Witch trials in Portugal

Almost all those executed by the Portuguese Inquisition were Conversos, and those arrested for smaller 'heretical crimes' (among them sorcery) were normally given a mild sentences such as penance, fines and exile from their congregations.

[3] Between 1626 and 1744, the Portuguese Inquisition prosecuted 818 people for sorcery, four of whom were given death sentences but only one famously carried out: in Évora in 1626,[4] when Luís de la Penha was executed.

[6] Victims of these trials were overwhelmingly peasant men and women who earned their living by providing magical remedies for common illnesses within their community.

[7] Portuguese folk magic was deeply ingrained into the fabric of peasant society, spanning centuries of tradition; the majority of such being simple sorcery–magical healing, with a minority practicing malicious spells–maleficium.

[6] In contrast to the earlier European witch hunts fueled by Inquisition superstition, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was the growing intellectual movement in Portugal that triggered the backlash against magical healers who continued to treat the lower classes with unscientific healing methods.

[8] In 1690, the General Council of the Inquisition penned a policy statement against superstitious folk healers and their practices, describing popular healing activities as evil and diabolical, and scientific medicine as the divine power of God.