The Portuguese guitar most diffused today has undergone considerable technical modification in the last century (dimensions, mechanical tuning system, etc.)

In 1582, Friar Phillipe de Caverell visited Lisbon and described its customs; he mentions the Portuguese people’s love for the cittern and other musical instruments.

The angel playing the cittern (c.1680), a sculpture of large dimensions in the Alcobaça Monastery, depicts in detail the direct ancestor of the Portuguese guitar.

[1] In the first half of the eighteenth century, Ribeiro Sanches (1699–1783) had cittern lessons in the town of Guarda, Portugal, as he mentions in a letter from St. Petersburg in 1735.

There was a type of cittern locally modified by German, English, Scottish and Dutch makers and enthusiastically greeted by the new mercantile bourgeoisie of the city of Porto who used it in the domestic context of Hausmusik practice.

Especially from the middle of the 19th century, the Portuguese guitar as a separate instrument developed from the various earlier types of citterns came into fashion by its association with the Lisbon song (fado) accompaniment.

As early as 1905 luthiers were building larger Portuguese guitars (called guitarrão, the plural being guitarrões), seemingly in very small numbers and with limited success.

Recently, the famed luthier Gilberto Grácio has built a guitarrão, which he named a guitolão instead; this instrument which allows for a wider timbral range, on the low and the high end, than a regular Portuguese guitar.

Most players use various materials in place of natural fingernails; these fingerpicks (unhas) were traditionally made of tortoiseshell, but today are usually nylon or plastic.

Then one masters the trinado (a triplet ornament), slides, picking individual strings (instead of both in a course), and intense characteristic vibrato to embellish the melody.

Instead of bridging the gap between a singer's phrases, in Coimbra Fado, the guitarra plays the chordal accompaniment alongside the Acoustic guitar.

[7] Following in Armandinho's footsteps came other guitarists, such as Jaime Santos, Raul Nery, José Nunes, Carlos Gonçalves and Fontes Rocha.

This soloistic tradition has been followed till today by several outstanding musicians such as Pedro Caldeira Cabral, Antonio Chainho, Ricardo Rocha, Paulo Soares, and several other virtuoso guitarists of the younger generation.

[8] Many leading guitarristas in Lisboa—Mario Pacheco, Luis Guerreiro, Jose Manuel Neto, Henrique Leitão, Bruno Chaveiro, Paulo de Castro, Ricardo Martins and Custodio Castelo—now use Oscar Cardoso guitarras, which feature the extraordinary innovation of a cutaway in the back of the guitarra, and a Coimbra string length but with Lisboa tuning.

Rocha has composed highly avant-garde pieces, and the original guitarradas of Pacheco, Castelo and Martins have become common repertoire in Lisboa, as those of Soares have become in Coimbra.

[11] British luthier Stefan Sobell based his early 1970s creation of the modern cittern on a Portuguese guitar he'd bought at a used shop in Leeds some years previously.

[16] British guitarist Steve Howe of the band Yes plays a Portuguese guitar on the songs "I've Seen All Good People" from The Yes Album (1971), "Wonderous Stories" from Going for the One (1977), "Nine Voices (Longwalker)" from The Ladder (1999), "Hour of Need" from Fly from Here (2011), "To Ascend" from Heaven and Earth (2014), and "Sister Sleeping Soul" from The Quest (2021).

Amongst the most notable guitarreiros, or guitar makers, are the Grácio family, Álvaro da Silveira, the Tavares family (now living in Toronto Canada), the Cardoso family—particularly Oscar Cardoso (whose guitarras are the subject of a recent book), António Guerra, Domingos Machado, Fernando Meireles, Antonio Monteiro and Domingos Cerqueira.

Antonio Pinto de Carvalho's APC luthiery is one of the largest in Europe, and produces thousands of traditional Portuguese stringed instruments.