Lisbon's Portela airport opened in October 1942, in the middle of World War II, and immediately became one of the strangest crossroads in aviation. Because Portugal remained neutral, airlines from both the Allied and Axis powers used the field side by side. The surrounding city teemed with refugees, diplomats and spies, a real-world Casablanca. TAP Air Portugal was founded in 1945 and grew up at Portela, which expanded steadily through the postwar decades even as the city enveloped it.
Renamed Humberto Delgado Airport in 2016 after the opposition general murdered by the Salazar dictatorship, the airport added Terminal 2 in 2007 and rode Lisbon's tourism explosion to chronic saturation, with its constrained runways and city-locked site leaving no room to grow.
TAP turned it into Europe's specialist hub for Brazil and a bridge to Africa, while low-cost carriers packed in leisure traffic. After decades of political indecision over a replacement, the Portuguese government decided in 2024 to build an entirely new airport at Alcochete, across the Tagus, to be named after the poet Luis de Camoes, though Humberto Delgado will carry Lisbon's traffic for years to come.