In which country did J.K. Rowling begin writing Harry Potter?

J.K. Rowling began writing Harry Potter in Portugal.

After working in London, Rowling moved to Porto in 1991 to teach English as a foreign language. She married Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes in 1992, and their daughter Jessica was born in 1993. During this period, Rowling worked on the early Harry Potter manuscript.

She later returned to the United Kingdom and settled in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she continued developing the novel. The story is therefore associated with both Portugal and Scotland, but Portugal is the country where she began writing it. This distinction matters because readers sometimes identify Edinburgh as the place where the project started.

Rowling has described the original idea for Harry Potter arriving during a delayed train journey from Manchester to London in 1990. The characters and plot developed over subsequent years, including during her time in Portugal, before Bloomsbury accepted the manuscript.