Poelzl V. Culture Shock! Portugal: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette
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CultureShock! Portugal
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playwright of his time and is considered the founder of
classical Portuguese theatre. He wrote 44 farces, comedies
and dramas, and often made fun of social conventions and
criticised the religious and secular powers.
Without any doubt, Luís de Camões (1525–1580) was
Portugal’s most important literary fi gure of all time. Camões
was a poet, soldier and adventurer, who was banned from
court, exiled in Morocco, and spent almost 20 years in
India. Camões never became rich on his adventures, but
he succeeded in enriching his country with his unrivalled
Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads, 1572), an epic poem in the
classical tradition about Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India.
Camões’ epic raised the Portuguese discoveries to the level
of epic grandeur and gave a strong sense of identity to the
Portuguese nation as well as a sense of pride in its historic
accomplishments. The poetic power of his work remains alive
until this day, including his many love poems.
Spanish control of Portugal from 1580 to 1640 brought
an end to Portugal’s Golden Age, the country’s most prolifi c
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Hardly a month goes by without a vibrant
festival taking place around the country. Here
in the town of Tomar, Ribatejo, the
Festival
dos Tabuleiros
, where women wear large
headdresses, is held in the month of July.
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Fishermen sort out their haul at a port in
Lagos. Seafood serves as an important source
of income for the people of this coastal town.
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A lighthouse stands atop the Cabo de Roca in
Sintra, which is the westernmost point in Europe.
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Crowds teem on the streets of the popular
feira de Barcelos
, a huge market in Minho
where a smorgasbord of goods can be found.
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Portuguese fans add a splash of colour to the
the Estádio José Alvalade stadium in Lisbon
as they passionately cheer on their national
football team during an international match.
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Enjoying Portugal
181
era of artistic and literary production. Few notable works of
literature were produced until the great revival of Portuguese
literature during the 19th century.
The 19th Century
During the 19th century, all literary genres experienced
a remarkable revival carried out by a large number of
talented writers, poets and historians. Early on in the 19th
century, Portuguese writers began to absorb the infl uences
of the Romantic movement from abroad. The most notable
writers of this period were João Baptista de Almeida Garrett
(1799–1854), an accomplished poet and dramatist, and
Alexandre Herculano (1810–1877), a respected historian and
ethnographer. The foremost 19th century romantic novelists
were António Feliciano de Castilho (1800–1875) and Camilo
Castelo Branco (1825–1890). In the second half of the
19th century, modern infl uences such as Realism began to
spread among young writers. Eça de Queirós (1845–1900)
is considered the most accomplished Realist novelist of the
19th century, and his work profoundly infl uenced Portuguese
literature. Among his best-known novels are O Crime do Padre
Amaro (The Crime of Father Amaro, his fi rst novel, 1876), and
Os Maias (The Maias, 1888), a chronicle of several generations
of a Lisbon upper class family.
The Road to Modernity
Without any doubt, Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) was
Portugal’s most important modern poet. Although hardly
known during his lifetime, his posthumously published works
of poetry had a profound infl uence on Portuguese literature
and the arts. He was part of the modernist movement
that loosely united several other Portuguese poets of the
time, among them Mário de Sá Carneiro. Only one book of
poems was published during his lifetime (titled Mensagem),
although he wrote for several literary magazines. Pessoa
wrote poetry under several pseudonyms, among them
Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Alvaro de Campos and Bernardo
Soares, through which he expressed different world views,
sensitivities and personality traits.
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