J.K. Rowling taught English in Porto, Portugal, during the early 1990s.
Rowling moved to Porto in 1991 and taught English as a foreign language. She lived in Portugal while developing her personal life and continuing to work on ideas that would eventually become the Harry Potter series.
Her time in Porto is frequently mentioned in biographies because it preceded her move to Scotland and the completion of the first Harry Potter manuscript. She married Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes in 1992, and their daughter Jessica was born in 1993.
Porto is sometimes mistaken for Lisbon, Portugal’s capital, but the two are separate cities. Rowling’s Portuguese period is also distinct from her later writing life in Edinburgh, where she continued shaping the early Harry Potter books.