The internal border between Portugal and Spain

The internal border between Portugal and Spain is 1,234 km long and nearly eight hundred years old, making it the oldest and the longest in the European Community. Although the border mostly follows many rivers and riverbanks, it is not defined simply and mainly by the terrain, but has been, and is a frontier of a political, historical and cultural nature.

The history of the border registers many conflicts and skirmishes, confrontations in which politics and the military have played an important part, forging a character of mistrust, exclusion and destruction, imposing a belligerent frontier as the dividing line between kingdoms which are blood brothers and brothers in religion but at war in terms of material, everyday aspects where «the other» was seen as a potential or permanent enemy and where mental and psychological boundaries ended up creating a more effective division than physical or geographical barriers. Nevertheless, in La Raya there developed (alongside the political and conflictive border) an osmotic, permeable frontier full of mutual encounters and opportunities. This is the frontier of trade and traditional smuggling, of «cotos mixtos» («shared preserves») and «povos promiscuos» (literally «promiscuous towns», the historical and legal term that defines the localities divided exactly by the border line between Spain and Portugal); it is the frontier of understanding, of cross-border weddings and of tacit alliances.