CTT Brand Guidelines: Portugal’s 1520 Royal Post, a Horse Rider & a 2014 Listing

Lisbon, 1520.

CTT – Correios de Portugal traces its history to 6 November 1520, when King Manuel I created Portugal’s first public postal service and the office of Correio-Mor do Reino, the kingdom’s chief postmaster, by royal charter, according to Portuguese Wikipedia. The office was public in the sense that any subject could use it on payment of a set fee. English Wikipedia calls CTT the oldest company still operating in Portugal. The first postal regulations followed in 1533, the first financial mail regulations in 1753, and house-to-house delivery began in 1821, English Wikipedia says.

For almost three centuries the post was a hereditary concern. Until 1606 the chief postmaster was named by the king; that year the office was sold to the da Mata family, which also became Correio-Mor das Cartas do Mar, in charge of letters carried by sea, and held both posts until 1797, Portuguese Wikipedia says. That year a decree of the Prince Regent, the future King João VI, returned the service to the crown, and from 1 August 1799 a Superintendência-Geral dos Correios e Postas do Reino ran it as a state service. Letters to Brazil and other territories overseas relied on slow sea routes, the same article notes.

The modern organisation took shape in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1880 the post office and the telegraph department merged into a single Direcção-Geral dos Correios, Telégrafos e Faróis, which also ran the lighthouses. In 1911 it gained administrative and financial autonomy as the Administração-Geral dos Correios, Telégrafos e Telefones and adopted the acronym CTT, which it has kept through every later change of official name, both Wikipedia articles say. English Wikipedia adds that CTT was also the name of the postal services in Portugal’s former colonies and is still used by CTT – Post of Macau. The same 1911 law created a postal savings bank, the Caixa Económica Postal, run as a service of the state bank Caixa Geral de Depósitos until it was absorbed into another savings arm on 1 January 1936, Portuguese Wikipedia says.

State company, listed company.

CTT became a state company in 1969, under the name CTT – Correios e Telecomunicações de Portugal. In 1992 it was turned into a public limited company, CTT – Correios de Portugal, S.A., with all its shares held by the state, and its telecommunications business was split off as Telecom Portugal, later part of Portugal Telecom, according to English and Portuguese Wikipedia. In 2000 CTT signed the concession for the universal postal service with the state, which obliges it to carry correspondence across the whole country, Portuguese Wikipedia says. The group added the payment network Payshop in 2004 and the Spanish express carrier Tourline Express in 2005; Tourline was renamed CTT Express in 2020. From November 2007 to 1 January 2019 CTT also ran a mobile phone service, Phone-ix, on another operator’s network.

The sale to private investors came in two stages. Shares representing 70 per cent of the capital were sold through a public offer, and CTT entered Euronext Lisbon on 5 December 2013, Portuguese Wikipedia says. The remaining 31.5 per cent held by the state was sold to institutional investors in an accelerated placement in September 2014. On 9 September 2014 a closing ceremony at the Lisbon exchange marked the end of the privatisation, Jornal de Negócios reported that day, and CTT became the first Portuguese company with all of its shares in free float, according to the same report.

Banking returned to the counters soon after. An earlier attempt, a Banco Postal launched with Caixa Geral de Depósitos in February 2002, ended in January 2003 when the state bank bought CTT’s share, Portuguese Wikipedia says. Banco CTT was incorporated on 24 August 2015 with CTT as its sole shareholder and opened on 18 March 2016 with 52 branches at the same time, all inside CTT shops. In 2019 it completed the purchase of 321 Crédito, a car finance specialist. The bank sells current accounts, cards, home and personal loans, savings products and insurance, and Portuguese Wikipedia puts its network at 212 shops in every district of the country.

Postal operators and their signs.

Postal operators are among the oldest names a country carries. Many began as royal or state services centuries ago and became companies only in recent decades, and their identities often hold on to symbols from that past while the business shifts from letters to parcels. Colour does much of the work: red, yellow, blue and orange wordmarks appear on post boxes, vans, uniforms and counters, and a colour can outlast the institution that first chose it. Denmark’s postal service wore red and yellow even before it was nationalised in 1711, and Sweden’s has used a post horn with a crown since its foundation in 1636, according to English Wikipedia.

The symbols repeat across borders. Post horns appear in several European marks; envelopes, birds in flight and arrows suggest movement elsewhere. Names matter too. Many operators use the national name in the local language, or in two or three languages at once, and some now trade under a group name that sits above the post office itself.

Their public faces have changed with the work. Websites now lead with parcels, tracking and delivery options, then letters and stamps and, for some operators, payments, money transfers or banking. Parcel lockers, service points inside shops, delivery vans and counter photography have become as common in their imagery as the post box. Stamp issues remain a design programme of their own, with commemorative sets and products for collectors, and philately keeps older issues in view.

Most of these operators are state-owned, or were until recently, so laws, annual reports and press releases are the main record of their ownership and structure. This guide sets out what those records and independent press say about each operator’s history, ownership and visual habits, and marks the companies’ own claims as theirs.

A horse rider, a bugle and an Iberian parcel network.

The emblem has a long life. In 1953 CTT adopted a horse rider as its logo, English Wikipedia says: an early mounted postman announcing his arrival with a bugle. The drawing has been redesigned three times, most recently in 2004. The current visual identity was introduced on 4 October 2004 and was refreshed in July 2015 and March 2020, while the logo itself has stayed almost unchanged since 2004, according to the same article. The three letters, which once stood for Correios, Telégrafos e Telefones, now work as a name in their own right, decades after the telephone business left the group.

The group is now as much about parcels as about letters. Its own website presents a family of brands — Banco CTT, CTT Express, Payshop and Locky — alongside tools for tracking items, finding postcodes, clearing customs on parcels and locating shops and CTT points. In December 2024 CTT and DHL announced a partnership for Iberian e-commerce parcels. Diário de Notícias reported on 12 May 2026 that the deal was complete after unconditional approval from the European Commission: CTT Expresso was to acquire DHL Parcel Portugal, DHL took 25 per cent of CTT Expresso, and CTT took 25 per cent of Danzas, the sole owner of DHL Parcel Iberia, with options that could later raise each stake to 49 per cent. Portuguese Wikipedia says the group employs more than 14,000 people and has set itself the goal of electrifying its whole last-mile delivery fleet by 2030.

Stamps remain a visible part of the brand. In September 2026 CTT announced “Hades”, its new Crypto Stamp, a physical stamp paired with a digital asset registered on a blockchain, continuing a project the company began in 2025. It belongs to a joint 2026 issue on Greek mythology with three other European postal administrations: Österreichische Post chose Perseus and Eos, bpost Heracles and PostNL Demeter, while CTT picked Hades, shown with his black horses, the company says. CTT presents the series as philately that joins tradition and innovation for new collectors. The company also names its programme for start-ups after its founding year, the 1520 Startup Program.

For a design guide, CTT shows how a three-letter acronym and a mounted messenger can carry five centuries of postal history into a listed parcel, banking and stamp business. Compare Correos, the Spanish postal operator, and DHL, CTT’s Iberian parcel partner. For this guide we use a letter-box red, a bugle brass and an azulejo parchment with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep CTT’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.