Minho province in northwestern Portugal has played a crucial and unique role throughout the country's history. The cultural and political expansion that eventually led to formation of the Portuguese state began there during the twelfth century. Many of the sailors who navigated the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century were minhotos, as were many Portuguese who explored and farmed Brazil in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.
Minho today is a busy, industrious area where the small, independent farmer, deeply attached to the land he owns and cultivates, thrives. The primary crops are wine grapes--the famous vinho verde, which grows on pergolas--and maize, which is grown on small, irrigated terraces carved out of the hillsides. Minho is the most active and enterprising industrial region of Portugal. But it is also overpopulated, and during the twentieth century, minhotos have spread throughout the world in search of better-paying jobs. In the Alto Minho--the northern, hillier part of Minho--there is little industry. Most of the largely peasant population in that region lives by farming, with the help of money sent by relatives working abroad.
There is no clearer sign that a peasant culture is dying than when the new occupants of the land begin to forget those who have preceded them. When a peasant is no longer concerned with those who owned the land he farms, who lived in the house he inhabits, and who belonged to his parish, then the old peasant culture is doomed.
In Minho today, the contrary is precisely the case. A deep attachment to local community goes hand in hand with a profound concern with the dead. This is particularly visible because the minhotos are very religious, and popular religion continues to be lively and irrepressibly inventive.
Politically, Minho today is a predominantly conservative region, where the Roman Catholic Church has immense social power. Since A.D. 550, when Saint Martin of Dume converted the barbarian king Theodomirus to Christianity, minhotos have been Roman Catholic. Moorish occupation in the ninth century lasted a little over sixty years, and its influence was superficial in this region. Thus, the parish organization, so important in contemporary community relations, has been evolving uninterruptedly since the early days of Christianization.
Minho is divided into parishes, each with its own little church, its own cemetery, and its own local authority. Parishes in turn are divided into hamlets. The relationship between social groups and the land they occupy is intense. Hamlet and parish boundaries, therefore, are usually clearly demarcated. When that is not the case, disputes can develop. Hamlets are not villages, properly speaking; rather, they are a group of farmhouses in a clearly demarcated portion of land, to which residents feel they have joint rights. In hillier areas, houses are clustered together; in valleys, they are scattered loosely throughout the fields.
At a higher level, parishes are grouped into concelhos (boroughs), whose headquarters are market towns where weekly or fortnightly fairs are held. Regular visits to the market also provide opportunities for visiting the bank, the doctor, the lawyer, the tax officer, or the hardware merchant, as necessary. The secondary schools and the agricultural cooperatives are also in the towns, which are inhabited
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