History of Escritas.org
Origin
Escritas.org was born on 7 August 1996 under the name asTormentas, hosted at
geocities.com/Paris/6041
— at a time when home internet in Portugal barely existed and Geocities was the main space for independent publishing on the web.
The project was created and has always been maintained by a single person, based in Portugal. The name asTormentas was deliberately chosen: it evokes Os Lusíadas by Camões, the sea as a metaphor for adventure and risk, and the storms of thought that poetry seeks to give form to.
The site began with the author's own poems and an anthology of classic poets of the Portuguese language — at a time when searching for Camões, Pessoa or Florbela in a search engine returned virtually no relevant results. The site also opens to participation from any voice: any author can create a page and publish their own work, free of charge and without advertising. No costs, no intermediaries, no editorial conditions — a space open to established poets and to those writing for the first time.
Timeline
1996 — Foundation
Launched on 7 August 1996 at geocities.com/Paris/6041.
The Geocities Paris neighbourhood had only been created a year before, in July 1995, and the address number 6041 attests to the early timing of the registration.
To understand what this moment meant: Sapo, the first major Portuguese portal, had just launched, and the overwhelming majority of Portuguese people had never accessed the internet.
Creating a poetry website in that context was an act that was simultaneously pioneering and almost implausible — the Portuguese-language web was then almost non-existent,
and the idea that classical Portuguese poetry could have an online presence was far from the horizon of any cultural institution.
1999 — First documentary archive
The Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive captured the site for the first time in August 1999, constituting today the oldest publicly accessible documentary evidence: August 1999 archive.
2001 — Own domain
The project migrated from Geocities to its own domain, becoming accessible at
astormentas.com.
The content and mission remained the same; the own domain represented the consolidation of the project as a stable and independent presence on the web.
2009 — Rebranding to escritas.org
The site adopted the name and domain escritas.org, more institutional and broad in scope.
This change coincided with a significant expansion: the project moved to three languages (Portuguese, Spanish and English) and began including authors and poets from across the Portuguese-speaking world and the Hispanic world.
The same year also marked the closure of Geocities by Yahoo!, which permanently deleted millions of web pages from the 1990s — the project's history was thus preserved by the Wayback Machine as one of the rare survivors of that era.
2009–present — Continuous expansion
Content grew systematically over the following years, with the addition of biographies, quotations, community authors and multimedia content.
The project today
Escritas.org is currently one of the largest poetry portals in Portuguese and Spanish on the internet, with:
- ✍️ 6,400 authors with biographical pages
- 📜 24,000 poems in Portuguese
- 📜 8,000 poems in Spanish
- 📜 8,000 poems in English
- 💬 70,000 quotations
- 🧑🤝🧑 4,000 community authors with their own texts
- 👥 120,000 monthly visitors
The project retains its independent, non-profit character, managed by a single person since its founding nearly 30 years ago.
Historical context
Escritas.org / asTormentas is, as far as it is possible to document, the oldest Portuguese-language poetry site originating from Portugal still in operation,
and one of the two oldest Portuguese-language poetry sites in the world — the other being the Brazilian Jornal de Poesia
(jornaldepoesia.jor.br),
founded in May 1996, just three months earlier.
Both projects were born of the same realisation: in 1996, poetry in the Portuguese language was virtually invisible on the internet. Searching for Camões, Pessoa or Castro Alves in a search engine returned no results. It was that absence which motivated, independently and almost simultaneously, the creation of the two projects that would become the pillars of Portuguese-language poetry online.
Last updated: April 2026