Everyone likes Portugal. Almost nobody knows its story. The sites that tell it are encyclopaedias or tourist brochures. This is the story told by someone who lives in it, twenty minutes from the castle in episode one — with the facts checked against the historians, and when it is legend rather than record, we say so.
House rules
Never make it up. Every episode is checked against at least one modern historian and, wherever possible, a source from the time. When a story is tradition or legend, it says so — and we tell it anyway, because legends also say who we are.
Every episode ends in the present: where that story can still be felt today. And every episode carries one detail from the ground — the castle, the rock, the church — that only someone from here would know.
Who writes this
Hugo. He lives in Minho, twenty minutes from the castle in episode one, and spends his days working with half the world — a good school for learning what other people know, and don’t know, about Portugal.
Images
The collages mix photography, public-domain engravings and portraits with illustration. No image is presented as a historical record.