Portugal remains majority Catholic, around 80 to 85 percent by most estimates including Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, though religious practice has declined among younger generations and a religiously unaffiliated minority has grown steadily. Portugal's Reconquista, completed earlier than Spain's with the Christian capture of the Algarve's last Muslim strongholds by 1249, ended over five centuries of Muslim Moorish rule that had left lasting architectural and cultural influence, particularly in the south. Fatima, a small town where three shepherd children reported Marian apparitions in 1917 during the First World War, became one of the Catholic world's most significant pilgrimage sites following the Church's eventual approval of the apparitions, drawing millions of pilgrims annually and gaining particular international attention after Pope John Paul II credited the Fatima intercession with his survival of a 1981 assassination attempt.
Portugal expelled its Jewish population in 1497 under pressure from Spain, shortly after Spain's own 1492 expulsion, though many Portuguese Jews were forced to convert rather than leave outright, creating a lasting converso and crypto-Jewish presence, some communities of which, notably in Belmonte, preserved secret Jewish practice for centuries before reconnecting openly with world Jewry in the twentieth century.