

In the Bronze and Iron Ages the land was shared by the hill-fort peoples of the north-west, the Lusitanians of the centre and the Celtici and Conii of the south, while Phoenician traders brought writing to the Algarve.