Portugal # 11 Old Towns and Friends December 10, 2011
We’re back
in Kingston, and I’m actually beginning to write the book for which I’ve been
gathering data during the last umpteen years, trying to figure out what to do
with the Portuguese material. I went to Portugal for the express purpose of
ferreting out information about the origins of a group of silver miners who got
into trouble with the Inquisition in Mexico in the 1580s and 1590s. The five
key figures and the thirty or so minor players who appear in the written
records of their trials were all born in Portugal, most of them in one or
another of a half dozen towns aligned along the country’s mountainous eastern
border with Spain. I’ve already noted in Blog 3 the constellation of
factors—generic surnames, fragile paper, relentlessly obtuse handwriting,
idiosyncratic abbreviations, and key documents incarcerated pending restoration
and parole—that made my three weeks in the Torre de Tombo archives so frustrating.
I learned a lot of fascinating stuff that may prove useful in some future
project, of course, but is of negligible use in the current one.
Nothing for
it but to pull up stakes and go touring. We sketched out an itinerary that
included most of the miners’ birth towns and—we being who we are—
the odd Roman
road
an architectural gem,
a mountain aerie,

and a Roman / Celtic hill town.

Oh, and Fátima, what with our other portfolio being pilgrimage.
An easy loop, we thought, leaving us ample time to spend
Thanksgiving with Nancy Frey, a former student of ours who now lives with her
husband José and their three children in a village in Galicia. Reality, as it
does, impinged. The roads in northeastern Portugal, curvy on the 1=1M national
map and squiggly on the 1-300K regional map, in the driving turned out to be way
beyond corkscrew, way beyond tilt-a-whirl. More like Medusa on a bad hair day.
Two days
into the loop we phoned our regrets to Nancy with a plaintive “We
can’t get there from here.”
But the
scenery, if frequently white-knuckle, took our breath away. High ridges massed
with tumbled boulders: rounded, jagged, diked with quartz veins and sparkling
with mica. Rounded hillsides furred with broom, heather, and wild rosemary,
their lower slopes dropping off to gorges where, between wisps of fog, we could
sometimes make out the silvery glimmer of the Tejo or Douro Rivers. Stone
shepherd huts, their humped roofs long since gone to sod. Stone walls in the
Galician style: boulders or triangular steles at three-meter intervals filled
in-between with courses of fieldstone. Remnants of stone windmills on the
spines of ridges, and on the lower slopes circular stone dovecotes in various
stages of disrepair. In the narrows of the lateral creeks we sometimes saw ruins
of mills, a few with their millraces still white with racing water.
In the morning, fog hid the rivers.
By ten o’clock it hovered at mid-slope, slicing the landscape into two
entirely
separate worlds, each unable to perceive the other. When the road dipped into
the fog layer, instantly we were creeping through cotton, unable to make out
anything further than five meters in front of the car, but acutely aware of
what we could not see: the chasm on one side of us, the near vertical wall on
the other. But the fog was only momentary, and soon we emerged into the planet
of the river gorge with terraced hillsides, ranks of grey-green olive trees,
and once in a while, where the slope flattened to a small alluvial plain three
or four meters wide fringing the river, poplar trees, their few remaining
yellow leaves the only spot of color in that world. Then after a few serpentine
twists the road would climb again, up through the terraces, into the wall of fog,
and then just as suddenly out into a world of sun-drenched upper hillsides,
bare most of them, or bouldered, but occasionally plaited with vineyards,
eye-catching red or gold where they still held their leaves, gnarly and
dead-looking where the leaves had already dropped. Sheep left by themselves to graze
behind fences, or tended by a shepherd on the open stretches, his umbrella in
hand, his blanket roll over his shoulders, his dog at his side. A bark, a wave,
and on we went.
It was easy to imagine that this
landscape has not changed very much since the Fonsecas and Almeidas, the
Enriquez, Váez, and Rodríguez boys had said goodbye to their friends,
shouldered a sack with their few belongings, and set out on their great
adventure to Sevilla and then to Mexico. But I know that it has changed in many
ways. In the 1550s the grapes and olives would all have been parceled into small
family plots; today’s endless geometric rows are a product of large-scale
commercial agriculture. Where today we see a few sheep, we would then have seen
many, many more, for the Beira and Tras-os-Montes were one of Europe’s
strongest producers of wool in those days. We would have seen a few mulberry
bushes too, for in the late 16th century the silk industry was just
beginning to build in the region; not a trace of them today. And, of course,
the ruined windmills and water mills, the shepherds’ huts and gaping roofless
barns and houses that dot this landscape today would have been alive with
people, tending to their animals, scooping the ground grain into sacks, hanging
out their laundry, and wiping away a tear as a favored son turned to wave
goodbye before disappearing forever into the distance.
A few of the cities have preserved
the core of the town that the Mexican miners would have grown up in. Often
these are tagged “Centro Histórico”, a program that shields them from change
and, at the same time, can be conveniently packaged to encourage tourism:
pamphlet, map, historical markers, arrows pointing to recommended itineraries.
Freixo de Espada-à-Cinta (literally,
Sword-in-your-belt) may have been our favorite town. It’s not on the way to
anywhere; to get there, you have to want to go there. The landscape around it
hollers “Remoteness,” and the echo replies “Poverty.” The Douro gorge that
forms the border here with Spain is only five precipitous kilometers to the
east, but unless you were a very determined smuggler, or an invading army
(or
David and Linda, you wouldn't want to come that way.
And let’s say you did:
once you had struggled up the long rocky hill from the river gorge, you would
still have to contend with Freixo’s castle, the tower of which still rises from
promontory at the top of the clustering town. Where the castle itself once
stood, is now the town cemetery.
But back in the day (the day being
King Manuel I’s time, early 16th century), Freixo place was booming.
Smuggling (of course), but mainly wool. Real fortunes, and many of the houses
in the centro histórico show it. Walls of massive stone ashlars, door and
window frames decorated in the florid Manueline style that bears the name of
the king. In fact, proclaims its tourist brochure, there are more Manueline
windows in Freixo than any other
village in Portugal. The ornate church,
which sits just below the castle tower, is about three times as grand as you
would expect in a village this size. Freixo once held a substantial Jewish
population (substantial = 30 families? 50?). The judiaria, the street on which the village’s Jews would have lived,
is not marked, but precedents suggest that it most likely wound around the base
of the castle.
What we brought home from this tour,
as you can see, is impressions, not data. We found no concrete fact about any
individual miner, but now we have some understanding of the environment in
which they spent their childhood.
Covilhã, home to several of the
Rodrigues, Núñez, and Tavares boys who ended up in Mexico, is now a large
sprawling textile town draped along a steep flank of the Serra da Estrella
mountains that are the backbone of the Beira region.
Fundão, home to no fewer than 21
members of Mexico’s crypto-Jewish community of the 1580s, preserves next to nothing
of its ancient flavor. But it has a hell of a nice hotel, the Alambique de Oro,
that looks like something out of the Arabian Nights, has two swimming pools and
a gym, and whose restaurant serves delicious goat, but charges as if it were a
mid-range pension.
Guimarães, hometown to Mexican
Rodrigues, Váez, and Gómez, is a substantial city that was once the capital of
the country. Palaces, museums, churches, a castle. The whole city is currently
under construction to spruce it up to be the “Cultural Capital of Europe” in
2012, whatever that means.
Viseu, home city to six Mexican
Fonsecas and a couple of Fernandez, and for several others from small towns along
the border, a temporary way-station on their way to Sevilla and the
Indies.
On the way back to Lisbon we
stopped for a few hours at the old Roman garrison town of Ildanha a Velha, a
village, wiped out by the plague twice (14th century and 18th),
that now houses a few dozen villagers inside of the Roman ramparts. In its day
(Roman) is was a stronghold. The Visigoths built a small cathedral there. Now
it’s mostly olive farmers, and we caught the tail end of one family’s harvest
right in front of the Roman gate into the city. Papa, with ladder and long
pole, climbed into the tree and tapped the branches with just the amount of
force to drop them onto the canvas tarp he had spread under the tree. Mama and
daughters gathered the fallen fruit up, pulled off the larger twigs and leaves,
and then filtered the rest through a sizer to separate the large and small
olives for scooping into separate bags. For olive oil and for marketing whole
for eating? We didn’t want to interrupt to ask them.


So, all in all we learned, we took
notes, we took pictures, and I’ll try to figure out a way to work it all in
somehow. Or not. We had a wonderful time wandering around up there, and that’s
our real bottom line.
That’s how we ended the trip, with
our heads in the distant past, the recent past, and the present. We dropped off
our car in Lisbon, flew to Madrid, spent two days with our friend (and former
pilgrim-student) Ana Sims, and lunched with another, Diane Beeson, who stayed on
in Spain after the 1974 pilgrimage and whom we hadn’t seen in 37 years! Both of
them lively, engaged, enthusiastic. Not rich, but happy. Us too.
David and Linda