The metropolitan area ( pt, área metropolitana) is a type of administrative division in

Portugal Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic ( pt, República Portuguesa, links=yes ), is a country whose mainland is located on the Iberian Peninsula of Southwestern Europe, and whose territory also includes the Atlantic archipelagos of th ...

. Since the 2013 local government reform, there are two metropolitan areas: Lisbon and

Porto Porto or Oporto () is the second-largest city in Portugal, the capital of the Porto District, and one of the Iberian Peninsula's major urban areas. Porto city proper, which is the entire municipality of Porto, is small compared to its metropol ...

. The metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Porto were created in 1991.Fernanda Paula Oliveira (2009), A law passed in 2003 supported the creation of more metropolitan areas, under the conditions that they consisted of at least nine

municipalities A municipality is usually a single administrative division having corporate status and powers of self-government or jurisdiction as granted by national and regional laws to which it is subordinate. The term ''municipality'' may also mean the go ...

(''concelho''s) and had at least 350,000 inhabitants. Several metropolitan areas were created under this law (

Algarve The Algarve (, , ; from ) is the southernmost NUTS II region of continental Portugal. It has an area of with 467,495 permanent inhabitants and incorporates 16 municipalities ( ''concelhos'' or ''municípios'' in Portuguese). The region has it ...

, Aveiro,

Coimbra Coimbra (, also , , or ) is a city and a municipality in Portugal. The population of the municipality at the 2011 census was 143,397, in an area of . The fourth-largest urban area in Portugal after Lisbon, Porto, and Braga, it is the largest cit ...

, Minho and

Viseu Viseu () is a city and municipality in the Centro Region of Portugal and the capital of the district of the same name, with a population of 100,000 inhabitants, and center of the Viseu Dão Lafões intermunipical community, with 267,633 inhabi ...

), but a law passed in 2008 abolished these, converting them into intermunicipal communities, whose territories are (roughly) based on the

NUTS III Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics or NUTS (french: Nomenclature des unités territoriales statistiques) is a geocode standard for referencing the subdivisions of countries for statistical purposes. The standard, adopted in 2003 ...

statistical regions. The branches of administration of the metropolitan area are the metropolitan council, the metropolitan executive committee and the strategic board for metropolitan development. The metropolitan council is composed of the presidents of the municipal chambers of the municipalities.

List

The current metropolitan areas are: *

Lisbon metropolitan area The Lisbon Metropolitan Area ( pt, Área Metropolitana de Lisboa; abbreviated as AML) is a metropolitan area in Portugal centered on Lisbon, the capital and largest city of the country. The metropolitan area, covering 18 municipalities is the l ...

(''Área Metropolitana de Lisboa'') * Porto metropolitan area (''Área Metropolitana do Porto'') Densidade populacional por concelho - INE 2001

The following is a list of those with mainland Functional Urban Areas (FUA).

References

Subdivisions of Portugal {{portugal-geo-stub