The floods of tourists that invade European cities are turning into a plague of termites that devours the personality of the places we visit. Everyone launches proclamations about the need to change a mass industry that is bread for today and hunger for tomorrow, but few get down to work. Portugal is doing it: it has put its hands on literary works. It is about providing alternatives to monument tourism with a selfie stick and hamburger with frozen fries, resolutely supporting literary routes that make it possible to attract a less massive audience, more interested in the culture of the place and, therefore, more aware of its preservation. It also makes it possible to remove a part of the visitors from the most obvious and saturated circuits. Because it is not about demonizing the tourist (we all are at some point) but precisely about offering them something that is different, that they will never find in the corner of their house and make tourism sustainable over time.
The Portuguese state tourism agency has displayed a map of routes linked to literature. Tours with visits that lead to the house-museum of Miguel Torga in Coimbra, discover the city of Vila do Conde through the romantic eyes of the writer José Régio or stroll through the places that inspired Camilo Castelo Branco in Famalicão, near Braga , and even taste a menu based on his literature in a couple of restaurants. The great writer Eça de Queirós (The Crime of Father Amaro or El primo Basilio are masterpieces) has two possible routes: one in Sintra, very close to Lisbon, and another that leads to Santa Cruz do Douro. Pessoa, Saramago or the poet Florbela Espanca are other authors who have their routes away from the madding crowd of the most obvious tourist attractions.
Cultura/s packs its bags to Portugal to do a tasting of some of the literary routes in the Alentejo area, less visited than the great Portuguese hits (Lisbon, Algarve and Porto) but, precisely for this reason, full of unexpected surprises.
As I cross the peninsula thousands of meters high I am reading Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), one of the great Portuguese writers. In The Book of Restlessness, he writes with his mixture of enlightenment and defeat: “Travels are travelers. What we see is not what we see, but what we are”. The arrival in Lisbon is majestic: a coastline of clean ocean waters, the spectacular arrival of the Tagus into the sea, the two-kilometre 25 de Abril bridge that was designed by a New York engineering studio and is reminiscent of the Brooklyn Bridge.
It’s been years since I visited Lisbon. I remember a certain decadent drowsiness and a background of seagull music. Wandering indolently is now more difficult, you have to be aware of bumping into the flood of tourists. It seems to me that I am in the center of Barcelona, ??in any center of any European city: Nesspresso, a spectacular Tous store, H
As I travel well guided, they point me to the door of the Sá da Costa Bookstore and upon entering the revelry is left behind. It is a bookstore where books of a certain age are mixed with second-hand commercial novels in several languages, old maps, miniature books, old travel brochures and junk. I find Ortega and Juan Marsé on the shelf dedicated to books in Spanish. Marsé would have liked to know himself in this promiscuity between high and low culture. Lisbon is still a city with bookstores. The historic Ferin, which in 1840 went from a bookbinding workshop to a bookstore, has a small bookbinding museum in its basement. Bookseller Raquel Cardoso tells me that they still have some of the original furniture and also lifelong customers, “but also other younger ones who are interested in their history, genealogy, politics and literature books.” There are no queues like in the Santa Justa elevator, but they survive.
We leave Lisbon behind and enter the Alentejo. The landscape becomes more interior, more silent, with more space to let go of the gaze. The phrase that opens Raised from the ground (Levantado do Chão), the book that José Saramago wrote in these lands, comes to mind: “What there is most on earth is landscape”. In the town of Lavre, (in the municipality of Montemor-o-Novo) Nuno awaits us together with the people who take care of the literary path of this fundamental novel by Saramago, where he found that voice of harsh tenderness that he never heard of anymore. he would abandon as a writer and lead him to the Swedish Nobel Academy.
We are located to start the route next to a modest bar, the Quiosque A Bolota, just as the protagonist of the novel, Domingo Maltiempo, began in a tavern, his bad steps in Alentejo. Saramago, a communist in that Europe of the 1960s and 1970s in which communism had not lost its glow of social rebellion, exercised such combative journalism that in 1975 he ended up being fired from the Diário de Notícias and decided to make his way in literature. In the small town of Montemor-o-Novo they asked for books for his modest library and Saramago decided to bring them a few of his own. Through the streets of a town plunged in silence, they take us to that small library where Saramago arrived with his books on his back. He liked that place so much, in the middle of the wheat fields and shadows of cork oaks, “that pale and hot soil”, that he returned to stay a few weeks in that Alentejo town that did not ask for money or roads, that asked for books. And they welcomed him with open arms.
The route of Raised from the ground in Lavre shows us the cooperative converted into a home for outsiders where Saramago slept in those months of 1977. They explain to us that he went to eat at the Besugas’ house and that he ended up becoming one of the family. Saramago was always scribbling in his notebook. He liked to listen to the stories of the people there and that of João Domingos Serra caught his attention, who had even written about the adventures of his family in a modest book entitled Uma Família do Alentejo. Saramago’s narrative force and the truth of the Serra’s story (transformed in his novel into the Maltiempo) give rise to a hypnotic work. The route takes us to the Serra/Maltiempo house: humble, low, with a tiny window. We can also see what was the store of Maria Saraiva, who told Saramago so many stories about the place on lazy afternoons and who appears in the novel as Maria Graniza.
The town is calm and secluded, with those colors of the white and ocher houses typical of the area. We left the bandstand behind and immediately entered the fields. A path leads to the Old Bridge of Lavre. Nuno explains that Saramago liked to do this route, sometimes with the young people of the town, sometimes with older people who told him stories, sometimes alone. A beautiful green corner with the old stone rejuvenated by the moss. To celebrate Saramago, in the middle of the path our guides take olives and high-grade wine from the region from inside a basket, the kind that stains the glass with garnet. When we head towards a nearby restaurant, the photographer who accompanies us, Paolo Canas, tells me: “For us, Levantado do bye is a bible from Alentejo”. We eat fish soup, pork chop that melts in your mouth, and some delicious migas with orange segments that Nuno tells the owner are the same ones his grandmother used to make. He explains to me that these literary routes “attract tourism that is not massive, that is interested in local things, that talks to people. A tourism that does not change the physiognomy of the places because that is precisely what interests it”.
We arrived in Evora and it had not occurred to me that I could find a Roman temple from the 1st century BC. C. in the middle of its urban area. Saramago’s Alentejo route continues at the elegant Evora Library, housed in an imposing 17th-century building. Here the writer came to consult, above all, newspapers from the beginning of the 20th century to set the scene for his novel, such as Democrazia do Sul, the most progressive newspaper of the time. The kindness of the librarian (and the safe-conduct that he provides us to be accompanied by a representative of Turismo de Portugal) allows us to access his secret area: the space closed to the public where valuable books from the 15th century or incunabula are kept (the first books printed after the Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. Its beautiful pages are moving because they have all the marks of the passing of the centuries and of all the readers who had them in their hands.
We slept in a convent converted into a delicious hotel surrounded by olive groves. The next day we headed towards Vila Viçosa, another town in Alentejo with a literary route. His is dedicated to the writer Florbela Espanca. Her poems are passionate, maverick, rapt. “To be a poet… is to condense the world into a single cry.” The Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa mentioned Espanca in an elegy as “Dreaming soul / Twin sister of mine”.
Joaquim Pernas, a restorer who worked at the Lisbon carriage museum before settling in Vila Viçosa, opens up the house where he lived, which is now just waiting for municipal permits to be a public facility. He talks about Florbela Espanca with the feeling with which he would talk about an old friend of hers: “She was a child prodigy who wrote her first verses when she was eight years old. Those who read it, admired it”. She was one of the first women in Portugal to go to university and was married several times. She “she claimed her right not to depend on men.”
The house belonged to the family, but for twenty years the City Council did not agree with them for the purchase. Finally, the family put it up for sale in a real estate agency. This house, so that scholars, readers or the curious can soak up the atmosphere where the writer lived, is preserved thanks to the passion, tenacity and money of the Angolan artist Kina Maua N’Pango. At school in Angola, a teacher read poems by Florbela Espanca to them and she was struck by them. Kina Maua N’Pango (people here affectionately call her Doña Frankina) found out that the house of that poet that she admired so much was going to be sold out of control and she bought it and paid for the rehabilitation so that Florbela’s memory would not be lost. . Pernas explains that the house, the recovery of the writer’s objects and the fitting out as a museum have been carried out by the efforts of N’Pango, without any contribution from the City Council. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. The City Council did put something in that house: some smelly garbage cans in front of the door.
We visited the cemetery, the most monumental and white because we are in a region that exports marble to the whole world. Florbela’s tomb was paid for by a Group of Friends of Florbela Espanca from Vila Viçosa and some artists. We salute Doña Frankina, a generous, vital and smiling woman by videoconference. We eat a glorious tomato soup in a restaurant and drink a strong wine from the region that tastes like freshly trodden grapes.
But the Florbela Espanca route has more. In the afternoon Tiago Passão Salgueiro, vice president of the Municipal Chamber of Vila Viçosa, welcomes us at the town hall. He laments the lack of sensitivity of the previous municipal government with Florbela. In fact, there is a nice photo of the poet in the room where we are. He tells us that the municipality has bought the place where her father had the photographic studio and they are gathering material from the writer. We are going to see that house-studio that the city council is rehabilitating. “The idea is to team up with Doña Frankina and create a circuit in Vila Viçosa”. As on other occasions, in matters of culture, politicians act late and in tow, but better late than never.
Elvas, very close to the border with Extremadura, is a walled city that must be entered by expert driving through its stone gates. It was walled and the fortress was built, which ended up becoming a prison over the years, to protect itself from the Spanish. But now the borders have been erased. A friendly local guide, who speaks Spanish with an Extremaduran accent, tells us that she goes to the gym in Badajoz, that she is a ten-minute drive away and can be seen from the battlements.
Hobby magazines and a Pope Francis prayer book are sold in the shop where the Portuguese lotus voucher is sealed. The Elvas between walls seems to have stopped all the clocks. But there are people who don’t stop, like Tania Rico, a senior technician at the Câmara Municipal de Elvas. She has organized several literary tours. One is with one of the greats of Portuguese literature, Camilo Castelo Branco, who sets one of his works in Elvas: A cruz do Corcovado. Another route is with the Portuguese poet, essayist and politician António Sardinha. Some plates dot these routes between her streets and Tania Rico is in contact with local restaurants so that the literary presence is transferred to her menus. In fact, the walk through Elvas is in itself a literary act, which is why its streets are suggestive and stopped in time. A strong downpour means that it reaches us just to complete the route and we have to run away.
The rain brings us back to Lisbon. A trip to Paraguay prevents me from meeting Pilar del Río, the widow of José Saramago who fights tooth and nail to keep her literary legacy alive. But she, always dynamic, puts me in contact with one of her assistants at the Saramago Foundation, Ricardo Biel. The foundation, inaugurated in 2012 and located in the magnificent A Casa dos Bicos building, gathers manuscripts, editions of Saramago’s books and even keeps his old typewriter. She tells me that one of Pilar del Río’s concerns is that the books are available, that they continue to be alive. Also to continue Saramago’s idea that his foundation is not a museum but a place where there are book presentations, music, workshops and things don’t stop happening. She reminds me that it is a private foundation, which is held by copyright. It is José Saramago himself who drives her with his work.
On the way out I stop at the olive tree where his ashes rest and the noise of Lisbon stops. They gave me a copy of his Trip to Portugal and I stop to leaf through it in front of the quay with the columns. I read in his pages: “No trip is final.” The waves of the Tagus River sound against the rocks, now turned into an ocean and then I do feel that I have returned to Lisbon.
