GEOGRAPHICAL MEMORIES, IN THE LITERARY STYLE OF MIGUEL TORGA*

The Mountains and the Sea in the North

 

In my beloved northern lands, where the Mountains and the Sea dance an eternal waltz, I find the essence of my country. The Mountains, robust and majestic, rise like a granite poem, whispering stories to the wind among the deep valleys, rooted secrets in time that only the stones understand.

 

It is a scenery where duality is drawn in the outlines of the landscape. In the Mountains, green unfolds in endless terraces, rugged cliffs, dense woods, hills covered in shrubs and brooms. A constant struggle for life unfolds before the attentive eyes of nature. It is the pulse of the earth, the echo of the memories of the soils, life tearing through the ground that sustains it.

 

Downwards, I come across the Sea, which welcomes the Mountains with affection. The waves break on sandy beaches, leaving foam as a trail of white lace. Fishermen, heirs of an ancient tradition, face the ocean with respect, in a millennial dance of survival.

 

In this duality, the Mountains and the Sea are accomplices in a unique story, like two inseparable halves of a beating heart. It is a symbiosis of contrasts that defines the character of the North, a region where the indomitable force of nature unites with the resilience of its people. In the Mountains, we find the firmness that defies storms; in the Sea, the fluidity that adapts to the tides of life.

 

In the North that inhabits me, I witness the poetry sculpted in the landscape, the eternal waltz, the story that is told without words, a narrative intertwined in the most authentic fabric of the Portuguese soul.

 

 

* This poetic portrait, born from the collaboration between artificial intelligence and human mind, seeks to capture the essence of the northern region of Portugal, in the unique literary style and sensitivity of Miguel Torga. This great Portuguese writer, poet, short story writer, and memoirist, born in Trás-os-Montes in 1907, knew, like no other, how to immortalize in literature the landscapes that inhabited him. Medical doctor by profession, he found an endless source of inspiration in the ruggedness of the Mountains and the vastness of the Sea.