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14 - North of Oporto
- Harold Livermore
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- Portugal: A Traveller's History
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Beyond the Foz, the Atlantic coast has a string of sandy beaches. Next to Leixões, the ocean port for Oporto, comes the fishing-town of Matosinhos, which has a baroque church and a Franciscan convent. The small river Leça gives its name to Leça da Palmeira and a few miles inland Leça do Balio. The coast continues to Vila do Conde, passing a prominent obelisk rising above the sands to commemorate the place at Mindelo where Dom Pedro and his liberal army landed in 1832 from the Azores to take Oporto where they were besieged. The dunes and pools are now a bird-sanctuary at which avian visitors are ringed. Leça do Balio was the former headquarters of the Knights of St John, the Hospitallers, who moved south to Crato in 1312. It may have been a church with a defensive tower against the Vikings. The present building dates from c. 1350 to 1374, the work of the balio Frei Vasques Pimentel. It consists of three naves in regular rectangular plan with a lower triple chancel with stone vaulting. Both church and tower are battlemented. It governed many places in the fourteenth century, and King Fernando's irregular marriage to Leonor Teles was celebrated here in 1372.
The whole area north of Oporto was the Terra dos Maias, the powerful family which liked to trace its origins to King Ramiro II in 917. It covered some sixteen parishes from the sea to the present airport of Pedras Rubras and beyond. It now has no centre, the Alto da Maia being overspread by later development. The church of Aguas Santas dates from the twelfth century, and passed to the Knights of St John and then to Malta. Its baroque trappings have been removed and its original appearance restored. The old roads to Braga by way of Famalicão, and Guimarães by Santo Tirso, have been interwoven with the excellent new system of toll-ways which whisks vehicles through the pine-clad rolling hillsides, avoiding long stretches of ribbon development, but, as everywhere, making errors difficult to rectify and remote places hard to find. Residents who have taken computerisation in their stride slip through the toll-ways and a gadget on the windscreen identifies them so that invisible wizardry sends them a monthly bill for their accumulated mileages.
Foreword
- Harold Livermore
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When I was invited to write this book some years ago, circumstances prevented me from accepting. I feared that arthritis would stop my travels. I first visited Portugal in May 1936 as a graduate working in Spain, but the outbreak of civil war obliged me to come home. Cambridge then kindly made an award, intended for study in Spain, available in Portugal. My wife and I went to Coimbra, and I was made headmaster of the English school near Lisbon. We returned to England in November 1942, and my earliest history of Portugal appeared in 1947; this will explain why my interest was originally historical. I see Portugal and the Portuguese as they emerge from their past. If I qualify as a tourist, it is because I have returned almost every year for one or more visits.
I am indebted to many friends – some of them not known to me by name. But they include the late Susan Lowndes, who with her husband Luiz Marques founded the Anglo-Portuguese News. She knew Portugal well and published her Selective Traveller in 1949. Dr Paul Lowndes Marques has given me valuable help with the illustrations, selected by him with the help of Dr George Winius, and I am glad to record my thanks for the kindness of the Portuguese tourist authorities. I must also mention Dr Carlos Estorninho of Lisbon and Figueira da Foz, as well as Dr A J Miranda of Santo Tirso and his family, who have afforded me hospitality and driven me round the Minho. On the one occasion, Dr Winius both drove and pushed me round the Alentejo and Algarve. I had not thought it feasible to visit Portugal in a wheel-chair until TAP, the Portuguese airline, and George and Grace made it possible. In London, Mr António de Figueiredo has helped on many occasions and lent me books I did not possess, and Mrs Andrea White has undertaken the formidable task of making sense of my script. None of these is to blame for such errors as I may have made.
I have inserted one or two poems, which strike a nostalgic note: Saudade, the yearning for people and places no longer present, is often thought to be characteristic of Portugal.
The author and publishers would like to record their gratitude to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation for assistance with the publication costs of this book.
Portugal: A Traveller's History
- Harold Livermore
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Portugal, the 'ancient ally', is a country easily accessible, with an enviable climate, welcoming inhabitants and famous beaches. English and Spanish apart, Portuguese is more widely spoken than any other European tongue. This historical guide draws on personal experiences ranging from a residence of three years to regular visits since 1936. It combines introductory chapters on eight centuries of nationhood, and sections on the Roman and Islamic past, architecture, painting, music and birds, with visits to the great cities of Lisbon and Oporto, and to the country's varied regions. The author's aim is not merely to describe; rather to account for the emergence of what the visitor may expect to see. He avoids jargon, preferring clarity and moderation - although permitting himself an occasional expression of saudade (the nostalgia for Portugal which haunts all who have loved this land).
Harold Livermore studied in Portugal in 1937 and taught there, in Cambridge and in Canada. He was educational director of the Luso-Brazilian Council in London and is a member of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences and of the Portuguese Academy of History. His first 'History of Portugal' was awarded the CamSes Prize and was followed by a 'New History' and a 'Shorter History'. He has also published a history of Spain and an account of the medieval origins of both countries. A selection of his articles, 'Essays on History and Literature', appeared in 2000.
List of Illustrations
- Harold Livermore
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- Portugal: A Traveller's History
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15 - Interior Portugal
- Harold Livermore
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The high road to the east from Oporto strikes out for a very different Portugal which the writer Miguel Torga (1907–95), who was born there, called a ‘marvellous kingdom’. It is not a kingdom, and has no name but that bestowed on it from outside, Trás-os-Montes, ‘beyond the mountains’. The range in question is the Serra do Marão, rising to 4,250 feet. The pass at the Espinho commands a vast panorama. Those who dwell beyond are their own masters: ‘Para cá do Marão, mandam os que cá estão’. It is a large land-locked province whose capital Bragança is far away near the border with Spain. It is quite different from the teeming maritime Minho which wears its heart on its sleeve (at least the seamstresses of Viana do). The rivers of the Minho go directly to the sea, whilst those of Trás-os-Montes rise near the Spanish border in the north and first find their way to the Douro. The largest of these is the Tâmega, already a broad stream when it flows under the great Roman bridge at Chaves, which is certainly in Trás-os-Montes, but passes through Basto and Amarante in the Minho, and pours into the Douro some twenty-five miles east of Oporto. The historical border of the province seems not to have been fixed. It comprises the two districts of Bragança and Vila Real. More recently the city of Oporto has been made the centre of the Douro Litoral, which includes both sides of the river, and Vila Real has become the capital of the Alto Douro, and includes Lamego south of the river.
On leaving Oporto, the road, whether it knows it or not, traverses the Douro Litoral. The first river to cross is the Sousa, a small stream flowing through a wide valley. Its name has been carried all over the world. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the only family that could match the Maias were the Sousas who acquired many estates. The Paço de Sousa stands a little off the main road near Paredes, and was an ancient hermitage when the Sousas made it their Benedictine monastery under Egas Moniz, the tutor of Afonso Henriques: he is buried in the church, which exceeds the usual Romanesque building of the time. Egas’ successor as mordomo-mór was Gonçalo Mendes, ‘o Sousão’ (1157–67).
17 - Algarve
- Harold Livermore
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Algarve is Portugal's ‘other kingdom’ which is in many ways different from the rest of the country. Its name recalls that it was once the Far West, as seen from Egypt or Syria. In late Muslim times, its capital was Silves, but it was only a kingdom dependent on the Abbadid rulers of Seville. In 1471, Afonso V ‘the African’ assumed the title of ‘King of Portugal and of the two Algarves, on this side and on that’, thus stressing its ancient connection with Morocco, the Magrib. His son, the great John II, came to take the waters of Monchique, where he died in 1495. His chronicler noted that he died ‘at a small place outside of Portugal’. Under the Philips, its governor was referred to as a viceroy, but the designation has now no political implication. Since the tourist boom which began in about 1960, Faro has become the second busiest airport in Portugal, and it is possible to visit the Algarve without seeing the rest of the country, regrettable though this may be. It is marked off from the neighbouring Alentejo by a line of hills, which rise to nearly 3,000 feet in the Serra de Monchique and only half as high in the Malhão further east. They form a sort of amphitheatre, containing the undulating coastal plain which stretches for a hundred miles behind a succession of sandy beaches that catch the sun. It is in sharp contrast with the long levels of the adjoining Alentejo, which is bare grazing country with a relatively small population. The Algarve is only a fifth of the size of the Alentejo, but carries a higher population than either part of its neighbour.
The territory is too narrow to have any great river or estuary to attract a large population. As in the north, the coast is more populous than the interior, and has a string of small ports administered from Faro, which before the tourist boom had a population of only 13,000 and was chiefly engaged in the export of fish or fruit from its fertile hinterland. The Algarve is an orchard of almonds, which blossom in January, oranges, lemons and figs, as well as apples, pears, cherries and other fruit, and a market-garden for tomatoes, onions, cauliflowers, melons, aubergines, pimentos and so forth.
7 - Music
- Harold Livermore
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- Portugal: A Traveller's History
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In an age when recorded sounds are available everywhere, what is heard in Portugal may or may not be Portuguese music. Discounting international sound, which is easily industrialised, and in which Portugal doubtless has its place, we can only say briefly what is typically Portuguese. When Ann Livermore wrote her Short History of Spanish Music in 1972, she remarked that she could not do a similar volume for Portuguese because you can't write about music unless you hear it. Now much more Portuguese music is available, for which a debt is owed to the Gulbenkian Foundation, particularly in the field of early church music which had hitherto gone unpublished. Church music emanated from the monasteries, and the tradition was abruptly broken at the dissolution of 1834, being only gradually restored. Secular music was performed at royal banquets and other occasions in the middle ages, and much of it went unrecorded. Some later music comes from the eighteenth-century opera, which flourished in the golden days of King John V. A detailed account of Portuguese opera by Manuel Carlos de Brito is available in English (Cambridge 1989).
The Galaico-Portuguese lyric goes back to the twelfth century, when the songbooks or Cancioneiros were formed. Under the learned Alfonso X (1252–84), the religious Cantigas de Santa Maria were preserved in Castile, while the secular tradition passed to his grandson, King Diniz of Portugal (1279–1325). The forms adopted in the songbooks fell into three main groups: the first, addressed by men to women; the second, put into the mouths of women, is amatory and plaintive, though almost always composed by men; and the third is satirical, denunciatory or comic. This convention lasted until about 1400. A new troubadour convention then arrived from Castile or Aragon (previously from Provence or Italy). The Portuguese style was more contemplative and discursive than the Castilian, which was ecstatic and introspective.
In the greater churches, the organ had prepared the way for orchestration and polyphony. The theatre of Gil Vicente, which prevailed at court from 1502 until 1536, calls for a wide variety of songs and dances, some of them regional. Camões’ last play, Filodemo, performed by the poet and his friends in India in 1554, calls for half a dozen rustic instruments.
3 - Before Portugal
- Harold Livermore
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There were innumerable generations of inhabitants of Portugal before they recognised themselves as Portuguese, or even Lusitanians, the name given by the Romans to the people of central Portugal. The first Stone Age or Palaeolithic takes us back a hundred millennia, when the present climate and landscape did not yet exist. The range of primitive artefacts, from stone bludgeons to the refined laurel-leaf blade, can be seen in the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography at Belém and in numerous local collections. Although Portuguese archaeology goes back to 1865, new sites are constantly being revealed. A project for a hydroelectric scheme in the valley of the river Coa, an affluent of the Douro, was halted because of the discovery of scrawled drawings on the flat rock. The preservation of this ancient art became a question of national concern, and the small town of Vila Nova de Fozcoa acquired a tourist attraction it previously lacked.
The existence in Portugal of cave-paintings of the Magdalenian age, like those of Altamira in Northern Spain and Lascaux in southern France, was unknown until 1963, when the caverns at Santiago do Escoural, near Montemór o Novo in the Alentejo, were explored. These underground galleries have fourteen sketches of animals and humans, supposedly done in about 15000 bc. Most of Portugal escaped the rigours of the last glaciation, and the drawings at Escoural do not reveal any sign of the despair at the disappearance of the reindeer and cold-weather fauna which it is possible to read into the art of Altamira. To the amateur eye they resemble the drawings at Fozcoa made in the light of day, when men had abandoned the life of the caves, and drew in the open on flat surfaces eroded by the small river. In the period between 8000 and 7000 bc, the valleys of the Tagus and Sado to its south were frequented by men who hunted and also gathered shellfish on the shore. The middens were noticed in 1865, and those at Flor da Beira in 1935, with others on the Sado. They are mounds of discarded shells, which also contain the bones of animals and human beings. Some three hundred skeletons have been found, pointing to continuous rather than dense occupation. The former owners of the bones dwelt in the open or behind wind-breaks or rock-shelters: they decorated themselves with perforated sea-shells.
16 - Alentejo
- Harold Livermore
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- Portugal: A Traveller's History
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Lisbon is a famous seaport, but it is not on the open ocean. A channel half a mile wide and twenty miles long leads into an inland sea several miles across and broad enough to hold all the world's navies. It is the Straw Sea, Mar de Palha. The name has nothing to do with straw, but suggests a false ocean, rather as the False Creeks explorers used to find, a ‘man of straw’, a dummy. The rim of this expanded river or miniature sea is the Outra Banda, or Other Side.
At the narrows ferries take about twenty minutes to cross, and ply constantly between the Terreiro do Paço or Cais de Sodré and Cacilhas. They are crowded at the rush-hours but otherwise provide a simple and inexpensive way to see Lisbon from the water. Formerly, travellers coming from the east would arrive at Aldeia Galega, the most distant part of the Mar de Palha, and wait for transport to Lisbon. The ferry from Lisbon to Montijo took an hour and a half and sitting on the deck in the sunshine afforded a pleasant way of passing an idle afternoon. The bay at Moita was rendered more attractive by the blue magpie or jay, found only in China and here. Who introduced this beautiful bird is not known; fifty years ago it was confined to Montijo or thereabouts, but now it is not uncommon over a large area.
The south bank seen from the height of the castle in Lisbon looks attractive in a faint veil of blue mist. It is a series of inlets now in part industrialised. Barreiro is the railhead for the southern railway, and passengers obtain tickets from the office near the Lisbon Terreiro and cross by ferry to the trains on the other side. The naval shipyard was traditionally at the Arsenal adjoining the Paço, but was transferred to Alfeite, a former royal estate. Barreiro has docks and yards for the repair of large oil-tankers and other vessels. The streams flowing into the Mar de Palha had water-mills, and one of these at Seixal has been rehabilitated as a tourist attraction.
Contents
- Harold Livermore
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Index
- Harold Livermore
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9 - Fishing
- Harold Livermore
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Fish forms an important part of the Portuguese diet. Lampreys are found in the Lima and shad (sável) in the Tagus and Douro, and trout are bred in the numerous new reservoirs or albufeiras. But the sea is by far the greatest source. In ancient times the most important catch was the tunny. The Romans also relished garum, made of preserved fish. The chain of tanks and industrial plants of Phoenician times can be traced from Lisbon to the Algarve, and also extends to North Africa. After the discovery of America, the great fishery was the Newfoundland Banks, and a large sailing-fleet built at Aveiro and Figueira da Foz left Lisbon every year to catch cod, which was dried to make bacalhau. With the imposition of national limits, this fish is now imported. Sailing-ships are still built at Figueira and Aveiro, where the Dom Fernando, the largest of the nineteenth-century schooners, was rebuilt in 1998 to serve as a naval museum.
The usual sea-going fishing-craft is the trawler or traineira, with both sail and engines. The main deep-sea fishing is for the sardine, the tunny, and a variety of fish, some not easily translatable into English. Smaller trawlers serve for in-shore fishing and are joined by wooden rowing-craft which have elongated prows like crescentmoons and are painted in bright colours. The sheltered lagoons of the Algarve abound in shellfish and in decorative small craft.
The principal sea-fisheries from north to south are: in the Minho, Viana do Castelo, with its festival in the middle of August dedicated to Nossa Senhora da Agonia, who protects fisherfolk; Oporto draws its supplies mainly from Matosinhos, the fishing-village out of which the deep-sea Port of Leixões sprouted to accommodate ocean-liners; south of the Douro, Aveiro remains an active fishery but Figueira da Foz is now best known as a summer resort.
Nazaré was one of the fishing-ports associated with Alcobaça, and is famous for the customs of its fisher-folk and their tartan shirts and skirts. Until recently the boats were drawn up by teams of men and women or by oxen which waited by the beach: these have given way to tractors. Peniche is the largest port for catching and canning sardines. While Nazaré is open and exposed, Peniche has the advantage of two beaches, one sheltered from gales from the north and the other from the south.
2 - Portugal in History
- Harold Livermore
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Portugal was a monarchy for eight centuries, and has been a republic since 1910. As every Portuguese schoolchild knows, its first king was Afonso Henriques, who was born in about 1109 and lived until 1185. He replaced his mother Queen Teresa in 1128, seized Santarém from the Muslims and took Lisbon after a long siege in 1147, thus carrying the frontier from the Mondego to the Tagus and beyond. He used the title of king from 1139 or 1140. Our pupil may or may not have been told that King Afonso I defeated five Muslim kings in the battle of Ourique and that his victory was assured by the aid of St James, or Santiago, mounted on a white charger. The great historian Alexandre Herculano (1811–77) found no contemporary evidence for the apostolic intervention, but concluded that the Portuguese state owed its existence to the strong arms of Afonso Henriques and the barons of the Douro valley who had brought him up. The conquest of Lisbon was achieved with the aid of several thousand crusaders who put in at Oporto on their way to Palestine. Many were Anglo-Normans from southern and eastern England. Expansion, first in the Iberian Peninsula and then in the overseas Discoveries, is a main theme of Portuguese history, in which the Ancient Alliance played its part. All Portuguese know this and are often surprised that many English visitors do not.
The notion of a Portugal suddenly springing into existence at the behest of Afonso Henriques is almost as extravagant as the visitation of St James. Our intelligent child knows that there was a county of Portugal long before it became a kingdom, that it was governed from the castle of Guimarães, where Afonso was born, and that his parents were Count Henry, a Burgundian, and Dona Teresa, on whom the county was bestowed by her father, Alfonso VI of Leon. Tarásia, as she was always called, was styled queen as the daughter of an emperor, but, as was customary, took her husband's rank. After he was killed in 1112, she governed as queen for sixteen years, and was so recognised by more than one pope.
The territory of Portugal had been founded, or at least claimed, in 868 by one Vimara Peres, a count of southern Galicia.
1 - Introduction
- Harold Livermore
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Portugal is a land, its people, and their language. It is not one of the larger European states, comprising about a fifth of the Iberian Peninsula. Its population is about ten million, comparable with those of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland combined, Norway and Sweden combined, Belgium, or Greece. Yet its language is more widely spoken than French, German, or any other European tongue, except English and Spanish. This is due largely to the vastness and growth of Brazil, which exceeds in population any state of Europe, even Britain and France combined. Portuguese has also been implanted in a large part of Africa south of the Sahara, and exists in places in Asia as far as Macau in China, and in Timor in Oceania. Its most remarkable feature has been its capacity to expand and endure. Both Portuguese and Castilian were once the provincial Latin of the late Roman army spoken only in small areas.
Though the language is as Latin as Italian and much more so than French, the word Portugal – like Castile – would have meant nothing to an ancient Roman. He would have heard of the Further Province or of Lusitania, but the political divisions of antiquity were effaced by the Muslim expansion into Europe of ad 711. Portugal emerged, as did the other states of the Peninsula, from the Christian Reconquest. The name is first used in the ninth century, when it applied to the area of Oporto. Portugal reached its present limits in about 1250, since when its frontiers have scarcely altered.
The expansion of Europe began when the Portuguese conquered the North African port of Ceuta in 1415. Soon after, Portuguese navigators annexed the Atlantic Isles of the Madeiras and the Azores. Both groups had been uninhabited since the formation of the world, and are therefore properly Portuguese. A distinction is made between ‘continental Portugal’ and the ‘adjacent isles’. Madeira is 600 miles south of Lisbon and the Azores 800 miles to its west. In the fifteenth century, when Vasco de Gama took two years to find the sea-route to India and to return, and in 1519 when Fernão de Magalhães (Magellan) set out on the first circumnavigation of the globe, these distances did not seem enormous. Nowadays, the islands are reached from Lisbon by air in two or three hours.
11 - Lisbon
- Harold Livermore
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Lisbon has a magnificent setting on hills at the mouth of the Tagus, which broadens into an inland sea, the Mar de Palha, before passing through a channel to reach the ocean. By convention the hills are seven, like those of Rome, but in fact the slopes are many and some very steep. On the height to the east stands the castle of St George, formerly regarded as the true seat of authority. It is separated from another height, the Alto, by a cleft, once an arm of the sea, and the city grew up between these and the water-front. It has now spread in all three directions on the north bank and has acquired suburbs on the other side, the Outra Banda. From a height, as the aeroplane approaches, it is a maze of red tiles and white walls, with the hills of Palmela and the sandy shores curving away toward the south. On landing, the missing dimension is restored and the vision becomes reality.
The airport at Portela de Sacavém is by modern standards near the centre: about four miles. It joins function with fantasy in the fashion of today, not architecture, but marbled like a bank with a façade of fountains. The taxi-rank is orderly, and there are buses; the underground, the Metro, is still on the way. The hotels are mainly near the centre. Lisbon sprawls but most of its inhabitants are flat-dwellers and its centre is compact; for the same reason, it is subject to traffic-jams in the busy hours and agreeably quiet at weekends. Much of the Baixa, the lower town, is easily covered on foot, and more of the city by the underground. The yellow trams which were one of the joys of Lisbon have been greatly reduced and replaced by long vehicles with trailers, or by buses of one or two decks. It is perhaps necessary, for, like all other cities, Lisbon has been overwhelmed by the proliferation of private cars. But it is a pity that Lisbon transport, like London buses, should be disfigured by aggressive and tasteless advertising. There are four elevators, three of them funicular, to avoid climbing the steeper places.
The castle of St George with its light fawn-coloured walls stands out above the city and is a useful landmark, being visible from many points.
13 - Oporto
- Harold Livermore
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The city of Oporto is the undisputed capital of the north, second only to Lisbon and metropolis for the province of the Minho, the source of Portuguese nationhood and the most populous rural region. It is about half the size of Lisbon, but has enveloped the surrounding townships without obliterating them. It is the port of entry and interchange for the teeming countryside to the north and for the valley of the Douro. One may still be aroused in the middle of the city by the crowing of cocks, even if the creaking of wains has given way to traffic-jams. It and its territory have given the name Portugal, and the word attached itself to the wines of the middle Douro. The true centre of the producing area is sixty miles away. The large barrels or pipes were formerly brought down the river on the characteristic rabelos, barges with a single sail, broad in the beam and of shallow draught, and deposited at the ‘lodges’ – lojas – of Vila Nova de Gaia on the south bank of the river. They have been replaced by other modes of transport, but a few are moored outside the lojas, with the names of the companies inscribed on their sails, rather as Vasco da Gama's sails were embroidered with scenes of Portuguese history, if the Lusiads is to be believed. They are brought out for an annual race.
Oporto – the Port – is built, like Lisbon, on the north bank of a great river, and its traditional centre, the cathedral, stands on a high bluff overlooking the stream two hundred feet below. There is no inland sea, but the river is nipped between the cathedral hill, formerly called Windy Hill, the Pena Ventosa, and another height surmounted by the Convent of the Pilar. The oldest part of the city lies below the cathedral where the river widens. The sea is four miles away at Foz, where a sandspit reduces the clearance to a hundred yards or so. The entrance may be dangerous, and only smaller ships reach the wharves to load wine and unload a variety of imports. For liners and freighters, a large mole has been built at Leixões on the ocean. The old walled city was an oblong including the cathedral and about a mile of water-front.
8 - Birds
- Harold Livermore
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Summary
Travellers who are also bird-watchers will find much to admire in Portugal. While the ‘British list’ has a little over two hundred varieties, the Portuguese exceeds three hundred, named by W C Tait in 1924, or two hundred and eighty named in 1973 by R Carey, who deals only with the south. The difference of nearly fifty per cent is partly because Portugal lies on a main migration route, receiving passengers from continental Europe on their way south and some African species on their way north. It is also due to the absence of any large industrial area and the survival of much countryside in the shape of mountainside, forests and open fields. There are several reserves, such as the coast north of Oporto at Mindelo, the National Park of Gerez-Penedo, the seashore of the Algarve, and the Berlenga Isles off the coast. Against this is the practice of eating birds, advertised in small restaurants with the sign: Há pássaros. There are two words for ‘birds’: larger kinds, such as chickens and above, are aves; small birds are pássaros, or with the diminutive, passarinhos.
There are eighteen warblers, thirteen gulls and eight terns: having no binoculars, I am not able to distinguish them. Birds not seen at all in the British Isles are: vultures, rare wanderers from the Spanish mountains; egrets; the purple gallinule, now confined to the reserve in the Algarve; and the serin, which can be heard in Lisbon. The azure-winged magpie is a native of China, found fifty years ago only at Montijo, on the south bank of the Tagus near Lisbon, but now reported from many places. Its spread will not surprise those who have witnessed the explosion of the magpie.
Among species now extinct in Britain are the stork, which is quite common and nests in towers, electricity-poles and elsewhere in villages: it is easily recognised and its clappering is a distinctive sound. The black stork is rare. The avocet is uncommon, and the great bustard survives in places in the Algarve and Alentejo. Cranes winter in parts of the Alentejo.
Birds extremely scarce in Britain include the hoopoe, bee-eater, golden eagle, osprey and kite. The hoopoe is a spring and summer visitor, common in the Alentejo, and the bee-eater also divides its time between Portugal and Africa: it occurs from the Douro southwards.
6 - Painting
- Harold Livermore
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- Book:
- Portugal: A Traveller's History
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 May 2017
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- 11 November 2004, pp 62-65
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Summary
Sacheverell Sitwell, who paid five visits to Portugal, says: ‘in Portugal there are no painters’, adding: ‘what is lacking in Portugal where decorative painting is nearly always bad is the brush of a Tiepolo. There are moments when one longs for even a third-rate Italian painter. But Italy is the land of painting, and Portugal is no more to be reproached for want of that than England, for here too it is no part of our native genius.’ I happen to be writing in the house of J M W Turner, R A and take these remarks for what they are worth. Sitwell is a child of the grand tour with a remarkable gift of reminiscence: everything he sees reminds him of something else. Perhaps Portugal ought to be Mediterranean, but it is not. Sitwell does not (I think) complain that there are no Scottish painters or no Icelandic painters. He loves Portugal, but has manoeuvred himself into being disappointed.
Greco-Roman pictorial art survives in mosaics rather than painting. Both forms were rejected by Islam, and the tradition disappears. Christian Europe inherited the Roman preoccupation with permanence and in the early middle ages preferred stone. Painting emerges between illumination and polychrome figure-sculpture: the former is minute and precise and the latter applies pigments to a stone surface without much subtlety. Early stone figures have little classical line, and the addition of colour does not make them more convincing. By the fourteenth century, the tombs of Alcobaça had acquired great narrative and decorative power, but have not the qualities of painting for which wood and ivory were more suitable. Queen Philippa brought the poems of John Gower to Portugal, but there is no evidence that she brought painting. Royal marriages were at times preceded by the exchange of portraits. In about 1428 van Eyck came to Portugal on a mission to arrange for Philippa's daughter Isabel to marry Duke Philip ‘the Good’ of Flanders. He was perhaps the first acknowledged great painter to visit Portugal. The first known royal portrait is that of Philippa's husband, John I, who died in 1433. There are a dozen manuscripts with miniatures dating from the twelfth-century Book of Birds (Livro das Aves) to the Missal of Lorvão of the fifteenth, with coloured drawings of rural work for each month of the year, a prelude to the art of painting.
12 - North from Lisbon
- Harold Livermore
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- Book:
- Portugal: A Traveller's History
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 11 May 2017
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- 11 November 2004, pp 102-123
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In early times the Castle of St George and the mosque/cathedral were the centre of Lisbon. The eastern side was cast in a secondary part by the epic of the Discoveries and the growth of Atlantic trade. King John V, the Most Faithful, wishing to have a permanent Portuguese cardinal, erected Occidental Lisbon as the see of his Patriarch: in the nineteenth century the trend was continued with the opening of the Avenida and the central station of the Rossio. To the east, there was no Oriental Lisbon: Pombal seems to have thought of the iron foundries as a potential industrial belt, a tendency encouraged in the twentieth century by the emergence of factories along the water-front. This has now been reversed, partly by the establishment of the airport at the Portela de Sacavém and then by the removal of the main railway-terminus to Santa Apolónia. The commemoration of Vasco da Gama's opening of the sea-route to India was the occasion for an exhibition on a large scale and the building of the Vasco da Gama Bridge completed in 1998, with two elegant high spans and a long causeway skimming the water to Montijo on the Outra Banda, giving access to the Alentejo and Algarve and relieving pressure on the crowded first bridge. The opportunity was seized to create a new suburb named Oriente, with a graceful station and a forest of palm-trees planted for the occasion.
The main railway-line follows the north bank of the Tagus to Santarém. The main road to the centre and north diverges beyond Vila Franca de Xira, which until 1966 was the lowest point at which the Tagus was crossed by road. The river here has an extensive water-plain broken up into islets running for nearly twenty miles – the lezirias – giving some of the most fertile land in Portugal. They were formerly royal property, but were privatised in favour of a company in 1836. Vila Franca is the centre of cattle-country. The mounted campino, in his stocking-cap and waistcoat, controls the herds of cattle with his lance. For the festivities in early July he decks himself in a green cap and red waistcoat. Portuguese bull-fighting is a risky display of horsemanship, punctuated by teams of teasers on foot. The victim, though bewildered, is not killed, but recycled, if that is the word.
4 - Islamic Portugal
- Harold Livermore
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- Book:
- Portugal: A Traveller's History
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 11 May 2017
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- 11 November 2004, pp 45-49
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The sudden collapse of the Spanish Goths in ad 711 arose from their own dissensions and from the dynamic expansion of Islam, which had conquered Egypt in 642, been held for a time at Carthage, and then at a bound reached the Straits of Gibraltar, reducing Eastern Rome, the Byzantine Empire, to a shadow of itself. The Greeks had occupied North Africa for less than two centuries and had revived the western church both in Lusitania and in the Suevic kingdom of Braga. They had been driven out by the Goths before 615, but rarely regarded the rulers of the west as anything more than a barbarian division of the Roman army that had seized power and perpetuated itself. The Gothic kings of Toledo lived in some state, but they and their nobles were no better landlords than the absentee Roman senatorial order they had replaced, and were much closer at hand. A faction seeking to overthrow Roderic, ‘the last of the Goths’, sought aid from North Africa. The first invasion, of Berbers, killed Roderic and seized Toledo and its treasure: the second, of Arabs, occupied Seville and overcame the last resistance at Mérida. The two Muslim forces then joined and toured the provinces, receiving the capitulation of governors and counts: it is supposed that they reached Portugal and Galicia before being recalled to Damascus, but the evidence is slight. The caliph in Baghdad had not authorised a permanent occupation, and could hardly have envisaged that his successors would continue to govern in Portugal until about 1245, and in Spain until the fall of Granada in 1492. The difference is significant. We cannot expect to find an Alhambra or a Generalife in Portugal because the Christian Reconquest had been completed there before the Nasrid kingdom of Granada was founded. The only Portuguese province with an Arabic name is the Algarve. To northerners it is the deep south, but from an Arabic orientation it was the far west. The garb is the sunset and is also the name of Morocco, the Magrib.
At first, the invaders did not much care about the north-west, but thought of pursuing the conquest into Gaul. They formed a ‘military colony’, which made use of the Gothic faction that had brought them, but did not restore the monarchy. Many of the conquering Berbers returned to Africa.