Portugal, at almost 900 years old, is one of the oldest nations in the world, and with a practically unchanged national borderline with Spain. Portugal encompasses the continental mainland, located in the southwest of Europe (the western part of the Iberian Peninsula), and two archipelagos (Madeira and Azores), located in the Atlantic Ocean. After consolidating its current borders, Portugal engaged in an epic world discovery from the mid XV century, which ended with the forging of a world empire, with colonies in several continents, which lasted until 1975, when Portugal regained a democratic system and soon applied to join what is now known as the European Union (EU) alongside Spain. Both Iberian countries joined the EU in 1986’ (Royo & Manuel, 2003) and soon started to incorporate policy measures which followed mainstream EU development strategies towards a more balanced, harmonious, inclusive, integrated and sustainable EU territory (Royo 2011), Certainly, EU Cohesion Policy has had a crucial role in the overall implementation of these EU development visions (Medeiros 2014, 2017), which included direct aid for urban and regional development, European territorial cooperation (Medeiros 2010, 2020a) and integrated sustainable urban development strategies (SUDS) (Medeiros and van der Zwet 2020a, 2020b).

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2030 Agenda,Urban Policies,Urban Agenda,Portugal