Cool. Btw, do portuguese people speak/understand spanish?

Yeah most of the times. Both languages are pretty similar in phonetics, pronounciation and way of speaking. It isn't hard to switch from one language to the other even in the same sentence.

Yeah, I hear the iberian languages are like the eastern europeon languages in that way.

Indeed, and even in cultural aspects both countries are pretty similar, mostly because historically they steem from the both source (the county of Portucale was part of the Kingdom of Leon which later became the kingdom of Spain three centuries after Portugal became it's own kingdom).

True, although really, "Countries" back then were a much more nebulous thing then they are now with different parts of countries seemingly changing hands all the time.

Then again I believe it was fairly rare I beleive that someone made themselves king like Alfonso did.

That's true too. The three counties of the iberian peninsula back them were made of ficticious demarcations, mostly because the large portion of the iberian peninsula was, back then, conquered by the moors. 

Alfonso not only chased the moors of the entire portucale county, he also did it while facing his mother and step-father who wanted to take back the county and re-annex it to the county of Leon. If only Portugal had followed it's rich history from the 12th to 15th century, today it would have been a very different (and probably better) country...instead it only had shitty decisions since the 1500s.

Is that so?  I must admit my Iberian history from about the 14th century on isn't great.

In NZ it's possibly partially down to the hole in the ozone layer? We have extreme levels of UV radiation here which leads to a higher than usual incidence of skin cancer.

Edit: And of course the US isn't giving Latin-American leaders cancer. People get cancer, coincidinces happen. Also if the CIA was to give cancer to people why on earth would they give cancer to the relative moderates in Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil?

Yeah, some of those very poor decisions were:

- Denying funds for Christopher Columbus when he first came to the Portuguese Kings before he went to the Castille Kingdom

- The Tordesillas treaty in which they let themselves be screwed by the Spanish, which already knew how much land the Americas really had

- The trade treaties with Antwerp and Amsterdam in the early 1600s, which made us dismantle almost all seafaring trading routes with Europe and American territories.

- Letting ourselves be invaded and annexed to Spain without giving a fight, which then costed us our entire navy fleet when Filipe III decided to try and invade England. Of the 139 boats used in that invading armada, 127 were portuguese....and all those 127 sank.

- Spending almost all the gold collected during the discovery era to create treaties with the French, just to have them invade us (Napoleon) and later with the British, just to have them forcefully divide our African territories in the late 1800s. 

These were just some of the primary ones.

Regardless of where the oil went, the bill for the defense of that oil was put on the credit card of U.S. citizens who weren't even born yet.

AND NOT ONE PENNY OF THOSE OIL PROFITS PAID FOR IT!  (Quite the contrary, the oil companies get tax payer subsidies ON TOP OF the military freebie!)