Freguesia - Citizendia

"Freguesia" (pron. IPA: [fɾɛgɨ'ziɐ]) is the Portuguese term for civil parish, a secondary local administrative unit in Portugal and in the former Portuguese Empire, and a former secondary local administrative unit in Macau. Portuguese ( or língua portuguesa) is a Romance language that originated in what is now Galicia (Spain and northern Portugal. A civil parish in the United Kingdom is a unit of local government. Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic (República Portuguesa is a country on the Iberian Peninsula. The Portuguese Empire was the earliest and longest lived of the modern European colonial empires spanning almost six centuries from the capture of Ceuta For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic Macau topics. A "freguesia" is a subdivision of a "concelho" or "município", the Portuguese synonym terms for municipality. Concelho (lit council is an alternative and traditional name for a municipality in Portugal and its former overseas provinces Municipalities of Portugal A municipality is an administrative entity composed of a clearly defined territory and its population and commonly denotes a City, Town, or Village, or Each civil parish takes the name of its seat, which is always the most important (or the single) human agglomeration within its area; in cases where the seat is itself divided into more than one civil parish, each one takes the name of a landmark within its area or of the patron saint from the usually coterminous Catholic parish ("paróquia" in Portuguese). Catholic is an Adjective derived from the Greek adjective '' / 'katholikos' meaning "whole" or "complete".

Each civil parish is administered by a "Junta de Freguesia" (IPA ['ʒũtɐ dɨ fɾɛgɨ'ziɐ]), drawn from a publicly elected four-year-term "Assembleia de Freguesia".

Municipalities in Portugal are usually divided into multiple "freguesias", but seven municipalities are not: Alpiarça, Barrancos, Porto Santo, São Brás de Alportel and São João da Madeira all consist of a single civil parish, and Corvo is a special case of a municipality without civil parishes. Alpiarça ( pron aɫpi'aɾsɐ is a municipality in Portugal with a total area of 95 Barrancos ( pron bɐ'ʁɐ̃kuʃ is a municipality in Portugal with a total area of 168 Porto Santo Island ( pron 'poɾtu 'sɐ̃tu is a Portuguese island 50 km northeast of Madeira Island in the North Atlantic Ocean São Brás de Alportel ( pron. sɐ̃w̃ bɾaʃ dɨ aɫpuɾ'tɛɫ is a municipality in Portugal with a total area of 153 São João da Madeira ( pron sɐ̃w̃ ʒu'ɐ̃w̃ dɐ mɐ'dɐjɾɐ is a municipality in northwestern Portugal. Barcelos is the municipality with the most civil parishes: 89. Barcelos ( pron bɐɾ'sɛluʃ is a municipality located in the district of Braga, in the north of Portugal.

According to the Portuguese Statistics Bureau, there were 4,261 freguesias in Portugal as of 2006. The Instituto Nacional de Estatística is the National Statistical Institute of Portugal. Year 2006 ( MMVI) was a Common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar.

See also