The 1941 cyclone: the February storm that wrecked Portugal’s coast and forests

In the middle of the morning of 15 February 1941, José Rosa, aged 11, was minding a pot of salt-cod stew for the crew of the fishing boat Santa Rita. He was in the boat's store by the Arco dos Pintos, on the seafront at Sesimbra, a fishing town south of Lisbon. The night had been rough and a big storm was expected, so he was not alarmed as the sea grew wilder, until a wave came through the half-open door and swept the room.1 source1 source

He held on to the posts of the bunks and was not carried off. When he climbed the stairs to the street, the whole waterfront was wrecked. Waves as high as the fortress were breaking over the sea wall and dragging out the boats that the fishermen had hauled up into the streets for safety. Seventy years later he still remembered one wave lifting a boat into the air and breaking it in two.1 source1 source

At the eastern end of the beach, Joaquim Silva, known as Canário, was 15. At lunchtime his father, a fireman, burst in shouting at him to get out, grabbed him and pulled him up the slope behind their house. Within minutes the sea had taken the house, and the family had nothing left but the clothes they were wearing.1 source1 source

The sea attacked Sesimbra for most of the day. By evening 309 boats had been destroyed, four people were dead in the town and a woman had been killed at Quinta do Conde. The next morning the waves had scoured so much sand from under the Fortaleza de Santiago that a man could stand upright beneath it, among the wooden piles it was built on.1 source1 source

What hit Sesimbra hit the whole country that afternoon. In a few hours a storm with no name, remembered simply as o ciclone, the cyclone, blew roofs and chimneys off houses from the Algarve to the Minho, flattened forests, sank boats along the coast and cut Lisbon's telegraph and telephone lines to the rest of Portugal.2 sources2 sources

In 1941 Portugal was a dictatorship. António de Oliveira Salazar, the President of the Council of Ministers, had drafted the constitution of 1933 that founded the Estado Novo, or New State, a one-party regime in which free speech, assembly and association were left to special laws and in practice restricted. Newspapers were read by censors before they could be printed.2 sources2 sources

The 1940 census counted 7,722,152 people. There was about one car for every 149 inhabitants, 54,700 in all. The electricity grid was small, and the storm damaged it badly; a national electrification policy only began in 1944.1 source1 source

Weather observations came from the stations of the state meteorological service, then part of the Ministry of Economy, and from university observatories such as the Instituto Geofísico in Coimbra. Synoptic information, the reports from ships and distant stations that forecasters plot on their charts, was scarce, and the storm arrived without proper warning.3 sources3 sources

The set-up began far to the north. On 13 February a huge low-pressure system lay a thousand kilometres south of Iceland, covering much of the north-east Atlantic. By midday on the 14th its centre, at about 980 hPa, was off Ireland, and a jet stream blowing at 230 to 240 km/h high above the Azores ran along its southern flank, where polar air met air from the tropics.2 sources2 sources

Along that boundary a new depression formed. Reanalysis charts, rebuilt in recent decades from the old observations, show a small secondary centre of about 990 hPa between the Azores and Portugal at midnight on 14–15 February. Then it deepened very fast: 35 hPa in the 24 hours to midday on the 15th, as it raced east towards the coast at around 90 km/h.2 sources2 sources

The barometer at Coimbra recorded the fall. At 3 pm on 14 February it read 987.0 hPa; at 3 pm on the 15th, 938.5 hPa, a drop of 48.5 hPa in a day. These are station-level readings, not corrected to sea level. IPMA, the Portuguese weather service, cites the fall as the mark of an explosive storm.1 source1 source

Rain was not the main problem. IPMA's note mentions heavy rain, but the totals that Nunes, Pinho and Ganho give for the day are modest, from 7.8 mm in Coimbra to 16.5 mm in Lisbon. The damage came from the wind, which peaked as a very active cold front swept across the country after midday, and from the sea, which the wind and the low pressure piled up against the coast.1 source1 source

Nobody knows exactly. The anemometers of 1941 were not calibrated or sited to modern standards, and at least one broke. At the Serra do Pilar weather station, on the hill above the Douro opposite Porto, the instrument failed during the storm. The figures for its last reading differ.3 sources3 sources

The broken trees give another measure. In the worst-hit places up to a fifth of mature trees were snapped or uprooted. Robert Muir-Wood of RMS, a firm that models natural catastrophes for insurers, reconstructed the storm in 2011. In the worst of the great European windstorms of recent decades, losses of about a quarter of mature trees went with gusts of 150 to 170 km/h, so he took 1941's damage as a sign of winds approaching that range. The worst damage, and so the strongest winds, lay between Lisbon and Porto.1 source1 source

Low pressure lifts the sea: in theory each hectopascal less raises it by about a centimetre, and strong onshore winds pile more water against the coast. Together they produce a storm surge. On 15 February it ran up the Tagus estuary with south-westerly gales driving waves behind it. Water in the port of Lisbon was reported a metre higher than usual.2 sources2 sources

Along Lisbon's riverfront the sea wall was destroyed from Alcântara to the Tower of Belém. More than 150 boats sank in the estuary near the city. At the Cabo Ruivo seaplane base, by Muir-Wood's account, a plane sank and the English airport manager drowned. Downriver at Cascais the waves broke into the lower town and destroyed a sea wall protecting the casino.2 sources2 sources

The worst came upriver. At Alhandra, a riverside town in the municipality of Vila Franca de Xira, the water rose more than a metre inside the houses. Waves smashed the front row of houses and threw the wreckage into the houses behind. More than 100 people got away at the height of the storm, but 25 drowned. It was said that some hesitated to leave their homes and others tried to cross the flood at the wrong moment.2 sources2 sources

Eight people drowned in the surge at Setúbal, and salt works along the Tagus were destroyed. The Navy's historical archive holds damage reports from Almada, Setúbal and Sines, where ports, boats and the fishing communities that depended on them were hit hard.2 sources2 sources

On the Algarve coast, the sandy barrier islands of the Ria Formosa took the full force of the waves. According to the local historian Lynne Booker, every house on the Praia de Faro and in the fishing village of Culatra was destroyed, and east of Tavira the sea cut a new inlet through the dunes. Joana Gaspar de Freitas and João Alveirinho Dias, who studied the storm's effects on the coast, describe how the surge favoured overwash, the sea washing right over the shore.2 sources2 sources

Salt spray from the breaking waves was carried up to 40 kilometres inland and scorched the vegetation, as at Grândola. In the mountains the storm brought a blizzard. Villages in the Serra da Estrela were cut off by drifts for three days.1 source1 source

Inland, the wind took roofs. Tiles flew off houses across the country, chimneys fell by the hundred, and factories, warehouses, barracks and aircraft hangars were badly damaged. A cement works at Maceira, near Leiria, and a factory in Guimarães were destroyed. At Malveira, north of Lisbon, the wind blew lorries off a railway line.1 source1 source

In Lisbon the fire brigade logged about 1,000 calls, and some 450 chimneys came down. Schools were damaged, and 300 large cypresses fell in the Prazeres cemetery and hundreds of trees in the Botanical Garden. At the Imprensa Nacional, the state printing works, the wind lifted part of the roof over the type workshops on to the power station. The printers kept working until a neighbour's chimney fell on the electrical switchboard.2 sources2 sources

In Coimbra the university hospital was badly damaged. The city's parks were stripped: many trees fell in the Mata do Choupal, the riverside wood, and in the Parque de Santa Cruz. Across the municipality's parishes about 230,000 trees were damaged, mostly maritime pines, followed by olive trees, which many families depended on.1 source1 source

There was no national survey of fallen trees. The figures that survive are local ones, collected by the newspapers and by parish councils, and they are large. Muir-Wood estimated that tens of millions of trees fell across Portugal, perhaps 2 to 3 per cent of the total at the time. On 20 February the Diário de Notícias led with the incalculable damage to the nation’s trees.2 sources2 sources

In the Pinhal de Leiria, the state pine forest by Marinha Grande, so much timber came down at once that it could not all be used. Much of it ended up as fuel for the furnaces of the glass factories of Marinha Grande. In Barcelos, in the north, the local weekly mourned the long trunks lying across the pinewoods: thousands of tonnes of timber that would lie idle unless something was done to use it.2 sources2 sources

Fallen trees blocked roads and railways for days. Alcoentre, in the Ribatejo, was cut off for three days by eucalyptus trunks across the roads. Two people died when trains collided at Lamarosa, near Coimbra, and three in an accident caused by a fallen tree on the Minho line between Travagem and Leandro. More than 100 km of telegraph line came down.2 sources2 sources

There is no official death toll. The newspapers of the following days reported deaths town by town, and historians have added them up since. The Coimbra geographers Adélia Nunes and Nuno Ganho and the local historian João Pinho, writing in 2012, found more than a hundred, with an unknown number injured. Many drowned in the riverside towns of the Tagus estuary and at Sesimbra.1 source1 source

Other counts run higher. Muir-Wood found at least 130 deaths across the Iberian peninsula, including 20 at Zumaia in Spain, where three carriages of an electric train were blown off a viaduct over the River Urola. In Portugal, by his count, falling chimneys killed 32 people and falling trees 15. At least ten died of exposure after being caught by the blizzard while walking between mountain villages.1 source1 source

Accounts of Lisbon differ most. The press tally and Muir-Wood both give about 20 dead in the capital, killed by falling trees, chimneys, tiles and other debris. Lynne Booker, writing in the Portugal Resident, says 78 were reported dead in Lisbon alone. Muir-Wood argued that the timing made things worse: the storm struck on a Saturday afternoon with little warning, when many people were out of doors, and casualties in daytime storms typically run five to six times higher than at night.3 sources3 sources

With the telegraph down, news reached Lisbon slowly. The capital's papers, O Século and the Diário de Notícias, and the Jornal de Notícias in Porto filled their pages for days with the effects of the storm: the dead, the trees, the roads blocked, the villages cut off, the roofs gone, the power and telephone lines down. Some districts only got their telegraph links back on 20 February.2 sources2 sources

Newspapers then went to the censors before publication. The regional weekly Notícias de Barcelos printed the line “Este número foi visado pela Comissão de Censura”, this issue was seen by the Censorship Commission, in its issue of 27 February. The same issue carried an article on the felled pinewoods and a wire report from London.1 source1 source

The Times went on to praise the fire brigades, sailors, soldiers and civilians who had saved lives at the risk of their own, and remarked that Londoners now knew, unhappily, the suffering caused by the sight of demolished buildings. In Lisbon, workshop staff at the state printing works were called in on Sunday 16 February for urgent repairs, and others came in voluntarily. The Diário do Governo, the official gazette, came out on Monday morning.2 sources2 sources

The damage was put at about 1 million contos, a conto being 1,000 escudos. Estimates for Lisbon alone exceeded 200,000 contos, with 80,000 for Madeira, 30,000 for the Algarve and 25,000 each for the Porto area and the towns of the Tagus estuary. In its monthly bulletin, the meteorological service wrote of enormous losses, some irreparable, that seriously damaged the national economy.3 sources3 sources

The government answered with price controls and a relief inquiry. On 20 February the Ministry of Economy ordered that the prices of tiles, glass, windows and cement go back to their levels before the storm. A national commission for aid to the victims of the cyclone, under the Ministry of the Interior, asked local authorities, priests and private people across the country to list families who had lost their breadwinner, their only house or the boats and nets they lived by.2 sources2 sources

Coimbra's returns survive in the municipal historical archive. They value private losses in the municipality at more than 5,600 contos, most of it in trees. The Coimbra list set the sum to be claimed for each damaged tree: 80 escudos for an olive, 40 for a walnut, 20 for a eucalyptus and 7 for a pine.1 source1 source

In a note on the storm's 76th anniversary in 2017, IPMA described a cyclone that swept the country very violently and classified its growth as explosive cyclogenesis. Muir-Wood ranked it among the five most severe windstorms in Europe in the twentieth century.3 sources3 sources

Direct comparison with later storms is hard, because instruments and their siting have changed. When storm Kristin crossed central Portugal on 28 January 2026, the highest gust in IPMA's own network was 156.2 km/h at Leiria, and a station at the Monte Real air base, outside that network, recorded 175.9 km/h. Several stations stopped transmitting during the storm, so the record of that night is incomplete too.2 sources2 sources

Nunes, Pinho and Ganho point to the country such a storm would hit today, with far more people, homes and cars in its path. Newer buildings are sturdier, but tall blocks and light, wide modern materials catch more wind.1 source1 source

Freitas and Dias concluded in 2013 that a storm like 1941 would do even more damage at Sesimbra and in the Ria Formosa today: urbanisation is much higher, and both are as vulnerable as they were then, or more so. They also wrote that the people living on the shore have no memory of the risk, and that recalling events like 1941 is one way to prepare them for the next one.1 source1 source

Sesimbra drew its own lesson. The storm put the working conditions of its fishermen on the agenda, and at the end of the 1940s work finally began on the sheltered harbour the town had lacked in 1941.1 source1 source