The Portugal that is left over from Lisbon
My entry into college dates back to 1977. At that time there was no law course in Porto and between Coimbra and Lisbon I opted for the Catholic University of Lisbon at a time when in the official faculties it was more politics than the teaching of Law.
In my first year, I had 260 colleagues from all over the country, but the overwhelming majority of them lived in the Lisbon-Estoril-Cascais axis. As I’ve always been on a special offer (except for no malice in this sentence), after a few weeks I had already established contact with almost everyone. Even today, I am not surprised that even without my colleagues having any kind of label on their foreheads, it was with those who had traveled from the North and Center regions that these contacts developed more quickly into friendships. In no first year, the only exception is perhaps Palma Ramalho who, being “southern and elitist” was a staunch FC Porto fan like me (Palma Ramalho who is now president of Novo Banco and so I found the change from green to blue in official color of that bank).
Set the context, what interests me to tell about my university experience in Lisbon is that what specifically surprised me in that frequency of 1.OIn the first year, it was noticed that the overwhelming majority of my colleagues from the Lisbon-Estoril-Cascais axis, aged 17/18, had never visited Porto. Especially strange for me, who before this trip had already been to Lisbon, Estoril and Cascais several times on family outings, but also in school teams. And in both cases, I was always very curious about getting to know the country I had heard about, but I always wanted to know it up close and personal.
It was this astonishment that I remembered when I read Miguel Sousa Tavares’ chronicle in the last edition of the weekly “Expresso”, which I recommend reading. Summarizing what can be read there, MST, now with more time after having abandoned pure and hard journalism, revealed how delighted he was with the trips he has now made in the Portugal that remains outside Lisbon, with praiseworthy highlights for what he saw, by for example, in Porto, in Guimarães and Braga. It is worth reading to understand what happens in a centralized country like ours. This astonishment that the MST (by chance, even born in Porto) punches when it saw realities that are not only not as recent as this, but above all belies ideas made in which the MST itself incurred, shown well how easy it is to make unforgivable mistakes when manages an entire country without leaving Terreiro do Paço.
* Businessperson