Algarve is not Portuguese. And the Algarvians are the most Portuguese. Portugal, in fact, begins when it begins to anticipate the Tagus, from south to north. But this is just a Portugal. There is the other, who discusses the Alentejo, this other mystery, and reaches its peak when one reaches the other sea. This always desired, the most desired land: after all, it was a lot, for a long time, to reach this south limit. Lots of blood, a lot of backwardness, a lot of hope. And it has come. Even if it were always Portugal and the Algarve, these approximate kingdoms in a desire for unity. “Alentejo, algarve and hunting dogs, is all the same breed,” he said.
The Algarve, until the twentieth century, was a land to which they were sent degraded. Internal degrades. Cattle thieves in Vinhais would serve a sentence for Castro Marim. Lisbon infanticides go to Silves. And the pity was to stay there. To men, to suffer in the salt, in the legs, the wounds. And the many lands like Castos de Homiziados, lands that, on the border, defended the Guadiana and the Atlantic, who sounded here in, and welcomed the fugitives of justice, asylum places for those who wanted to start over.
It was also pirate land, the nearest north of Africa, the most susceptible to attacks on its long and friendly coast, on their sweet sea, for those who resigned there, good or evil. And, in the other sense, land of emigration. Brazil, Venezuela, less Africa. And even Lisbon …
It has always been land of encounters in the accelerated mismatch of people. In a few kilometers apart, those who lived from the sea and those who lived from the earth were crossed immediately, in a dialogue of barter and silences between radical lives in their difference. Dry and brandy figures were exchanged for Carapaus and Sardines, an allegory of worlds that only played at a road meeting, between bicycles and alcohas. Then, much later, came the travel and tourism industry and everything changed. Of course, people’s generality lives better, like all of us. It has shoes, there is a doctor who does not appear by charity, has school.
But greed and speed came, these externalities of the so -called successes, which usually decline in people stepping on others toward a new world, always promised, always luminous. One of the best climates and landscapes in the world was taken advantage of to create a harassment of other degrades, episodic and volunteers, whom the places served. And this brought ecstasy and subsequent depression in an endless cycle. And it brought destruction and, worse, ugliness. Probably no Portuguese has never been so mistreated as an Algarve to live in the Algarve. Spoiled, even by itself, what life has given you without asking in return.
This is the base story of the people who now vote for the arrival like none among us. Those who do not have a doctor or teacher, because even they have no money to pay home income. And those who feel forgotten and thirsty for revenge, even about themselves. They see, at the bottom of the road, the bicycle mirage with the gap – or perhaps gap – sardines, running slowly, in the back of his head. Deep down, we are always a perfect idea of exchange and harmony, as if there was no pain on any doubt. But it can be just an alcohon, which is said to be “who makes intrigue.”
Professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Lisbon