A speech corpus has been designed to explore the fricatives of standard European Portuguese. The phonetic and phonological evidence underlying the design of the corpus are described in the sections that follow. The complete corpus is described in Jesus(2001). We used methodology of previous fricative studies, begun with the EC SCIENCE “Fricative” Project, conducted by Shadle et al. (Shadle 1992; Shadle and Carter 1993). That study was focused on characterizing fricatives in general. Here, that methodology has been adapted to focus on Portuguese fricatives in particular, and thus uses real words and phonology of Portuguese.