11 Traditional Portuguese Dances

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Portugal has a huge variety of traditions and customs in a small space. This has meant that, over the centuries, each region or each small town or city has developed different traditions from those of its closest neighbours. Popular dances are some of the most original and authentic Portuguese traditions.

They represent various aspects of the daily life of the Portuguese people, from the forms of relationship to Sunday rituals or the clothes used daily at work.

Popular music and the use of typical instruments are also associated with the dances. One instrument stands out and is used in almost all regions and in almost all dances: the accordion.

There is, however, a dance that differs from all the others: the dance of the pauliteiros de Miranda, which has its origins in the ancient rituals of emancipation of young boys and the wars between different clans. Discover 11 traditional Portuguese dances.

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1. Corridinho - Algarve

In the early years of the 20th century, the famous corridinho was born. A curious fact, which many are unaware of, is that this type of music originated in a ballroom dance born in the middle of the 19th century, somewhere in Eastern Europe, and brought to the Algarve by a Spaniard named Lorenzo Alvarez Garcia, who decided to court the young Loulé woman Maria da Conceição, dedicating La Azucena to her – a polka. The corridinho is then born as a procession dance.

The main instrument of the corridinho is the accordion, which arrived in the Algarve region at the end of the 19th century. The new instrument quickly became popular, enriching the local repertoires. Ballroom dances then in vogue – the polkas and mazurkas – began to enter, performed in accordion, in the field dances alongside the old "sarilhos" and circle dances. Musicians invent and reinvent them, and the corridinho is born.

The corridinho was danced with the pairs always holding each other, forming a circle, the girls inside and the boys outside. When turning the wheel, the pairs therefore evolve sideways. At a certain point, «when the music resounds», «the bailho is rebated», that is, the feet hit the ground more vigorously, stopping the circle, to continue immediately afterwards. Further on, the pairs “waltz”, that is, they dance together, turning in the same place, after which the circle again resumes its evolution, always to the right. With some variants of detail, this is how we captured the choreography of the Spanish Extremadura corridiño.

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The Corridiño and the Fandango Oliventivo is a fusion of two very old and bordering songs -from the border between Spain and Portugal "la Raya"-, which is performed by the Group of Choirs and Dances of Valencia de Alcántara Juéllega Extremeña.

* Olivença / Olivenza is a portuguese town in a contested territory nowadays under spanish administration. Most of their citizens are dual citizens and bilingual.

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2. Bailinho da Madeira - Madeira Islands

Almost every portuguese surely has seen the “Bailinho da Madeira” dance or at least, as it is known on the mainland: a group, dressed in the typical costume of the island of flowers, dancing around the typical regional instrument of Madeira: brinquinho - the little toy. It is an instrument composed of a group of seven cloth dolls and regional costume with castanets and ribbons, arranged at the end of a cane of rock and animated by vertical movements in the hand of the bearer, that is, the bailinho as most people know it.

However, there is another one, it is the bailinho that appears in the typical villages of the island, where people sing to the challenge and dance in choreographies invented on the spot. This fun is called a brinco. It is sung and danced by everyone, without any rules or restrictions. There is no need for a costume, as all you need to do is want to enter the circle.

Eduardo Pereira describes the atmosphere in the second volume of the book lhas de Zarco as follows: “to the sound of rajão’s wire guitar or braguinha, the people sing to the challenge in village evenings, sunny days and pilgrimages, improvising poetic events that evoke, their lyricism old courtesies of love and imitate the palatial tensions reproduced in the songbooks and in the tradition”. The motto is given by the player. Then it goes from element to element until it completes the wheel and returns to the starting point. Each motto consists of two quatrain verses. What follows should answer in a way that completes the rhyme and subject.

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3. Pauliteiros de Miranda - Trás-os-Montes

The Pauliteiros de Miranda is a group of eight dancers (four guides and four tops), three musicians and an alternate dancer who performs a folk dance from the lands of Miranda, in Portugal, which simulates a fight with sticks. The dancers perform guided by a bagpipe, which is accompanied by a war box and bass drum, or by a pastoral flute, which is monotubular with three holes and is played with three fingers. There are about fifty sets of different dances and ballets. The pauliteiros also work with castanets made with a razor, with hand-engraved designs.

The dance of the Pauliteiros de Miranda, although well known, even internationally, is of unknown origin. One of the hypotheses is that it appeared in the center of Europe, more precisely in Transylvania, in the second Iron Age, at the time as a dance of swords. Then it spread through Central Europe, Germany, Scandinavia and the British Isles, until reaching the Iberian Peninsula.

Pliny, a Roman historian of the 1st century, already spoke of this type of dance. In the 3rd century, the Latin geographer Strabo says that the Celtiberians installed along the Douro River prepared for combat with warrior dances, where they replaced swords with sticks. Later, and still in the Iberian Peninsula, Romans, Suevi and Visigoths kept these dances in their agrarian fertility festivals. Already in the tenth century, the Catholic Church adopted the dances for the feasts of the saints corresponding to the times of solstice and harvests. The Pauliteiros de Miranda traveled through the villages at the time of religious festivals to collect alms, participating in processions to, at the end, make an exhibition.

Other scholars argue that the origin of the dance of the Pauliteiros de Miranda is in the Pyrrhic dances, that is, military dances, of the Greeks, with the diffusion being made by the Romans.
The costumes also seem to have military inspiration and, according to some scholars, may be successors of the Greco-Roman military attire.

The Pauliteiros de Miranda, who regularly work abroad, were distinguished in Germany with the European Folklore Prize.
Currently, this tradition has the support of the municipalities of the lands of Miranda, which intend to keep the tradition alive, also threatened by folk groups that do not strictly follow the spirit of the Pauliteiros de Miranda.