page_title: Póvoa de Varzim
section_title: Demographics
hierarchical_section_title: Póvoa de Varzim / Demographics
context_page_description: Póvoa de Varzim is a Portuguese city in Northern Portugal and sub-region of Greater Porto, 30 km from its city centre. It sits in a sandy coastal plain, a cuspate foreland, halfway between the Minho and Douro rivers. In 2001, there were 63,470 inhabitants, with 42,396 living in the city proper. The city expanded, southwards, to Vila do Conde, and there are about 100,000 inhabitants in the urban area alone. It is the seventh-largest urban agglomeration in Portugal and the third largest in Northern Portugal.
  Permanent settlement in Póvoa de Varzim dates back to around four to six thousand years ago; around 900 BC, unrest in the region led to the establishment of Cividade de Terroso, a fortified city, which developed maritime trade routes with the civilizations of classical antiquity. Modern Póvoa de Varzim emerged after the conquest by the Roman Republic of the city by 138 BC; fishing and fish processing units soon developed, which became the foundations of the local economy.
context_section_description: A native of Póvoa de Varzim is called a Poveiro which can be rendered into English as Povoan. According to the 2001 Census, there were 63,470 inhabitants that year, 38 848 (61.2%) of whom lived in the city. The number goes up to 100,000 if adjacent satellite areas are taken into account, ranking it as the seventh largest independent urban area in Portugal, within a polycentric agglomeration of about 3 million people, ranging from Braga to Porto. According to the EOCD methology, Póvoa de Varzim was the 13th largest Functional urban area of Portugal, hence a small urban area with 63,428 inhabitants, by including only its municipality.
  The urban area has a population density of 3035/km² (7,864/mi²), while the rural and suburban areas have a density of 355.5/km² (920/mi²). The rural areas away from the city tend to be scarcely populated, becoming denser near it. During the summer the resident population in the city triples; this seasonal movement from neighbouring cities is due to the draw of the beach and 29.9% of homes had seasonal use in 2001, the highest in Greater Porto. Póvoa de Varzim is the youngest city in the region with a birth rate of 13.665 and mortality rate of 8.330. Unlike other urban areas of greater Porto, it is not a satellite city. Significant commuting occurs only with Vila do Conde, an urban expansion area of Póvoa since the 18th century.
  For centuries a fishing community of mostly Norman origin, where ethnic isolationism was a common practice, Póvoa de Varzim is today a cosmopolitan town, with people originating from the Ave Valley who settled in the coastal Northern districts during the 20th century, the ancient immigration from Galicia, Portuguese-Africans (who arrived in significant numbers after the independence of Angola and Mozambique) in the late 1970s. In 2017, Póvoa de Varzim had a legal foreign resident population of 1.5%, up from 1.4% in 2008, mostly including economic migrants and expatriates, it excludes those who obtained Portuguese citizenship and illegal migrants. Most of these were from Brazil, China, the Ukraine, France, Spain, Mozambique, Angola, Romania, the United Kingdom and Cape Verde. In 2008, the ten largest groups were from Brazil, Ukraine, China, Spain, Moldova, Angola, France, Romania, Mozambique, and Cape Verde. Most of the growth in foreign population arrived from China, other Asian countries, France and other European countries. In 2017, 231 migrants moved to Póvoa de Varzim from Brazil, the Ukraine and Venezuela; but also from Uzbekistan, Angola, and Georgia.
  The population of the entire municipality grew only 1% between 1981 and 1991, then increased by 15.3% between 1991 and 2001. During that period, the urban population had grown 23%, with the number of families increasing considerably — by about 44.5%. The quality of living, the infrastructure development such as the light rail metro and a 15 minutes distance from Porto and Braga, prompted new residents originating from near-by cities such as Guimarães, Famalicão, Braga and Porto which led to a real estate development that may double the resident population in the medium term.
  Due to the practice of endogamy and the caste system, Póvoa's fishing community maintained local ethnic characteristics. Anthropological and cultural data indicate Nordic fishermen settling during the period of the coast's resettlement. In As Praias de Portugal (Beaches of Portugal, 1876), Ramalho ortigão wrote that the Povoan fishermen were a "race" in the Portuguese coast; entirely different from the Mediterranean type of Ovar and Olhão, Poveiro is of "Saxon" type. On the other hand, the man from the interior was a farmer with Galician character (Paleo and Nordid-Atlantid). In a 1908 research, anthropologist Fonseca Cardoso considered that Poveiros were the result of a mixture of Teutons, Jews and mostly, Normans. In the book The Races of Europe (1938), Poveiros were distinguished by having a greater than usual degree of blondism, broad faces of unknown origin, and broad jaws.
  Poveiros have migrated to other places and this attenuated the popu
caption: Poveiros during the 2006 Saint Peter festival.
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