On December 26, Saint Stephen day (the saint that brings this pagan festivity to the catholic realm), four young men wearing hats and colorful scarfs start the day by knocking on the houses at Ousilhão, a small village in the …
My weeks of confinement
At this point is kind of pointless to explain how hectic these past few months have been. But it still amazes me how in early March I was just doing a photowalk in Alfama, looking from all the pandemic …
A flashback…
Today I’m getting ready to a “ritual” that now I’m getting very used to: rushing the Christmas lunch, get my things ready and packed, do the long drive that takes me to the Northeastern corner of Portugal, where the very …
A fire doesn’t last for days, but years…
A fire, a forest fire in particular, doesn’t end after the firemen save all the hoses in their red trucks and leave, after all the smoke flies away and the burned smell finally disappears. In a way it keeps burning …
The doctor that heals
In dowtown Lisbon, right in front of a building where medicine has been taught for centuries, there’s a statue of a man. That man is called Sousa Martins, an accomplished doctor and teacher that lived in Lisbon during the 19th …
The place of the alder masks
Most of the masked traditions in Portugal happen in the Northwest of country, where the distance from the coast and the main cities, along with the mountains that stand in between, allowed these pagan traditions to survive. Lazarim is one …