Latifúndios

   Large farms and landed estates, generally south of the Tagus River. Located mainly but not exclusively in the Alentejo district, southeast of Lisbon, these large, landed estates originated in Roman and then Muslim times and, by the 19th century, were characterized by absentee landowners and vast estates of thousands of acres farmed by landless peasants who provided much of the labor. Concentrated in the wheat-growing Alentejo district, the latifúndio represented a chronic, severe social and economic problem that many successive governments failed to address or to solve. Agrarian reform attempts in the late monarchy, the First Republic, and the Estado Novo failed to deal decisively with the latifúndio problem.

   A mere handful of well-off families, sometimes resident in the towns or in Lisbon, owned most of the land, while most of the work on this land, a crucial food-producing area of Portugal, was performed by poor peasants with little or no access to land ownership. Sporadic forcible occupation of land on a small scale by farm workers occurred during the First Republic, but the authorities soon repressed it. During the Revolution of 25 April 1974, about 1,136,363 hectares (2.5 million acres) of latifúndio were forcibly occupied by farm workers and political supporters, and a program of land ownership redistribution and sharing was initiated. Agrarian reform efforts regarding both minifúndio and latifúndio have continued.

   See also Agriculture; Minifúndios.