Portuguese Guineans are Bissau-Guineans of Portuguese descent. Guinea was never a colony of mass settlement by the Portuguese Empire like Angola or Mozambique, but nonetheless maintained a settler community during its multi-century rule of the colony mainly consisting of merchants. Many Portuguese settlers chose to return to Portugal following independence in 1974, and the country fell into a bloody civil war. Despite this, there is still a Portuguese population numbering slightly more than 4,000 people in the country.