Tales from the Heath and the Mountain

Literature is not built solely on established writers. "(...) All those, humble, ignored by critics and even by the most dedicated scholars, who weekly and monthly fill the pages of our very rich provincial press - or rare locally published volumes - with their short stories, with their chronicles, with their personal visions of events (national or local) and daily life; all those, and they are legion, who write well, think well and are, more often than not, a genuine source where our eyes can be cleansed of the filth with which urban life and official literature burden us. All of them are, day by day, building a parallel Portuguese literature, which every now and then emerges from oblivion and reveals itself to us with force, with violence, with an irresistible beauty, with a charm as if straight from the initial moment of Creation. It comes from the pen of provincial doctors, of bachelors and graduates - conservatives, notaries and judges - of teachers and parish priests and, as we will see here, it also comes, unexpectedly, from the pen of entrepreneurs from the wider world - the great wide world - who, having left their homeland decades ago, continue to love it, to remember it, to describe it, in their grand or naive dramas and comedies, with the purity of spring water and small streams, but also with the force of the violent waterfalls of the great rivers that pass nearby, are seen from afar and go far away. Sebastião Alves is such a case. Having left his homeland in the prime of his youth, immersed in many and varied businesses for so many decades, co-founder, with the author of these lines, of one of the most important and respected Portuguese publishing houses, he here records two dozen stories of the heath and the mountains, experienced by him or by those he knew in his youth, or of which he learned from older people from whom he must have heard them, in that tradition of oral storytelling so precious to our collective memory. Written with the freshness of natural things; vigorous and healthy, significantly increasing the cultural heritage of the Beira region, that region which has given Portugal so many important men in culture, politics, and business. (...)"