I recall the days when we moved to a “romaria” and it would give nothing of what the photographer was looking for. Not even a lousy picture to which it would be worth looking at a second time. Garbage, he said. But after we lived again moments through conversation, remembering people, actors on a stage with an immense dome of awnings and paliums of damask, and we would smile, burst in laughter, or even give a tenderly comment on that sympathetic old lady or on that beautiful girl who smiled at us. After all, it had been worthwhile. The truth (we say this without hesitation and in the simplest manner) is that <i> all </ i> is worth in a festival at Alto Minho…

This word, difficult to translate, represents an object not easy to understand. Do not quite understand it the non-believers and even believers have serious difficulties to explaining it. But, in Alvarães, inhabits warm and cheerful people, among petals, which builds them from the ground and understands them like nobody else. There, where the pottery kilns were transformed into wild flowers, you need not be a believer to admire the things that men do for faith and to become, for life, friends of a people.

The glycemic index of a pilgrimage is extremely low and it’s excessive consumption is even desirable. Of course, then goes to each one what they want toto do once there : to pray to the saint, to meet friends and drink a few drinks or, simply, to buy cotton candy so the spoiled brats don’t upset you much all night long.

And the improbability of certain moments … The Romeiros~Pilgrims by Paulo Alegria, on paper in a digital world. Ah, when I hold the book in my hand, smell the fresh paint and the hard bump grinding nuts for the effort in the glue and in the wire. When I open it and see my people, my childhood, my elder from Alto-Minho smiling and telling the world that it runs but they stay put. When I feel that, to me as to Paulo we’ll probably feel like crying [but we won't] not believing in the trail that passed until the cutter drops on the last thick sheets. The dirt roads, the winding in the soil and in the minds of many [barriers], the trail up to the tent of Quim, Anabela or Pedro under a sun fire rain and a white chapel that greets us at the top [of centuries]. When I feel it on Saturday, October 14, at 6:00pm., at the Museu do Traje (Costumes Museum) in Viana do Castelo, I want everyone to be there to see us [and to see the exhibition and buy the work because it's a  sin if you don't]. Maybe we will know each other (the pilgrims as well) and become better people, just to exchange a few words. My land has this strength, this always happens when we speak there.

Trees give us a lot. So much so, that it is not even worth describing, in these few lines, which everyone already knows. Hold us, perhaps, the assurance that if there is something in them that can escape our understanding, there won’t certainly be the love that they gives us in a day of pilgrimage. To everyone, without exception.

A Portuguese man (or woman) always feels stronger when walking through the fog. It was passed to his (or her) head, along the generations who jumped over the centuries, the idea of the Empire (later, when it weakened, they invented another, a Fifth one) that was vast (later they said, wrongfully) from Minho to Timor. Minho, of course, was the head and the beginning of everything…

I often saw my father going to the sea. He told me that his grandfather had also been a fisherman. Then I saw my husband going and, later, my son, on his new boat. But, for many years now, there is this morning that compensates for everything and we don’t go out to the sea. The Senhora d’Agonia goes in our turn. We just transport her and stay there, by her side…

«Who went to sea, lost his place!». He didn’t understand what she was talking about, but entered the game, taken by her smile. An  incomprehensible tug trespassed his chest. He felt the sea brise more intensely, lightly dragged by the wind. The grandmother arrived, took the basket of vegetables and growled: “You look like a fool, boy.” He replied that he was just playing, but soon regretted and felt stupid for saying that. A few years later, they will tell him that one cannot love as a kid, that everything was just childish fantasies. Hopefully he will understand that this is a lie, but only he will know.

There are days in our lives that become memorable. Sometimes, they end like complex stories told in the family, on winter nights and around the fireplace where our grandmother cooked the raw and salted pork meats in black iron tripod pots. Or, then, it stays one or another smile exchanged with a stranger, that will be a lover for life. But in the Alto Minho, young women, mordomas, they add yet another day that will remain in their memories like light on a sheet of silver bromide. They will tell this beautiful story, many years away, to other young girls who will want to hear them and see them with their eyes gleaming, sometimes brimming with water.

The train goes by, suddenly, above the path, and its drag shakes the sambacus that flank the rails. The same ones who, kindly, donated their green leaves to cover some litters. Let us salute the bushes as we pass by in the regional train to Nine, in between the way stations of Alvarães and Senhora das Neves.