When I first heard from Tiago asking about guest posts, my first reaction was a pang of jealousy. Tiago, after all, spent some time bouncing around Brazil, and is now living in Cartagena, the heart of the Colombian Caribbean.
After I got his post, however, my reaction was quite another. I am honored to include here his wonderful text about the difference between Spanish and Portuguese, and the surprises and hilarious pitfalls of moving between the two languages. This is a must-read for language lovers and speakers of Spanish and/or Portuguese.
Spanish vs. Portuguese: What’s the Difference?
Many people with some experience with these two languages hold that there are very few differences, and sometimes even go so far as to claim that they are more like different dialects of an underlying Iberian lingua franca than two completely separate tongues (they are, in fact, both in the language group called West Iberian).
This view has its merits, especially when you consider that what we know today as “Spain” is really more of a confederacy of various regions with their own distinct cultures and languages. What we call simply “Spanish” is really Castilian, the particular dialect of the Kingdom of Castile, which over several centuries was the driving force behind the expulsion of the Moors from the peninsula and the unification of the numerous Iberian kingdoms into the Spanish state.
Seen from this point of view, tiny Portugal can seem like just another one of these mini-kingdoms that just happened to not join its neighbors, and its language the local dialect of just another regional outpost of Iberian civilization.
The reasoning behind underestimating the differences between the two languages isn’t limited to history. The modern listener upon first exposure will immediately notice the broad similarities and even sometimes identical words and phrases between them.
Take the following sentences, where the first, bold line in each pair is in Spanish and the second is in Portuguese, taken from Gramática Esencial de Español by Manuel Seco by way of Wikipedia:



