Explore The Minho
It’s worth making plans to arrive in BARCELOS, 20km west of Braga, for the Thursday market, the Feira de Barcelos. The great weekly event of southern Minho, it takes place from around dawn until late afternoon on the Campo da República – aka Campo da Feira – a vast open square in the centre of town. At other times, Barcelos idles along at a small-town pace and, with a few historical sights and an attractive riverside location, it’s an enjoyable place to spend half a day. Other events to catch are the Festa das Cruzes (Festival of the Crosses) on May 3 and, on the last Saturday of July, a folklore festival in Barcelinhos, just across the river, with live music and fireworks.
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Feira de Barcelos
Feira de Barcelos
The centre of Barcelos is dominated by the enormous main square, Campo da Feira, site of the weekly market, the Feira de Barcelos, the pick of Minho’s many markets. The region is made up of hundreds of tiny, walled smallholdings, rarely more than allotments, and many people here are just selling a few vegetables, some fruit, eggs, or cheese from the family cow. In addition to rows of village women squatting behind baskets of their own produce, there are stalls selling a mind-boggling array of goods – fresh bread, clothes, kitchen and farm equipment plus less traditional lines in counterfeit sportswear and CDs.
The feira’s other big feature is local pottery and handicrafts, for Barcelos is at the centre of Portugal’s most active artesanato region. The pottery ware – louça de Barcelos – is characteristically brown with distinctive yellow dots and has been highly acclaimed since the 1950s when the earthenware figurines of Rosa Ramalho (marked RR) began to be collected throughout Europe. Though some of the handicrafts are Far Eastern imports, there are some good items to be found, sold at around half the price of outlets elsewhere, including items by Rosa’s granddaughter, Júlia Ramalho, marked JR. For more on ceramics, see the Museu de Olaria above. Other crafts, too, are impressive, especially the basketwork, traditionally carved yokes (cangas) and wooden toys.
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The Barcelos cock
The Barcelos cock
A stone cross in Barcelos’s archeological museum depicts the legend of the Galo de Barcelos, a miraculous roast fowl which rose from the dinner table of a judge to crow the innocence of a Galician pilgrim the judge had wrongly condemned to the gallows. The pilgrim, having wisely proclaimed “As surely as I am innocent will that cock crow if I am hanged”, got his reprieve, although it was a close-run thing. He was already in the noose when the bird stepped in but, by luck or maybe divine intervention, the knot caught and he survived. It’s a story that occurs in different forms in northern Spain, but the Barcelos rooster has taken a special hold on popular folk art, becoming a national symbol of Portugal and now, usually in pottery form, the ubiquitous emblem of Portuguese tourism.
