Districts and Municipalities of Portugal

How many municipalities and parishes does Portugal have?

Portugal has 308 municipalities: 278 on the mainland, 19 in the Azores and 11 in Madeira. The list is the one in the Directorate-General for the Territory’s official administrative map (CAOP 2025), and it matches INE’s territorial code, which carries the same 308 municipalities with the same four-digit codes.

The number of parishes is 3,259: 3,049 on the mainland (CAOP 2025), 156 in the Azores and 54 in Madeira (the DGT layers for the two regions). Some pages still quote 3,258 or other totals from before the restoration was finished; the sum of the official layers is 3,259.

Why the parish count changed in 2025

• In 2013, Lei n.º 11-A/2013 merged parishes on the mainland, creating the “uniões de freguesias”.
• Lei n.º 39/2021 repealed it and opened a special, simplified and transitional procedure for creating parishes again.
• Lei n.º 25-A/2025, of 13 March, completed that procedure and restored 302 parishes, listed in its annex. The restored parishes have the territory they had before the merger (art. 4).
• The restoration took effect when the bodies elected in the 2025 local elections were installed (art. 14); the merged unions disappeared once the last of the successor parishes was installed. The islands were not touched: no Azorean or Madeiran municipality is in the annex.

You can see the effect in the table above: Águeda, for example, has 15 parishes in CAOP 2025, among them Águeda, Barrô and Borralha, which the 2013 merger had folded into unions.

Regions of Portugal: NUTS II and NUTS III (2024)

“Region” in everyday Portuguese means different things. The official statistical regions are the NUTS, the European nomenclature that INE and Eurostat use. Since 1 January 2024 (Delegated Regulation (EU) 2023/674) Portugal has 3 NUTS I, 9 NUTS II and 26 NUTS III. Until 2023 there were 7 NUTS II: Lisbon was a single metropolitan region, and it is now split in two (Grande Lisboa and Península de Setúbal), while Oeste, Médio Tejo and Lezíria do Tejo, which belonged to Centro and Alentejo, were grouped as the new Oeste e Vale do Tejo. Sertã and Vila de Rei moved from Médio Tejo to Beira Baixa, and Alto Tâmega became Alto Tâmega e Barroso. (Pordata summary ↗)

Codes follow INE’s NUTS 2024 numbering (shown here with the PT prefix). The NUTS III of the Azores and Madeira coincide with the NUTS II.

NUTS regions are not the same as the CCDR areas

The Comissões de Coordenação e Desenvolvimento Regional (CCDR) are the State’s regional bodies on the mainland: Norte, Centro, Lisboa e Vale do Tejo, Alentejo and Algarve. They do not follow the 2024 NUTS II one to one. The Lisboa e Vale do Tejo CCDR, for example, covers three NUTS II (Grande Lisboa, Península de Setúbal and Oeste e Vale do Tejo), according to its own 2025 activity plan. Municipal data, such as the municipality comparator, are published by municipality, so the difference only matters when you use regional programmes or NUTS statistics.

There are no administrative regions

The Constitution lists regiões administrativas among the local authorities of the mainland (art. 236) and says they are created by law and then set up one by one after a referendum (arts. 255 and 256). That has never happened, so the mainland still works with districts (art. 291) and the NUTS regions are statistical, not political, units.

What districts are for today

• They still exist in law. “While the administrative regions are not set up, the district division subsists” (Constitution, art. 291, no. 1).
• They have had no civil government since 2011. Resolution of the Council of Ministers 13/2011 dismissed all civil governors, and Decreto-Lei 114/2011 and Lei Orgânica 1/2011, both of 30 November 2011, moved the civil governments’ powers to other bodies. The 2005 text of the Constitution available from Parliament still mentions the governor in art. 291; the office is what no longer exists in practice.
• They are the electoral circles for parliament. The mainland circles coincide with the districts (Lei Eleitoral, art. 12): 18 circles, plus one each for the Azores and Madeira and two for voters abroad (Europe and the rest of the world), 22 in total, sharing 230 seats (art. 13). Seats per circle are fixed before each election by the Comissão Nacional de Eleições.
• They are an everyday label. Addresses, weather forecasts, courts and statistics tables still sort places by district, which is why this page lists them alongside the NUTS regions.

The old provinces: Minho, Trás-os-Montes, Beira…

Names like Minho, Alentejo or Beira Alta come from the 11 provinces of the 1936 administrative reform: Minho, Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Douro Litoral, Beira Alta, Beira Baixa, Beira Litoral, Estremadura, Ribatejo, Alto Alentejo, Baixo Alentejo and Algarve. They are no longer an administrative division: the Constitution’s list of local authorities (art. 236) has no provinces, only parishes, municipalities and administrative regions. The names survive in everyday speech, in wine and food labels and in NUTS III names such as Alto Minho, Beira Baixa or Terras de Trás-os-Montes. They do not match the districts: Beira Baixa is roughly the Castelo Branco district, but Estremadura and Beira Litoral were split across several. Treat this paragraph as history; there is no current official source to check a municipality against a province.

Largest, smallest and most populous

Next step: data by municipality

Once you know which municipality you are in, the site has the numbers that change from one to the next: house prices per m², average salary, municipal taxes such as IMI and a side-by-side comparator. They use the same 308 municipalities and the same codes as the table above.