Barcelos

I took a day trip to Barcelos yesterday. Every Thursday, the normal outdoor market is larger and locals come from all around to do their shopping here. It's not an antique market. It's really a market where you can buy produce, textiles, household goods, entertainment media, and even some farm implements. It covers all of Barcelos's large plaza.

Most people know Barcelos from the tale of the Cockerel of Barcelos. I won't repeat it here; if you don't know it, a web search or a visit to a Nando's restaurant will find it. That proud looking specimen of poultry is now the national mascot, on table cloths, and in pottery figurines. And Barcelos is milking the tourist connection for all it's worth. Here he is, posing outside the tourism office.

Is the story true? Here is a monument supposedly errected by the grateful pilgrim, the Senhor do Galo, saved by the bird. How could a cooked bird get up and crow? Supernatural? Ah, but the bit about the judge about to dine on the bird isn't in the Portuguese retelling of the incident. It simply says that the cockerel was in a cesta, a basket, and probably a live one. So the story got embellished somewhere along the line. Yet, could an innocent pilgrim be so lucky as to be saved by the crow at the right moment? Divine intervention? I suppose we don't hear about all the other poor innocents whose chosen manifestation of innocence failed to materialise. We only know of this one that got off the hook.