Same-sex marriage in Portugal
same-sex marriage in Portugal
Same-sex marriage has been legal in Portugal since 5 June 2010. The XVIII Constitutional Government of Portugal under Prime Minister José Sócrates introduced a bill for legalization in December 2009. It was passed by the Assembly of the Republic in February 2010, and was declared legally valid by the Portuguese Constitutional Court in April. On 17 May, President Aníbal Cavaco Silva ratified the law, making Portugal the sixth country in Europe and the eighth in the world, after the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, South Africa, Norway and Sweden, to allow same-sex marriage. The law was published in the Diário da República on 31 May and became effective on 5 June 2010. Polling suggests that a significant majority of Portuguese people support the legal recognition of same-sex marriage.
Portugal has also recognized same-sex de facto unions, providing several of the rights and benefits of marriage, since 2001.
Background
De facto unions
A de facto union (Portuguese: união de facto, pronounced [uˈnjɐ̃w̃ dɨ ˈfaktu]; Mirandese: ounion de fato) provides opposite-sex and same-sex couples with similar rights and benefits as marriage. Same-sex de facto unions were established by Law no. 7/2001 (Lei n.º 7/2001) in 2001.
“Same-sex marriage in Portugal” enters the record as same-sex marriage in Portugal. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Same-sex, marriage and Portugal can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17465. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2010, 2009 and 2001.
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