Portuguese South African Portuguese South African Portuguese South Africans () are South Africans of Portuguese ancestry. The Portuguese explored the coasts of South Africa in the late 15th century, and nominally claimed them as their own with the erecting of "padrões" (large stone cross inscribed with the coat of arms of Portugal placed there as part of a land claim). Bartolomeu Dias did so in 1486, and Vasco da Gama recorded a sighting of the Cape of Good Hope in 1497, en route to India. The early 20th century witnessed a trickle of emigrants from Madeira whose numbers greatly increased in the decades
Greater Portugal Greater Portugal Greater Portugal (), also known as Portugalicia (), is a proposed union of the Portuguese-speaking territories including the autonomous region of Galicia, the Eonavian region, the territory of Olivença, and many villages along the Portugal-Spain border that speak any kind of Galician-Portuguese dialect, such as the Fala language. The concept of a Greater Portugal has its origins during the Portuguese Age of Discoveries, when Portuguese navigators and explorers discovered previously uninhabited lands such as the Madeira Islands, Savage Islands, Azores, and several other lands in the Atlantic Ocean. Although the proposal is thought to be a recent political