Every summer hundreds of people from around the world descend on Portugal to enrol in language courses at Portuguese universities. Included are secondary school students from Macau, university students from Hong Kong, doctoral candidates from Japan, retirees from Western Europe and Americans of Portuguese heritage wanting to reconnect with their roots.
Take Nobuhiko Tazoe, a PhD candidate in linguistics at the University of Tokyo. He has spent the past year conducting research on the socio-linguistic situation in Macau at the University of Macau. He decided to spend last summer in Portugal to acquire a basic knowledge of Portuguese to facilitate his research on the influence that the Portuguese language has had on the way Cantonese is spoken in the former Portuguese enclave.
'I decided to do a summer course in Portugal because I like the country,' Mr Tazoe said. 'I travelled around the southern part of the country in 2003, and I liked it very much.'
With three sessions running for three consecutive months - July, August and September - the University of Lisbon's summer language programme is by far the largest. The programme at the University of the Algarve - situated in the heart of Portugal's premier tourist destination in the country's South - is popular with linguistically inclined travellers wanting to combine a summer at the beach with language studies.
Other universities offering such programmes include the universities of Porto, Minho, Aveiro, Tras-os-Montes and the Azores, among others. The oldest is offered by the University of Coimbra, which will hold its 84th annual summer Portuguese language programme this year.
Many students taking classes last summer were as upbeat about the extracurricular activities - many of which were organised by the students themselves - as with the classes themselves.
'I went to many cultural events - fado and folklore concerts, theatre and the Festa dos Tabuleiros in Tomar,' said Jarmila Svatosova, a high school teacher of French and German in the Czech Republic. She decided to study Portuguese so that she could read Portuguese literature in the original language.