[lolinder]

I speak fluent second-language Spanish and have had next to no difficulty communicating with native Portuguese speakers from Mozambique, Cabo Verde, and Portugal. What variety of Portuguese do you speak?

I'll concede that it's possible that I actually have an advantage as a second-language speaker, since my Spanish is probably slower than a native's and when I'm listening I'm already doing more work than a native is accustomed to.

[schoen]

Brazilian Portuguese has some phonological differences that I think confuse people in both directions more than other varieties of Portuguese, like the /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ for <t> and <d> in various contexts. For example a Spanish speaker would probably have a hard time recognizing that Brazilian Portuguese /dʒi'abu/ is cognate with Spanish <diablo>. A Brazilian Portuguese speaker who was less familiar with Spanish might similarly have a hard time recognizing /ˈdjablo/ as cognate with Portuguese <diabo> 'devil'.

Or Brazilian /'sedʒi/ is cognate with Spanish <sed> 'thirst'. A Spanish speaker will have to know to effectively ignore the /ʒi/ in order to recognize the word easily!

Maybe more extreme, Brazilian /'hedʒi/ (written <rede>) is cognate with Spanish <red> 'net, network'.

You might also be familiar with a greater variety of Spanish pronunciations as a non-native speaker... if you know Argentine /'ʃubja/ and /'ʃabe/, then you have a better chance to recognize Brazilian /'ʃuvɐ/ and /'ʃavi/ ('rain' and 'key', respectively).

[lolinder]

Yeah, I suspect that OP speaks Brazilian Portuguese but I didn't want to assume.

I should have specified in my original post, but I only meant that Portugal Portuguese (and at least a few of the African varieties that are still very close to Portugal's) are mutually intelligible with Spanish. Which actually just further illustrates the complexity of categorizing speech into discrete languages...

[dontlaugh]

Interestingly, it makes Brazilian much easier to understand to (many) Italians and Romanians.