IWC Portugieser: The Complete History and Comprehensive Guide

IWC is a Swiss watch company, founded by an American, whose history is closely tied with Germany. But one of its most enduringly popular timepiece families is called the Portugieser, and it’s likely that lots of enthusiasts and would-be owners don’t even know why — or that the watch itself preceded that now-familiar name by many decades. What's indisputable is the Portugieser's key role in IWC's history and its impact on watchmaking — from its humble origins as a market-specific experiment to its modern incarnation as a major pillar of IWC's collection.  

1939: Two Portuguese Businessmen Walk Into a Watch Factory…

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Actually, don’t bother, because I’ll be retelling the origin story of the IWC Portugieser anyway, for those who aren’t familiar with it. Like much of the rest of the world, in the throes of the Great Depression and under the gathering storm clouds of a second World War, the Swiss watch industry was facing rough economic times in the 1930s. The International Watch Company, based in Schaffhausen in Switzerland’s German-speaking north, dealt with the challenges in a number of practical ways. One was by making wristwatches that could be worn by military pilots for the aerial combat that was looking increasingly inevitable. (I tell that story in much more detail here.) Another was by expanding its reach to international markets such as Portugal. Thus it came to be that two gentlemen by the name of Antonio Texeira and a Mr. Rodrigues (his first name is apparently lost to history), who ran a wholesale business in Lisbon, visited IWC’s headquarters near the banks of the Rhine and made their pitch. The Portuguese market, they explained, was hungry for not only the type of ornate pocket watches that IWC still specialized in at the time, but also — possibly owing to Portugal’s traditionally seafaring culture — for larger men’s wristwatches that offered the precision of a marine chronometer, a rarity for the era.

Photo: Bonhams

IWC’s watchmakers responded with a now-rare timepiece that didn’t have a name or, initially, even a reference number. It wasn’t even listed in any sales catalogs, perhaps indicating some skepticism about the model’s saleability. The watch was very large for its time, with a three-part case measuring 41.5mm in diameter and 9.5mm thick; at the time, the average size for a men’s watch hovered around 36mm. The large case was most likely born out of necessity, because to achieve the desired chronometer-worthy accuracy, IWC needed to install in the case one of its top-quality pocket watch movements, Caliber 74 (below). For the dial, IWC strayed from its signature Art Deco look and adopted instead the more modernist Bauhaus style which was still in its heyday, primarily in Germany, with Arabic numerals, long, leaf-shaped hands, a railway minute track, and a chronometer-like, dedicated subdial at 6 o’clock for the seconds. The case had a thin, grooved bezel and an extra-large crown. All of these signature elements have, somewhat improbably, survived largely unchanged into the modern era.

The very first of these watches were simply identified by their case style, “Mod. 228.” Shortly thereafter, somebody at IWC gave it the Reference number 325, and it is this designation that is still used to identify the earliest Portugieser models today, as the latter name would not be applied to them until much later. In another bit of historical oddity, even though they were designed on special request for Portuguese customers, the first Ref. 325 watches were delivered not to Portugal but to Ukraine; records reveal that the first delivery was made to a wholesaler named L. Schwarz in Odessa on February 22, 1939. The first deliveries to Portugal didn’t occur until February 1942, to a wholesaler named Pacheco. This delay can most likely be explained as a consequence of a continent fragmented by World War II: landlocked, neutral Switzerland often had its supply lines blocked, and connections to points west of Nazi Germany and occupied France, like those to similarly neutral Portugal, were exceedingly difficult. Up until 1946, the majority of the watches were destined for Eastern European countries like Slovakia. And there weren’t that many of them in the first place: IWC records show that only 250 of them sold from their debut in 1939 to 1945. This is a reason why IWC’s first generation of Ref. 325 (let’s call them “pre-Portugieser”) models are so rare and collectible today.

Photo: Antiquorum

The bulk of IWC’s Ref. 325 watches finally made it to their original intended customers in Portugal in the 1950s. These models, also made in relatively minuscule quantities, are recognizable for their adoption of a Portuguese customs marking on their casebacks. The original Caliber 74 gave way to the Caliber 98, forerunner of the modern 9800 caliber family and intended originally for hunter-style pocket watch cases. Having never really found worldwide success — they were just too big for most wearers back then, apparently — the models gradually faded from production in the 1960s and ‘70s, and a backlog of pre-ordered Model 228 cases began gathering dust on the inventory shelves. 

Photo: Matthew Bain

The Portugieser’s next act — albeit a short one — kicked off in 1973. The Swiss retailer Golay Fils & Stahl expressed interest in a revival of the Ref. 325 and IWC put the watch back into production, this time with an updated movement, Caliber 982, an evolution of Caliber 98, which added shock-absorption to its mechanical repertoire. This third generation of the proto-Portugieser was essentially strangled in its crib by the onslaught of the Quartz Crisis: Golay cancelled its order, and only a handful were actually made, most of which made it to IWC’s retailer in Frankfurt, Germany. Known as the “German Editions,” some of these 325 models are recognizable for their very non-Bauhaus “Louis XIV” handset. And this would be the last anyone would see of any version of IWC’s “pocket chronometer for the wrist” for decades. 

1993: Everything Big is Big Again

Fast-forward now to 1993, IWC’s 125th anniversary year — when the widespread consumer appetite for large wristwatches, which had failed to ever really materialize during the original production run of the 325 model, was finally ramping up. The company had already started revving its nearly forgotten WWII-era Pilot’s Watches as modern-day luxury objects, and the Portugieser, a dressier timepiece from the same era, appeared ripe for a comeback as well. According to legendary IWC watchmaker Kurt Klaus — inventor of the game-changing Da Vinci Perpetual Calendar of a few years prior — the idea to bring it back came when he spied a vintage model on the wrist of a visitor to the factory.

Photo: Bonhams

The brand approached it tentatively at first, releasing a single limited-edition model, the Jubilee Portuguese, naming it in homage to the nationality of its original intended customers for the first time. The watch was a largely faithful replica of the 1939 model, 42mm in diameter in steel, with the same essentially bezel-less design and a dial with leaf-shaped hands, a 6 o’clock seconds subdial, and thin Arabic hour numerals; in place of the railway minute track, IWC applied a discreetly elegant track of tiny pearled markers. The front crystal was even made of period-appropriate plexiglas rather than modern sapphire. The caseback, however, was not solid like its ancestor’s but included an exhibition caseback, a feature that was just starting to come into vogue for mechanical watches. The movement was an updated version of the same pocket watch Caliber 982 that had been in the midcentury models, but now it was in full view for the wearer — including the special engravings that commemorated IWC’s anniversary. All 1,000 pieces of the Jubilee Portuguese (Ref. 5441) sold out, signaling that a full-blown revival of the Portuguese (“Portugieser” in the German parlance of IWC’s native Schaffhausen) was soon at hand.

The Portuguese would expand into a sizeable product family in the ensuing years, and the growth really kicked into high gear when IWC became part of the Richemont Group in 2000, joining a Murderer’s Row of heritage watchmakers poised to become major players in the dawning 21st Century renaissance of luxury mechanical watches after decades of quartz dominance. Big cases, like the Portuguese’s, and bigger complications were becoming all the rage, and IWC shot for the moon with the latter in 1995 with the release of 550 editions of a Portuguese Minute Repeater. A more practical complication followed in 1998: the first Portuguese Rattrapante Chronograph, the hallowed Ref. 3712 (above), which became one of IWC’s most iconic and successful watches of all time. Its Valjoux 7750 movement, heavily modified by revered watch designer Richard Habring, was also a landmark for watchmaking in general, as the  first mass-produced movement with a split-seconds (i.e. “rattrapante”) function.

The dawn of the new millennium marked another milestone for IWC and the Portuguese family: the debut of a new in-house movement — and a new look — for the base Portuguese Automatic model. IWC’s manufacture Caliber 5000 featured the brand’s ultra-efficient Pellaton self-winding system and, even more notably, an astounding week-long power reserve. The latter, from that point forward, has become part of the dial aesthetic, which indicates the seven days of running autonomy via an analog hand in a 3 o’clock subdial positioned directly across from the 9 o’clock subdial for the running seconds. The first Portuguese perpetual calendar, equipped with a version of the complicated movement module that Kurt Klaus developed for the original Da Vinci Perpetual Calendar, followed in 2003. That watch opened up the floodgates for a wave of other ultra-high-complication iterations of the watch in years to come: the Portuguese Tourbillon Mystère in 2004; the Portuguese Grande Complication in 2010; the Portuguese Sidérale Scafusia in 2011; and the Portugieser Constant-Force Tourbillon in IWC’s 150th anniversary year of 2018. Each of these horological masterpieces is deserving of (and, in most cases, has received) more in-depth coverage than space allows for here, and they all set the stage for perhaps the collection’s pinnacle of high horology to date, 2024’s Portugieser Eternal Calendar, explored in more detail later.

2015: An Anniversary Makeover and a “New” Name

Commemorating 75 years since the first Ref. 325 watch rolled off the assembly line, IWC made some important moves to reposition its venerable wrist chronometer within the portfolio in 2015. The English-language name “Portuguese” was officially retired in favor of the German-language “Portugieser,” which was how many international markets were referring to it anyway. As for the collection itself, it received a slew of new references, including a limited edition that re-created one of the very first models from 1939 and an all-new “practical” complication in the first Portugieser Annual Calendar. The inspiration for the former, the Portugieser Hand-Wound Eight Days Edition “75th Anniversary” (above), came from an early watch discovered in a private collection. Its dial featured slim feuille hands, a prominent minute track around the main dial and the small seconds subdial, large Arabic numerals at only the 3, 9, and 12 o’clock markers, and a vintage, cursive “International Watch Company” logo. Its movement was the in-house Caliber 59215, a manual-winding descendant of the original Caliber 5000, which extended the power reserve to an astonishing eight days, or 192 hours.

The Portugieser Annual Calendar (Ref. 5035, above, in its original version with a sunburst midnight blue dial) was the first watch from any IWC collection to offer this complication, and it did so with a noteworthy spin: the triple windows at 12 o’clock display the calendar indications “American style” — i.e., month, date, and day of the week, in that order — rather than the traditional European style in which the date precedes the month: It’s a subtle homage to IWC’s founding, by American watchmaker Florentine Ariosto Jones. Elsewhere on the dial are the parallel subdials derived from the Automatic models, with small seconds at 9 o’clock and an analog power reserve at 3 o’clock — visually trumpeting the presence of another new in-house movement from the 5000 family inside, Caliber 5280, with seven days (168 hours) of energy stored in two barrels.

By 2020, the trend pendulum had swung away from the appetite for bigger, bolder timepieces that had sparked the return of the Portugieser in the first place, and back toward more modesty in watch design. IWC responded not by drastically tinkering with its existing models but by supplementing its Portugieser Automatic family with new models that bring back the 1930s vintage dial — with its simple arrangement of two hands and a 6 o’clock small seconds subdial — in a more understated 40mm case, 2mm smaller than the 42mm cases that had been standard on the Automatics since 2000. That same year, IWC launched the first versions of the Portugieser Chronograph on steel bracelets, in response to another trend, the growing popularity of bracelet-mounted sport-luxury models. 

The most recent revamps and extensions of the IWC Portugieser collection came very recently, in 2024, and they included not only all-new colors, dial and case refinements, and a new precious metal, but also a world-first complication that took the top prize at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève, the watch world’s Oscars. Here’s a look at the current lineup.

Portugieser Automatic 40 and Automatic 42

IWC continues to offer the base Automatic models in two sizes — Automatic 40 and Automatic 42. As of 2024, both versions of the watch have a re-engineered case construction with a more slender profile (12.4mm for the Automatic 40, 13mm for the 42mm model) and double box-glass sapphire crystals over the dials. The dials themselves are noteworthy for their elaborate finishing, with 15 layers of transparent lacquer, and their new striking color options, including Horizon Blue, Obsidian, and Dune. 

The smaller version, the Automatic 40 model launched in 2020, remains the one closest in look and spirit to the original 1939 model, despite being sized for modern tastes. On its dial you’ll find all the basic elements of the Portugieser, including Arabic numeral appliqués, leaf-shaped hands, and a slightly recessed 6 o’clock subdial for the seconds. The watch contains the IWC manufacture Caliber 82200, with a 60-hour power reserve. The Automatic 42 features the bicompax design that debuted on the Caliber 5000 models back in 2000, with seconds at 9 o’clock and power reserve at 3 o’clock; a larger case deserves a longer power reserve, IWC reasoned, so the Automatic 42 is outfitted with the seven-day Caliber 52011. Both movements are on display behind a sapphire back and both include the improved Pellaton winding system, which now uses friction-resistant zirconium oxide ceramic for some key components. 

Portugieser Chronograph

The same new colorways and the same painstakingly lacquer-finished dials can be found on the latest generation of Portugieser Chronographs, which come in white gold, rose gold, and stainless steel and are mounted on the Santoni leather straps that IWC has been using since 2011 (Santoni is a family-owned Italian firm famous for their luxury shoemaking). In the user-friendly configuration that IWC first introduced in 1998, the subdials are arranged so that the counter for elapsed minutes appears at the top, near 12 o’clock, while the running seconds tick away below it at 6 o’clock. The inner flange of the dial is printed with a ¼-second scale to enable easy reading of precise stopped times. The case measures 41mm in diameter and 13.1mm thick, with a solid but minimal water resistance of 30 meters. The movement inside is the in-house automatic Caliber 69355, which uses a classical column-wheel architecture to drive the chronograph functions and carries a power reserve of 46 hours. 

Portugieser Perpetual Calendar 44

IWC introduced its proprietary precious metal alloy, called Armor Gold, in 2020, and the alloy made its dazzling debut in the Portugieser family in 2024. Significantly harder and more wear-resistant than the traditional 5N rose gold that it closely resembles, Armor Gold uses a full 75 percent of pure gold in its composition, with the other 25 percent being an alloy of undisclosed materials. The latest version of the Portugieser Perpetual Calendar contains the in-house Caliber 52615, a descendant of Kurt Klaus’s legendary mechanism from the 1980s, and is offered in 44mm cases, in both Armor Gold and 18k white gold, with the dial colorways described above. The watch’s complex dial displays indications for the date, day, month, and leap year, plus an ultra-precise moon-phase that depicts the moon as seen from both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres and which will deviate from the natural lunar cycle by just one day after 577.5 years. IWC even managed to fit a power-reserve indicator, for the watch’s lengthy seven-day running autonomy, on the same 3 o’clock subdial that hosts the 31-day analog date display. Like the Automatic and Chronograph models, IWC has slimmed down the case, added a highly polished box-shaped sapphire crystal, and applied elaborate finishing to the dial, including the aforementioned layers of lacquer, along with individually hand-mounted appliqués. 

Portugieser Hand-Wound Tourbillon Day & Night

The Portugieser Hand-Wound Tourbillon Day & Night, also clad in the proprietary Armor Gold and housing the manually wound manufacture Caliber 81925, features a new execution of a classical, calendrical complication. The lacquered obsidian dial, with its finely polished finish and gold-plated details, has a large aperture at 6 o’clock offering a view of the flying one-minute tourbillon, which consists of 56 individual parts and weighs only 0.675 grams. Containing the balance wheel and balance lever inside its tiny cage, the tourbillon makes a complete rotation on its axis every 60 seconds.Joining the tourbillon in its own, smaller aperture at 9 o’clock is an ingenious day-night indicator whose primary element is a small, three-dimensional orb with a dark side and a bright side, representing a planet in daytime and nighttime hours, which makes a complete rotation once every 24 hours on its own axis in synchronization with the passing of daytime to nighttime and back again. Because the movement is manually wound, with no rotor to obscure the back view, this orb is visible from both sides, as the caseback affords a view through a sapphire pane. The case is 42.4mm in diameter and 10.8mm thick and fastens to the wrist with a Santoni alligator leather strap. More detail on the model can be found here. 

Portugieser Eternal Calendar

The IWC Portugieser Eternal Calendar, winner of the coveted GPHG “Aiguille d’Or” award for 2024, is undisputedly the horological apogee of the current Portugieser collection, and I give it its due in a much more detailed review here. To boil it down, it is the first timepiece whose calendar, leap years and all, will be precise for 400 years without corrections, and whose moon-phase display will remain accurate for an astonishing 45 million years. The watch’s innovative “400 years gear” is designed to skip automatically over the years 2100, 2200, and 2300 — which would normally appear in the indication as leap years but are actually “common years,” according to the solar calendar — ensuring that the watch’s date won’t require a correction until the year 3999. The watch’s even more “eternal” feature is the moon-phase, equipped with a “reduction gear train,” which can simulate many trillions of moon-phase scenarios occurring in the natural lunar cycle, thus ensuring that the display will deviate from the moon’s actual orbit only once in an astounding 45 million years. All of this cosmic complexity comes delivered in a very handsome and surprisingly compact package, with a 44.5mm case made of platinum and a frosted lacquer dial. Little did Messrs. Texeira and Rodrigues know when they put in their now-famous request in the 1930s that the timepiece that emerged would so elegantly honor the past while still boldly embracing the future.