RIVER of GOLD & RED
Port still flows through the economies, politics and culture of Douro Valley settlements like dark red blood courses through your pulsing heart.
Wart-ah?” she asks, barely getting her mouth around the English, but then, without hesitation, she pries open my sweaty palm with powerful flour-caked mitts and shoves a glass brimful with rust-coloured liquid into it. I lap up the spillage from my tacky wrist and knock back a mouthful against the heat of the day. Holy Mother of God, that ain’t no water. Wordlessly, Rosalia returns to her bread kneading, no punchline, no tell-tale smirk, nothing.
Elementary mistranslation, perhaps? No, I prefer to ponder a more romantic view: that she has elevated her town’s homegrown wine to water-of-life status, the way the Scots pedestal whisky. For donkey’s years, Rosalia has hand-made bread in her family’s World Heritage-protected, wood-fired bakery in an anonymous back lane in the village of Favaios. She piously shapes each loaf into a cross for good fortune; provincial Portuguese paganism meets Roman-Catholic ceremony.
Rosalia was once a housemaid for the most infamous leader in Portuguese modern history, dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, before the Carnation Revolution of 1974 eventually stubbed out his party’s suppression without a single salvo. She doesn’t talk about those days these days.
The uncomplicated petite parish of Favaios, where women still toil in communal
