In Portugal in the second half of the seventeenth century a population of nearly two million occupied, as it had done since the mid-thirteenth century, an area of 34,000 square miles (55 to the square mile). Portugal's demographic position was thus stronger than that of Spain, whose density of population was only about 31–4 to the square mile (with a total of under six millions), and did not compare badly with that of the United Provinces, whose population was not much larger than that of Portugal. Yet, because of the injuries inflicted by war, there was no increase of population until the end of the century. Lisbon, the capital, had at least 165,000 inhabitants, a figure comparable to that of Amsterdam. Four towns had between 16,000 and 20,000 inhabitants: the university city of Coimbra, the great northern port of Oporto, and Évora, the grain centre of the south. A newcomer to this group was Elvas, the vital stronghold of the War of Independence. There were another thirty towns with more than a thousand houses each, most of them in the south.

The Portuguese Empire stretched from South America to China. In the vast territory of Brazil, which was being mapped by the bandeiras, the population, which had increased rapidly in the first third of the seventeenth century, later suffered seriously from the Dutch wars and the sugar slump and resumed a slow increase only towards the end of the century. The most densely populated areas were the north-east, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, the Amazon basin and the Maranhã. Europeans, Indians and Negroes together totalled half a million, about one-fifth of these being Europeans.