Portugal is a long country with a varied terrain, and a cultural history at times dominated by Spain with influences from Italy, the Low Countries and English trade and military support. As Lusitania to the Romans and an adjunct of Islamic Spain and North Africa, Portugal was created by reconquest from the Christian north by a dynasty that established its independence until adopted through inheritance by Philip 11 of Hapsburg Spain. Reestablished under the Braganzas in the mid 17th. century, Portugal enjoyed the silver from Brazil, the wealth of the spice trade, and the development of the Douro wine trade with England, despite the devastations of earthquake, the Peninsular and civil wars through much of the 18th. and 19th. centuries.
The architectural and artistic legacy of these developments was often enormously spectacular and colourful and at other periods quite plain and domestic in scale. This is apparent in church, palace and civic buildings, their tiled and painted decoration, formally tiled and landscaped gardens and parks, and their adaptation to an Atlantic seaboard but a Mediterranean climate at home and abroad from Madeira to Macao.