A COZY EARTHQUAKE-PROOF HOME IN SOUTH PORTUGAL AN AVEIRO BOAT WITH A PICTURE ON ITS NOSE This smart-looking pleasure craft is anchored at the old Aveiro quay in north-central Portugal. Many of these high-prowed. Norse-looking boats ply the canals of the marshy, rice-growing region between Oporto and Coimbra. CH National Geographic Society MAIDS OF MINHO PROVINCE Autochrome Lumière by Gervais Courtellemont But when Sunday comes, or a feast day, they squeeze their broad feet into wooden-soled shoes and Barefooted, these women work afield all week. limp happily away to mass or fiesta. Here, style calls for more and longer petticoats. PORTUGAL Rugged Scenic Beauty, Colorful Costumes, and Ancient 66 BY HARRIET CHALMERS ADAMS AUTHOR OF "A LONGITUDINAL JOURNEY THROUGH Chile," "ADVENTUROUS SONS OF CÁDIZ," "ACROSS FRENCH AND SPANISH MOROCCO," ETC., ETC., IN THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE "T "T'VE never been in Portugal," said the man with national prejudices, "but I'm sure it isn't worth visiting-little country; small, dark, lazy people; revolutions." I have twice journeyed through Portugal and am fascinated by its marked scenic beauty, unique architecture, ancient survivals in costumes and customs, to say nothing of its glorious historical associations. It has a sturdy, industrious peasantry. Many of its northerners are fair and blue-eyed. Last summer we waited a week in the Spanish seaport of Vigo for the current. Portuguese rebellion to calm down, before heading south. We were entering on a longitudinal and an altitudinal journey through Portugal. From the summits of wooded hills back from the coast we were to look down on the Lusitanian lowlands, on limpid streams winding through emerald valleys, on flower-spangled meadows reaching down to pine-fringed shores. Noble Iberian rivers flow westward to the Atlantic. There is one which the Spaniards call the "Miño," the Portuguese, the "Minho.". The international bridge which spans it unites green Galicia, in northwest Spain, with northernmost Portugal. On the Spanish side of the river lies the gray fortress-town of Tuy, frowning across upon its Portuguese neighbor, Valença do Minho, whose crumbling battlements crown the hill. We slip across the bridge by train, or automobile, in these prosaic days; but Tuy and Valença belong to a turbulent age of border warfare, of hard, valiant men, of blades dripping blood.* *See, also, "The Greatness of Little Portugal," by Oswald Crawfurd, in the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE for October, 1910. Leaving Vigo at noon, the traveler can reach Oporto, Portugal's second largest city, at 6 the same evening; but it is well to break the journey at Valença, Vianna do Castello, Braga, and Guimarães, four interesting, historic towns. A MEDIEVAL MILITARY POST AT VALENÇA Although the need of frontier garrisons. is past, Valença still is a military post. Medieval in aspect, hidden behind great ramparts, the old warrior town surmounts a hill high above the Minho. Over the moat, through the tunnel, and up the narrow, winding streets Our automobile "honked," warning swarms of children, cats, and chickens to run to safety. Valença's architecture differs from that of Spanish Tuy, across the way. Portuguese houses run to granite, painted white, with trimmings in the natural hue; to blue and white glazed wall tiles, the manufacture of which is a national industry inherited from the Moors (see, also, Color Plates V and XV). Leaving the automobile for the railway, we found the coaches on local trains not always so clean and comfortable as those in Spain; the customs and train guards less neatly garbed; the paper currency, in exchanging our Spanish pesetas for Portuguese escudos, more ragged. But these were minor details. The people were hospitable and courteous. The customs guard even put on clean, white cotton gloves before examining our luggage! "The garden of Portugal," as the Portuguese call their lovely ever-green northern country, is nearly as rich in flowers as California.* Even the railway stations *See, also, "The Woods and Gardens of Portugal," by Martin Hume, in the NATIONAl GeoGRAPHIC MAGAZINE for October, 1910. blood and heritage from their Galician neighbors. Both speak more or less the same language, the dialect of the Spanish Gallegos being classed as Portuguese, a tongue less changed than Castilian from the Latin current when Rome ruled the Peninsula, but influenced by many contacts, Celtic, Arabic, and aboriginal Brazilian among them. It has even certain affinities with the French. "Between 1580 and 1640, when Spain ruled Portugal, Portuguese writers and the people in general endeavored to render the language as different as possible from the Spanish, and the gulf has kept on widening," a learned Portuguese once told me. Although illiterate, these northern peasants are industrious, independent, and they own their land. Politicians. and military chiefs, in Lisbon and Oporto, may come and go, townsmen dodge revolutionary bullets; but in the country stalwart men and handsome, full-bosomed women toil peacefully in the open. From the little stone houses with thatched roofs comes the click of the loom (see, also, Color Plate XVI). Drawn by A. H. Bumstead A SKETCH MAP OF PORTUGAL are embowered in red and pink rambler roses. There are picturesque mills, with huge water wheels, beside the clear streams, and every fern-bordered patch of cultivated ground is so carefully tended that not a blade of grass seems out of place. Trellised six feet above the ground, on tall, granite posts, are sturdy vines whose grapes yield the tart red wine of the region. OXEN YOKED DIFFERENTLY FROM THOSE OF SPAIN Along the well-paved, tree-bordered road clogs a man in wooden-soled shoes carrying a long goad to urge on a pair of |