About Revista Amar

Revista Amar

Overview

Revista Amar is a Portuguese community magazine published in Toronto, Ontario, for the Portuguese-speaking — or Lusophone — community of Canada. Its name is its mission statement in miniature: amar is the Portuguese word for "to love," and the magazine's own articles say it takes that name to express affection for the culture, language and people it serves. Its Portuguese-language self-description, published on its website, puts the proposition plainly: the magazine maintains a monthly presence in the Portuguese community in Canada, and its priority is the relationship between Portugal and its people spread around the world.

The magazine describes itself, in that same statement of purpose, as an informative, educational and entertainment medium covering a very wide range of subjects of interest to the community. It aims to be a reference magazine among its own people, a space for dialogue and for the communion of diversity, and a link — in Portuguese, an elo de ligação — between the whole Lusophone community in Canada. It also sets itself a practical economic role: to support Lusophone entrepreneurs living in Canada by publicising and backing their projects. Alongside the daily news agenda, it says it wants to give an account of subjects and realities that are less obvious and often condemned to invisibility for want of attention, knowledge or resources on the part of the people they concern.

Revista Amar is part of a wider Toronto Portuguese media group. Its own description states that it is a subsidiary company of the Cyber Planet Inc. and MDC Media Group groups, and a profile of the group's founder published by the Gallery of the Portuguese Pioneers lists the Amar magazine among the Portuguese-language outlets of the Manuel da Costa (MDC) Media Group, alongside the Milénio Stadium newspaper, Luso Life magazine, Camões Radio and Camões TV. Its office address, published on its own website, is 309 Horner Avenue in Etobicoke, Toronto — the same west-end address used by its parent group and several of its sister titles.

History

Revista Amar does not, in the sources consulted for this profile, publish a founding story with a single clear start date, and no founding date is invented here. One dated public record can be stated with care: summaries of Canada's federal corporations register show a corporation named Revista Amar Incorporated, incorporated in August 2016 and listed at a Toronto address. Whether that registration marks the beginning of the magazine itself is not stated in the magazine's own published descriptions, so it is recorded here as a registry fact rather than as a launch date.

What can be traced is the setting the magazine grew into. Toronto's Portuguese community, built by immigration from mainland Portugal, the Azores and Madeira from the 1950s onwards, historically supported a crowded field of Portuguese-language newspapers, magazines, radio programmes and television services. That field has contracted sharply: an October 2025 history of Toronto's Portuguese-language press by veteran community journalist Paulo Pereira recorded that only two Portuguese-language newspapers remain in the city. Magazines became one of the forms in which community publishing survived, because a monthly magazine does not need the daily advertising base of a newspaper; it needs a loyal readership, community advertisers and subjects that last longer than a news cycle.

Revista Amar's place in that landscape is as the MDC group's magazine title, sitting between the group's weekly newspaper and its broadcast services. Within the group, Camões Radio and Camões TV carry interviews, debate and music; Milénio Stadium carries the weekly news; the Amar magazine carries the slower, more reflective material — profiles, cultural features and community storytelling — in a monthly rhythm. The magazine also plays a documenting role inside its own sector: its website has published surveys and profiles of fellow Portuguese-Canadian publications, including Luso Life, Milénio Stadium and Correio da Manhã Canadá, describing their coverage and their place in community life. A magazine that writes about its fellow titles is, in part, writing the record of the media world it belongs to.

The magazine's recent history, like that of its sister outlets, is a partial migration online. Its website, revistamar.com, carries both community articles and a library of longer explanatory features about the magazine, Portuguese culture in Canada and the place of Portuguese media within Canadian multiculturalism. The site was live at the time of research, with its homepage item recording an update in January 2025 and feature articles dated through December 2024 — a slower publishing cadence than a news site, consistent with a monthly magazine whose main life is in print and in the community it circulates through.

Content and Coverage

Revista Amar's coverage, as the magazine presents it, moves between the two poles of its readers' lives: Portugal and Canada. Its own overview articles describe a content mix of community profiles, cultural stories, news from Portugal and Canada, and lifestyle pieces. It reports on local community events in Toronto, highlights Portuguese festivals held in Canada — its cultural coverage gives the example of the Festa de Nossa Senhora de Fátima — and provides material on Portuguese cuisine adapted to Canadian preferences, alongside Portuguese history, music and art.

People are the magazine's main subject. Its stated aim is to amplify the voices of the Portuguese-Canadian community by presenting stories from local authors, artists and business leaders, and its features run from interviews with emerging artists to profiles of successful Portuguese-Canadian businesspeople. Its homepage has carried profiles of young community members — one recent item profiles Ethan and Owen Alves-Warlow — reflecting a deliberate attention to the second and third generations as well as to immigrants themselves.

Alongside culture, the magazine covers practical and civic information: political news affecting the community and updates on immigration rules are both named in its own descriptions of its content. Its Portuguese statement of purpose adds the entrepreneurial strand: publicising and supporting the projects of Lusophone businesspeople in Canada is an explicit part of its job, and business profiles and local enterprise coverage follow from that commitment. The values it declares for all of this work are equality, freedom, diversity and justice, and non-discrimination on grounds of race, gender, sexuality, creed or ethnicity — stated in its own description, and consistent with the inclusive, multicultural framing of the longer articles on its website, which present the magazine as a platform where Portuguese Canadians, and readers from other backgrounds, can encounter one another's experiences.

Language is a deliberate part of the formula. The magazine is a provider of content in Portuguese, which its articles present as crucial to preserving the community's linguistic and cultural legacy, allowing first-generation immigrants and younger readers alike to interact with the language. At the same time, its website describes a bilingual approach in Portuguese and English in parts of its output, which it says bridges the divide between readers most closely connected to Portugal and those who grew up in Canada.

Audience and Reach

Revista Amar's core audience is the Portuguese-speaking population of Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area, one of the largest Portuguese communities in North America, with readers elsewhere in Canada reached through the magazine's circulation and its website. Within that audience it addresses two generations at once: first-generation immigrants who want news of Portugal and a cultural life conducted in Portuguese, and their Canadian-born children and grandchildren, whose connection to Portuguese is often a heritage connection that a magazine can help to maintain.

The magazine's own articles describe that dual address in terms of identity: its readers live, as it puts it, between two cultures, proud of their Canadian lives and at times homesick for their country of origin. A monthly magazine serves that condition differently from a newspaper. It arrives as an object to keep and share, it favours stories that explain people to one another — an artist, a business, a festival, a family — and it treats belonging itself as a subject. The community-participation mechanisms it describes, such as letters to the editor, community submissions and social media interaction, are designed to make readers contributors as well as consumers.

No circulation figures or readership measurements for Revista Amar are published in the sources consulted, and none are claimed here. Its reach is best described by its stated monthly presence in the community, its Toronto base at the centre of Portuguese Canada, its distribution of attention across print and digital editions — its own articles say it maintains close relationships with readers through both print and digital versions — and its role inside a media group whose newspaper, radio and television services share the same audience.

Digital Presence

The magazine's digital home is revistamar.com, a live website that introduces the title as "AMAR — Portuguese Community Magazine." The homepage carries community profiles, and the site holds a substantial library of feature articles about Portuguese culture, multiculturalism in Canada, Portuguese current events in Toronto and the magazine itself. Individual articles close with an invitation to sponsors, advertisers and collaborators to make contact, and with the magazine's Etobicoke address — evidence that the website functions as the magazine's public shopfront for commercial as well as editorial relationships.

The site's article record also demonstrates the magazine's cross-referencing habit: its features discuss and describe the rest of Toronto's Portuguese media, from community centres such as Casa do Alentejo to fellow publications, placing Revista Amar inside a web of community institutions rather than above them. For readers outside Toronto, and for younger readers who encounter community media online first, the website is the accessible face of a magazine whose print edition circulates within the community.

Ownership and Organisation

Revista Amar's own published description states that the magazine is a subsidiary of Cyber Planet Inc. and the MDC Media Group. The MDC — Manuel da Costa — Media Group is the Toronto Portuguese media group whose outlets, according to the Gallery of the Portuguese Pioneers' profile of its founder, Manuel da Costa, include the Milénio Stadium newspaper, the Amar and Luso Life magazines, Camões Radio and TV, and the MDC Music label. Da Costa's group is based at 309 Horner Avenue in Etobicoke, the address Revista Amar itself publishes, and the magazine sits within that stable as the group's community magazine title.

That group context explains much of the magazine's character. It is not a standalone start-up but one format among several — newspaper, magazine, radio, television — through which a single community-media organisation addresses the same audience in different registers. Directory listings for the magazine give its address as 309 Horner Avenue, Toronto, describe its operating status as active, categorise it as a media and news company and publisher, and list a contact telephone number of +1 416 900 6692, with weekday office hours. Those listings are consistent with the address and identity the magazine publishes for itself.

Contact and Availability

Revista Amar can be reached through its website, revistamar.com, which invites contact for sponsorship, advertisements and collaboration, and at its published address: 309 Horner Avenue, Etobicoke, Ontario, M8W 1Z5, Canada. Directory listings give its telephone number as +1 416 900 6692.

For a new reader, the practical route in is the website's profile and culture features: a community profile, a festival article or one of the magazine's own surveys of Portuguese life in Toronto shows Revista Amar doing its characteristic work — recording, in Portuguese and for the record, the life of a community that has made Toronto one of the great Portuguese cities of the diaspora.