comScore released findings this week from a study of the online habits of Portuguese Internet users. Interestingly, they found that the Portuguese Internet audience grew to nearly 4 Million users in September.

Over 3.8 million people age 15 and older accessed the Internet from a home or work location in Portugal in September, viewing an average 1,843 pages and spending an average 1.9 hours online per person during the month.

"Portugal represents a dynamic and growing Internet market in Europe with users continuing to be more active and engaged online," said Mike Read, comScore managing director for Europe and Ibero America. "The average Internet user in Portugal is spending more time online engaging in different behaviors such as reading news and articles, search, conducting personal financial transactions and social networking. As these behaviors continue to take hold in the Portuguese market there will be an increasing number of opportunities to leverage the Internet for marketing and advertising purposes."

Google sites are the most popular in Portugal, according to comScore’s data. Here’s a look at the top 15 online properties for Portugal:

Naturally, social media plays a big role in Internet use in Portugal, but it is not Facebook that dominates there, according to comScore’s numbers. Here are the top ten social networking sites:

The figures for both charts exclude traffic from public computers, such as those from Internet cafes. They also exclude access from mobile phones and PDA’s. I’m willing to bet that social networks and Google sites are pretty popular among mobile users in Portugal though.

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