Why the Portuguese hate the Spanish
Hey everyone. You must all be wondering why the title of this post is so specific and has a very strong word - hate - in it. Well, this post is just about the cultural differences and the rivalry that my country has with Spain and how it makes us feel.
All in all, we love Spain. Portuguese people love going to Spain for holidays and we really enjoy pretending we speak spanish (Did you know we have our own version of Spanish you know? It’s called Portunhol!) Whilst we love going there for holidays, we absolutely cannot stand it (99% of the time) when spanish people come over to our country.
We love the way they bring money to our country and try to help our economy by bringing their whole families for holidays, but it gets a bit ridiculous whenever we go over to Spain. It is all fun and games until the moment that we try to go to a restaurant (or anywhere really) and they pretend they cannot understand what we are saying.
My country prides itself on being very polyglot, it means we speak a lot of languages, and whenever we don’t know the language we try our best to understand it. As our language is quite difficult to learn, we have a lot of sounds and accents that are similar to Spanish. The same word could sound basically the same in both languages but with a slight difference and whenever we go over to our Spanish neighbours and say it they pretend that they don’t know what it means. For example, water is said pretty much the same way in both languages but the spanish pretend they don’t know what we are on about when we ask for “agua”.
Another reason why the spanish are hated in Portugal, is because of the rest of the world really. Most of the time, if you ask someone from overseas if they know where Portugal is, they will point to Spain and say we are just a province of Spain. As you can imagine, this hurts our pride deeply and we are left with no choice but to hate the spanish as we don’t want to be them. We are our own nation, full of glory and completely separate from Spain. (Although, back in the Monarchy days, our country was taken over by King Felipe, his son and even his grandson ruled Portugal until we finally got our country back). Maybe that is why we also don’t really like the Spanish...
Overall, we have no real issue with the Spanish, we would just like them to try to understand us and to point out to people that the Portuguese are very much not a part of Spain.
That said, the Portuguese love speaking our Portunhol, we love pretending we know a lot of spanish and we often joke about in spanish.
For me, working at the airport for quite a while, I mostly refuse to speak Spanish to customers. I don’t know their language enough (I never actually learnt it in school for example) to massacre it and leave the Spanish even more confused than they already were. But on rare occasions, I actually try. I have recently finished watching season 2 of Elite on Netflix and, as per usual, I was left with the sense of Spanish that makes me think I actually know the language. Maybe that is why I actually tried to help a customer in Spanish.
This woman seemed to understand me just about enough. As always, I seemed to lack certain words but when she said them to me I understood them. It made sense what she was saying, and I actually tried very hard to help her out and put on as much of an accent as I could gather. I know it was crap, but it was the best I could do.
Maybe I should actually try to learn Spanish for good.
Señora si está leyendo esta publicación... Perdóname por mi español.
Honestly, we don’t hate the Spanish. Not at all. We just wish we were understood and that they tried a little bit more. We love being their neighbours, but sometimes we just want to be recognised for what we do and for our territory.
Obrigada | Gracias | Thank you for reading.
Sofia xxx
All in all, we love Spain. Portuguese people love going to Spain for holidays and we really enjoy pretending we speak spanish (Did you know we have our own version of Spanish you know? It’s called Portunhol!) Whilst we love going there for holidays, we absolutely cannot stand it (99% of the time) when spanish people come over to our country.
We love the way they bring money to our country and try to help our economy by bringing their whole families for holidays, but it gets a bit ridiculous whenever we go over to Spain. It is all fun and games until the moment that we try to go to a restaurant (or anywhere really) and they pretend they cannot understand what we are saying.My country prides itself on being very polyglot, it means we speak a lot of languages, and whenever we don’t know the language we try our best to understand it. As our language is quite difficult to learn, we have a lot of sounds and accents that are similar to Spanish. The same word could sound basically the same in both languages but with a slight difference and whenever we go over to our Spanish neighbours and say it they pretend that they don’t know what it means. For example, water is said pretty much the same way in both languages but the spanish pretend they don’t know what we are on about when we ask for “agua”.
Another reason why the spanish are hated in Portugal, is because of the rest of the world really. Most of the time, if you ask someone from overseas if they know where Portugal is, they will point to Spain and say we are just a province of Spain. As you can imagine, this hurts our pride deeply and we are left with no choice but to hate the spanish as we don’t want to be them. We are our own nation, full of glory and completely separate from Spain. (Although, back in the Monarchy days, our country was taken over by King Felipe, his son and even his grandson ruled Portugal until we finally got our country back). Maybe that is why we also don’t really like the Spanish...
Overall, we have no real issue with the Spanish, we would just like them to try to understand us and to point out to people that the Portuguese are very much not a part of Spain.
That said, the Portuguese love speaking our Portunhol, we love pretending we know a lot of spanish and we often joke about in spanish.
For me, working at the airport for quite a while, I mostly refuse to speak Spanish to customers. I don’t know their language enough (I never actually learnt it in school for example) to massacre it and leave the Spanish even more confused than they already were. But on rare occasions, I actually try. I have recently finished watching season 2 of Elite on Netflix and, as per usual, I was left with the sense of Spanish that makes me think I actually know the language. Maybe that is why I actually tried to help a customer in Spanish.
This woman seemed to understand me just about enough. As always, I seemed to lack certain words but when she said them to me I understood them. It made sense what she was saying, and I actually tried very hard to help her out and put on as much of an accent as I could gather. I know it was crap, but it was the best I could do.
Maybe I should actually try to learn Spanish for good.
Señora si está leyendo esta publicación... Perdóname por mi español.
Honestly, we don’t hate the Spanish. Not at all. We just wish we were understood and that they tried a little bit more. We love being their neighbours, but sometimes we just want to be recognised for what we do and for our territory.
Obrigada | Gracias | Thank you for reading.
Sofia xxx
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