Setúbal

In antiquity Setúbal was Cetobriga, a settlement visited by Phoenicians, Greeks and Carthaginians in search of salt and tin and later a Roman town of fish-salting works and pottery kilns; more salting tanks survive across the estuary at Tróia. After the fall of Rome, invasions and piracy left the place stagnant or abandoned for centuries, and in Arabic it was known as Shaṭūbar. After the Christian reconquest it came under the protection of the Order of Santiago, which granted it a charter in March 1249. John II began the square now called Praça do Bocage and an aqueduct in 1487, and the Monastery of Jesus, one of the first Manueline buildings, was founded in the same period.

Salt made the town rich. In the 17th century it reached the height of its prosperity, when the salt of "Saint Ubes", as the English called it, served as currency and payment to the European states that had backed Portugal's wars of restoration; it was still being exported as far as Australia in the 1830s. The 1755 earthquake, with the sea and fire that followed, interrupted that prosperity.

The railway arrived in 1860, the year King Pedro V raised Setúbal to a city, and the river was filled in to build the Avenida Luísa Todi. The first canneries of sardines in olive oil opened in the 19th century, and by the early 20th century Setúbal was Portugal's most important centre of the fishing industry. The canneries declined from the mid-1970s until none remained, and the city turned to heavy industry, its port and, increasingly, tourism.

Setúbal honours its poets and musicians. The city holiday, 15 September, marks the birth in 1765 of Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage, the satirical and classical poet, whose statue stands on a column in the main square and whose house is now a museum. The opera singer Luísa Todi gave her name to the main avenue and the municipal theatre, and the singer-songwriter Zeca Afonso lived, worked and died in the city. Teatro Animação de Setúbal is based here.

The city's identity is that of a working port. The old fishing quarters of Troino and Fontainhas, the cannery history told at the Michel Giacometti Museum of Work and the boats still landing fish at the docks keep that past visible. The Diocese of Setúbal has its seat at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Grace, and its current bishop, Américo Aguiar, is a cardinal.

Football means Vitória de Setúbal, founded on 20 November 1910. The Sado's dolphins are a source of local pride: the colony is the only one living in a Portuguese estuary. On summer Sundays, people from Setúbal and Lisbon head for the Arrábida beaches below the hills.

The city had about 90,000 inhabitants in 2021, and the wider municipality, which includes the villages of Azeitão, about 124,000. It is the capital of the Setúbal District and part of the Lisbon metropolitan area, and many residents commute to the capital by train or across the Tagus bridges.

Industry still matters more here than in most Portuguese cities: pulp and paper, cement, fertilisers and other chemicals, power generation, shipbuilding and ship repair, and car assembly, which has been part of the local economy since the 1950s. The port was the fourth busiest in Portugal by cargo in 2012. Unemployment has been a persistent problem — 15.6 per cent of the labour force was out of work at the 2011 census — and services now employ most people, with tourism growing on the strength of the estuary, the beaches and the Arrábida.

Everyday life is centred on the flat old town and the avenue along the water: the morning market, coffee at the counter, lunch in a tasca and an evening walk by the river. Bus services in the city and the surrounding towns have been run under the Carris Metropolitana network since 2022.

Setúbal's cooking is built on fish from the Sado and the Atlantic, roasted, boiled or grilled, and the city is best known for choco frito — cuttlefish marinated and fried without flour or breadcrumbs, served in generous slabs with chips and salad in restaurants across the centre. Migrants from the Alentejo and the Algarve added meat and poultry dishes and açordas, bread-based dishes that were adapted here to seafood and fish. The Livramento market on Avenida Luísa Todi is the place to see the catch, and the tascas in the streets around it serve seafood at modest prices.

The surrounding countryside supplies the rest of the table. Azeitão, on the inland side of the Arrábida, makes a sheep's cheese with protected designation of origin, and tortas de Azeitão, a sweet made with egg yolks, sugar and ovos moles. In the 19th century Setúbal's oranges became famous alongside its Moscatel.

Moscatel de Setúbal is the region's fortified Muscat wine. The style is credited to José Maria da Fonseca, whose family winery in Azeitão dates from 1834 and still offers tastings, and the region also makes liqueurs and traditional sweets of its own.