ABSTRACT
The history of the Bank of Portugal has developed ‘back to front’, that is, the further back, the clearer the picture; the closer to us, the dimmer it becomes. As a result of the way in which research on the subject has developed, we know a good deal about its foundation and its early decades up to the First World War, a good deal less about the inter-war period, and, characteristically, very little about the last fifty years. For this reason, the following paper, which is intended simply to introduce the history of this institution, concentrates on roughly the first century of the Bank of Portugal’s existence only.
