Portela
surname · Latin script
Meaning: small door
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/puɾtɛlɐ/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Portela is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Brazil than in any other country.
- UYUruguay1 in 1.2K(measured from records)
- BRBrazil1 in 2.6K
- PTPortugal≈1 in 3.6K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Brazil (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 193 (measured from records)
- 1 in 1.2K (inferred from the name graph)
80,184 people
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Uruguay
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
small door
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Portela counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BR Brazil | #260 | 80,184 | 1 in 2.6K | 80K | Portela | 169 |
| ES Spain | — | 5,682 | 1 in 8.8K | 5.7K | Portela | 124 |
| CO Colombia | #750 | ≈4,700 est. | ≈1 in 11K | 8 | Portela | 76 |
| AR Argentina | #981 | 3,743 | 1 in 12K | 3.7K | Portela | 62 |
| PT Portugal | #225 | ≈2,900 est. | ≈1 in 3.6K | — | Portela | 95 |
| UY Uruguay | #212 | 2,835 | 1 in 1.2K | 2.8K | Portela | 36 |
80,184 people counted by IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname). Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); the co-datosgov-candidates register; INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public). Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Other recorded senses(measured from records)
Portela is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Galician, a parish of Verea, Ourense, Galicia
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Manuel Portela Valladaresb. 1867ESSpanish politician (1867-1952)
- Manuel Reimóndez Portelab. 1916ESSpanish politician
- César Portelab. 1937ESSpanish architect
- Nelson Pelegrinob. 1960BRnot in their usual nameBrazilian politician
- Carlos Portelab. 1967ESSpanish writer
- Sergio Portelab. 1970ESSpanish sculptor (1970- )
- Teresa Portelab. 1982ESSpanish canoeist
- Juan Portelab. 1984ESSpanish footballer
- Maria Portelab. 1988BRBrazilian judoka
- Rafael Portela FreireESfilm producer
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
How to address them(machine-generated)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 22 sources across 15 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 80K | #330 |
| ES Spain | INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 5.7K | #948 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 5.7K | #948 |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national) | — | 3.7K | — |
| UY Uruguay | INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public) | — | 2.8K | — |
| CO Colombia | Colombia — Función Pública SIGEP II public-servant name corpus (datos.gov.co) | — | 8 | #108 |
Reference works 2
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Portela mean, and where does it come from?
- small door Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- How do you pronounce Portela?
- A machine transcription gives /puɾtɛlɐ/ (IPA) for Portuguese.
- In which country does Portela have the most bearers?
- In Brazil, the national register counted about 80 thousand people named Portela, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled portela.
- Where is Portela most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Portela is densest in Uruguay — about 1 in 1.2 thousand people — even though Brazil holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Portela?
- In Brazil, the national register counted 80,184 people named Portela, about 1 in 2.6 thousand residents.
- How common is Portela compared with other names?
- In Brazil, Portela is the 260th most common surname of 424,864 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Portela?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/portelaThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Portela” — the 260th most common surname in Brazil. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.