Introduction

Now comes the third and last national final for me to review this year: Festival da Canção 2025, a three-week competition to determine which song will represent Portugal in Eurovision 2025. Festival da Canção, FdC for short, is one of the oldest Eurovision national finals, having begun in 1964. It’s as big of a deal to the Portuguese as the Sanremo Festival is to the Italians, or Melodifestivalen to the Swedes. I won’t go into the full history of FdC here, but just know that even though it’s a long-running tradition in Portugal, after years of sending songs that no one really cared about, the contest was completely reinvented in 2017, and that’s how FdC as we know it today began.

This national selection consists of two semifinals (February 22, March 1) and a final on March 8. The semifinals consist of ten songs each, then six from each make it to the grand final. This means I have 20 songs in total to review: 19 fully in Portuguese, and just one in English.

I didn’t watch the semifinals live and instead watched them starting on March 2, right after I finished my review of the German national final. I wanted to start watch the final live, but I was so absolutely amazed at the song that won Melodifestivalen that I couldn’t watch FdC right afterwards, plus I had other shit to do. So instead, I started watching the final on a day I was sick, March 11, then finished it on another sick day three days later.