In 1939 two Portuguese watch importers, Rodrigues and Teixeira, visited IWC in Schaffhausen with a specific request: a wristwatch with pocket-watch accuracy for use by Portuguese merchant-marine officers who needed observatory-grade timekeeping at sea. Standard wristwatch movements of the era could not match pocket-watch chronometers for accuracy, so IWC delivered by casing the Cal. 74 (later Cal. 98), a pocket-watch movement, into a stainless-steel wristwatch case.
The resulting watch was 42mm in diameter, extraordinarily large for 1939 when wristwatches typically measured 30-34mm. The dial was clean and highly legible: Arabic numerals on a minimalist dial, a railway-track minute ring, small seconds at 6 o'clock, leaf-shaped hands, and no date aperture. Production was limited, and the "Reference 325" (often called the "Portuguese") remained a niche product through the 1940s and 1950s, with only a few hundred examples produced across three decades. Original Ref. 325s trade for six-figure sums at auction today.
The watch was revived in 1993 as the Ref. 5441 for IWC's 125th anniversary, this time in a limited series. The revival faithfully reproduced the 1939 silhouette but in a modern 41mm case with a contemporary Cal. 98290 hand-wound movement. The 1993 relaunch was followed in 1995 by the Portuguese Chronograph Ref. 3714, which became the best-selling IWC of the late 1990s and 2000s, and which remains the single most-recognisable Portugieser today, with its Valjoux 7750-based chronograph (later replaced by the in-house Cal. 69355 in 2020).
Today the Portugieser (renamed from "Portuguese" to use the German spelling in 2015) is IWC's haute-horlogerie flagship collection. The line includes the Automatic 40 (three-hand anchor), Chronograph, Perpetual Calendar, Annual Calendar, Tourbillon, and ultra-complicated Sidérale Scafusia references. Case sizes range from 40mm (the Automatic 40, introduced 2020 and sized to contemporary tastes) to 44.2mm for complicated references. Retail starts around USD 8,800 (Automatic 40 steel), runs through USD 15,000 (Chronograph) and USD 35,000+ for Perpetual Calendar, reaching over USD 500,000 for the Portugieser Sidérale Scafusia and grand-complication variants.
