Urban Society in Chaves, Portugal

Religion

There is great care taken to make the public gardens one of the most beautiful places in urban Chaves (photo by J.B. Cesar)

What are the people like in urban Chaves? Again a tough question to answer, with any attempt at an answer being highly subjective. Defining a people's character is never simple, and Chaves makes no exception. Travelogues tend to portray the Portuguese in general as "easy-going, smiling, patient, good-natured, but imbued with an inner saudade, a feeling variously defined as a nostalgia or melancholy." Let me point out that these travelogues tend to describe people in Lisbon, which is where most tourists spend their stay. Few come to Tras-os-Montes, which is considered an off-the-beaten path tourist destination. Tourists only come here if they have seen all the other places in the south first, and there are no foreigners who have come here to make their home, except for oddballs like me. In other words there are no written testimonials about the people here.

What I can say is only what I, as an American living in Chaves, have experienced and what other foreigners, and other Portuguese, who have lived abroad and who have moved here from Oporto or Lisbon, have said.

Yes, the people here are easy-going and surprisingly very tolerant. They rarely have radical opinions about any subject and have a "ive-and-let-live" outlook.

As for smiling, perhaps compared to Northern Europeans, or the French, they smile more, but compared to Mexicans or Brazilians, or most Americans, they smile less.

Patience is one quality they do tend to have, which can also be prejudicial as they tend to accept many horrible situations with a fatalistic inertia, expecting them to get better in time.

As for being good natured it all depends. The old people tend to look sad, perhaps due to their horrible pensions and poor medical care, but they still manage a weak smile when you say "hello" and talk to them. It is this appearance of melancholy which has attracted the attention of many foreign observers.

There is no tradition of lively, happy-go-lucky music. Even the popular songs and dances are done in a sad and melancholy way. Curiously, just across the border the Spanish are very different with their no-holds-barred Carnival.

Of course this sadness is not as bad as exaggerated by a Brazilian writer: "They like to suffer. They have always liked to suffer. They wake up and think, what will be my suffering for today? You have only to look at their faces in the street and you see that they are suffering. They are happy when they suffer. (Schifaizfavoire, by Mario Prata, p. 14.)

Often one's impression of a people is based on how one feels or if the weather is somber etc. Dark clothing worn by the people and an aged population can also add to the impression. One day I was with my wife's aunt, who was visiting from Brazil, in the main square, and she noticed that all the people who were seated around the square were sad, their heads bent, thoughtful. She asked the waitress why they were so sad. And she, young, pretty, with a smile on her lips, melancholically answered: we, the Flavienses, are like that, sad..."

The same aunt, who is very religious, hurried off on her first Sunday here to see her first Portuguese mass. Her comments when she returned: "So sad. All those old women, dressed in black, and the music, so sad. It would be hard to be a Catholic and go to church here."

The first word that comes up is "closed" (fechado). It is difficult to penetrate the outer shell of standoffishness worn by the Transmontano. They are not demonstrative in their emotions and definitely not outgoing. In some aspects they tend to bear out the hypothesis that "the higher one lives, the less one is extroverted and confiding, and the more one is suspicious and devious".

Very family oriented, they rarely invite anyone to their homes for a cup of coffee and a chat. Their weekend pleasure is to go to their village (they all seem to have come from a nearby village) and spend time with their older relatives or work in the fields.

Visitors from other countries have mentioned a trait of sadness about the Portuguese in general, and the Portuguese themselves say they are a sad people especially when compared with the Spanish or the Brazilians. Their national music--the Fado--is a good example of that as is the common everyday expression "tem que ser" (it has to be).

Again there are differences between the north and the south. Time after time people from Lisbon complain of the taciturn character of the Transmontano. Perhaps this is due to the rigorous winters and the horrible living conditions that used to exist in the villages here, or perhaps it is due to the oppressive, rigidly hierarchical stratification of village life that drove so many to emigrate.

Now of course it is common knowledge that for all generalizations there are opposite examples proving the first to be fallacious.

What was once a very closed rural society besot by illiteracy, inbreeding, religious superstition, class rigidity and absence of contact with the outside world is fast transforming itself into a more open, worldly, liberal urban society. Those who swore they would never touch foreign food now eat pizza or hamburgers. Those who thought wearing shorts was effeminate now see their children doing so. Earrings on men are even starting to appear, and many girls even have their hair dyed red. Salazar is probably spinning in his grave.

At present the process is ongoing and will take a generation at least, but rest assured that a visitor to Chaves twenty years from now will see a completely different world.

Quality of Life

Population centers like Chaves are in many ways far from the world of the isolated villages of the north.

Living conditions are not high when compared to the majority of EU countries, but when compared to what they were twenty years ago a near miracle has occurred. A region that had almost no doctors, no dentists, precarious communications, few telephones, almost no sewage system, and an inadequate educational system that mainly educated a small minority, has seen almost unbelievable change over the last two decades.

In Chaves, for example, there are very attractive homes, usually on tree-lined streets. One has only to drive to neighboring Verín, in Galicia, to see how drab urban life can be. Chaves is much more colorful, with a variety of construction. But the good has come with the bad. In the last ten years there has been a surge of apartment construction, but little attention has been paid to gardens around these buildings and some of them take on a dilapidated look with time. There is also the custom of building stores on the ground floors in order to get more profit from what might just be empty space, but often these stores are not sold and remain empty for long periods of time.

In Chaves there are sidewalks on most streets and large areas for walking or jogging. The town especially has a substantial green area for recreation near the river, which includes four tennis courts. Other sports facilities are poor though. There are almost no basketball courts—probably because it is not a popular sport—and the swimming pool is small and inadequate. There is also no outdoor swimming pool so many people go to Spain to go swimming in the summer. No one in town has thought to build a bicycle lane near the river or a path for joggers. Perhaps in the future these might be built.

In towns like Chaves and Vila Real there are large supermarkets and availability of almost all goods and services. A large shopping center is being constructed in Vila Real with multi-cinemas. There are high-quality restaurants, but there is obviously a shortage of international cuisine due to the lack of foreigners in the region and contact with foreign cultures. So far the only international restaurants are Chinese, Italian, and American fast food.

In conclusion, we can say that the quality of life in a small town in the district is reasonably high. There is no air pollution, and water pollution is being dealt with. The crime rate is very low. Although there is not the same excitement of the big urban center, or a variety of ways to spend your leisure time, there are also not the inconveniences of traffic jams, pollution, high crime rate, and accompanying stress.

Road Communications

These have improved dramatically over the last two decades. Every small village, no matter how isolated is now connected with the outside world by a tarmac road. Even though the area has seen the loss of the railroad the highways have got better and now it takes only an hour and a half to drive from the north end of the district at Vila Verde da Raia to Peso da Régua on the Douro.

Porto is now less than an hour away from Vila Real and about two hours from Chaves. Lisbon is five hours from Chaves while Madrid is also five. With the excellent highway on the Spanish side it is now possible for people in Chaves to be in Orense in fifty minutes to visit a hypermarket with lower prices than in their town.

Telephones and Electricity

The telephone, which once was a luxury, has now become something common. Ten years ago installation in the large towns took one to two months. Now in Chaves in three to five days a telephone is installed. Many people of course have mobile phones, even cleaning ladies or construction workers. Service is excellent.

Electricity has now reached even the most backward hamlet. Connection is quick and efficient and there is a team of troubleshooters to solve any emergency at no cost. In the larger towns many apartment blocks are now equipped with piped in gas for heating and cooking. Many families still use bottled gas; electric cookers are rare, probably because gas is so much faster. In large towns all houses are connected to sewage systems. Chaves has already finished an ETAR (Unit of Treatment of Urban Residues) and the sewage no longer flows directly into the Tâmega. Vila Real is adding the finishing touches to a massive sewage-treatment system that will finally make the Corgo River clean again.

Medical and Dental Care

Education