Monchique, a little village in the Algarve

Monchique, a little village in Portugal

For the time being, I am in Monchique, a little village in the southwestern part of the Algarve, the most southern region of Portugal. It is april and the temperature during the day about 20 centrigrades and 10 at night. It’s never cold, they say and mean frost is unknown. Every night I try the wood burner – in vain. There is too much moist in the air and the wood is too wet. In the hills, the weather is often more cloudy than in the valley, but the temperature is also a bit more moderate. The village has about 6.500 inhabitants, shopkeepers, café owners, farmers, builders and street cleaners. It is built on the slope of a hill about 700 m high. Road traffic centers on a square that connects an upper and lower part of the village. A well maintained park covers the lower slope, most of the houses are built on the upper side. Tourists almost never climb down, but al ways walk uphill through the narrow streets of cobble stones. Or they stay in the restaurants along the square and its water works, a fountain and its water lifting mill in miniature. I didn’t count the tourists nor the pubs, pastelaria’s, restaurants or cafés. They are many and I will visit them in the weeks ahead. It will be quite a job. Hopefully, it will help me to get used to the montagnards of this village. They are small, broad shouldered people in old fashioned woolen clothing. Most of the men wear a small hat. The older people carry a walking stick, because of arthritis or other illness of old age. However, they still stroll up and down hill. They have a steady pace and patience knowing life will be shortened when hurrying. The people here live already for centuries the same kind of life, their lifestyle never changed. Do they live in this age?

Yes, they do live in this age, this beginning of the 21 th century, because they like to forget the past but not the tradition. They are traditional; they dress traditionally and think traditionally. They are never in a hurry, but keep an eye on the ball even if there is no ball. Climbing, they know where they go and will arrive. Time is included in their behavior, wrapped in their fashion, fixed in their mind. Time is out of order and present all around. The people’s movements are slow, but steady and simultaneously senseless while without aim. Sometimes the people stop and look around as if for a moment they lost their goal or to show they still are on their way. At times, they interrupt their climb to talk to friends or neighbors or even strangers and smile, because they can’t communicate although they feign doing so. They talk about the weather, the start of the spring, the pain they feel in their old legs. And so they give rest to their body taking a breath for the next stretch of the street. Standing on three legs they look solid and well balanced, firm and decisive. As soon as they start walking again, I see their fragility and frailty, the efforts to find a steady pace, the old age they try to hide. Though they cannot mask who they are, they all look alike because of their traditional dress. I don’t know them personally and therefore they are to me a kind of people, a sort of beings, a category of persons acting as actors in an outdoors theater, personae wearing a mask. Monchique is a mountain, its inhabitants are montagnards. I start to find my way in the mountains, later I will try to understand the people.