The Goddess of Viana do Castelo
Hidden in plain sight, who is she?
Viana do Castelo (“Viana of the Castle”) is an hour’s drive north of Porto, at the mouth of the Lima River. The most prominent feature of this pretty little city is the mountain that juts up, overlooking the harbour and the surrounding land. Much more than a photo op, Monte de Santa Luzia has been a strategic lookout and safe haven since before Roman times. In fact, it is one of the oldest inhabited places in Portugal, dating back 7,000 years to the Mesolithic era.
Teresa (my beloved spouse) and I stayed on this mountaintop in a beautiful old Belle Epoque era mansion converted into a hotel. In front of us, enhancing the view is a 20th-Century Basilica that looks as if it dropped straight from heaven. It glows gold in the setting sun. Behind us are the ruins of an Iron-Age Celtic fort town. I imagine for some readers this will not compute. Aren’t the Celts Irish and Scottish? Well, yes, but they came to the British Isles from somewhere, didn’t they? There are Celtic ruins in Brittany, Northwest France, as well as Galicia in Northwest Spain and Portugal. If you need any more proof, look to the bagpipes — which you can find in Brittany, Galicia, and, yes, here in northern Portugal.
The Iron-Age Celts in Portugal intermarried with earlier inhabitants and became the Lusitanians — a loose collection of tribes that modern Portuguese claim as their ancestors. It was very cool to wander the old Celtic ruins on Monte de Santa Luzia and see how these early Portuguese once lived. Their houses are round, grouped together in clusters that were apparently family compounds. The excavated portion is apparently only one-third of the original settlement, which must have been home to a thousand or more people, living safe and secure, high on the hill, behind the thick stone wall of their citadel.
…Until the Romans came and conquered the land, claiming Lusitania as a province of the Empire. There are square buildings plunked in the middle of the fort town — Roman design. Romans occupied the town from around 300 BC. When the Romans finally left, other waves of invaders followed: Carthaginians, Suevi, Visigoths, Moors, Galicians. It took until the 12th Century for Alphonso I, the first king of Portugal, to claw back Portugal from the last of the invaders and reestablish an independent kingdom.
In the mid-1200s, the village of Viana was already an important hub for the new nation of Portugal. Viana was an international port, trading wine, fruit and salt with northern Europe in exchange for preserved cod (still a mainstay of the Portuguese diet). Monte de Santa Luzia’s strategic mountain defences enabled the town to fend off pirates and thrive. Viana became so vital to the young kingdom of Portugal that the king granted it a city charter in 1258, and the town prospered through the centuries.
A “Statue of Viana” erected in the old town in 1774 depicts Viana as “Queen of the Sea,” so the nearby plaque contends. She holds a scepter in one hand (now missing), a ship in the other, and wears a headdress in the shape of a castle. Busts on the four corners indicate the four cardinal directions and the four continents which brought wealth and abundance to Viana from all around the world.
What’s strange about this is that to my knowledge so far, no other towns in Portugal are personified as a woman. Viana is not even a Portuguese woman’s name. So I wondered where it came from. The only origin story I could find was that once upon a time there was a beautiful but shy princess named Ana in a tower in a castle on the hill. A young man was in love with her, but because she was so shy he rarely saw her. Whenever he did he would tell everyone: “I saw Ana!” — “Vi Ana!” Well, to me this was one of the worst made-up origin stories I had ever heard.
I did some internet flanêuring down various rabbit holes and discovered a Celtic-Lusitanian Goddess, Nabia: “Goddess of waters, of fountains and rivers. In Galicia and Portugal still nowadays, numerous rivers that still persist with his name, as the river Navia, ships and in northern Portugal there is the Idol Fountain, dedicated to the goddess Nabia.”
Perhaps Viana is an inversion of Navia?
I also discovered and contacted a Portuguese goddess priestess and scholar, Luiza Frazão, who has written a book about the Goddess in Portugal. She wrote to me:
“Dear Tim, In which concerns the statue, she looks like Brigântia, goddess of civilization, of the city, with the tower as a headdress, and the boat… she was the goddess of maritime activities also. But mind that this statue is from the XVIII century… anyway it could be manifesting a very ancient memory. Brigântia was very important here, Bragança and Braga towns are called after her….”
Ah! Brigantī, according to Wikipedia means “The High One.” It’s “derived from the Proto-Indo-European root of berg (“to rise”). Berg, of course, means an ancient medieval fortress or town — a castelo.
Whether she was Brigânti or Nabia of the Castelo, it might also be that when the Romans arrived and set up residence in the hill fort, they simply changed the name of the castelo’s Goddess to one they were more familiar with. Perhaps a version of Diana called Lucina, goddess of the cycles of the moon, and hence all things to do with women’s cycles and childbirth. Lucina found her way into Catholicism as patron saint of childbirth — St. Lucia. Santa Luzia, in Portugeuse. As in Monte de Santa Luzia.
(In case you wonder why this stuff intrigues me so much, I wrote a book about the Goddess in early Europe, Savage Breast: One Man’s Search for the Goddesss).
In modern times, Viana do Castelo has dwindled from its glory days. Except for one brilliant light: The annual Festa da Senhora da Agonia — Festival of Our Lady of Agony, renowned throughout Portugal and the world. The heart of this festival are processions of hundreds of local Lavradeira — women farmers — from the surrounding inland villages, adorned in traditional embroidered dresses and bedecked with gold jewellery.
Although we missed the festival, the town has a festival costume museum containing preserved costumes and mind-blowing photos dating back to the mid-1800s. Traditionally, each rural village had its own distinct embroidered costumes and festivals. The museum lays out the evolution of the patterns and colors through the years, including stunning photographs that go as far back as the mid-1800s.
The tourist guides rather glibly date the origins of the festival to the declaration of a Catholic feast day in 1744 to the Virgin Mary as “Our Lady of Sorrows.” The purpose of the women’s procession is so that by their prayers, Mary will calm the seas and protect their men when they are off fishing. Visitportugal.com describes the procession to the sea like this: “The image of Nossa Senhora da Agonia, dressed in her blue and purple cloak, is carried aboard a trawler, amidst fireworks and the ringing of bells, so that she can bless the sea and thereby make it calm and forever generous in the sustenance that it provides.”
As by now you can imagine, I suspected there was another story beneath the surface. The costumes are worn by Lavradeira — women farmers, from villages in the fertile inland hills. Not fishermen’s wives and daughters. The museum also says women traditionally did all the work on the farms, from plowing to sowing. They were the mainstay of the economy, not dependent on their men for survival. The museum also said the origins of these festivals are not known.
What I suspected was the Catholic Church had taken over an older pre-Christian festival and Christianised it (as the Church has done with Christmas and Easter). 1744 is a long way back; so there’s not much hope of finding evidence of such a reinvention. But in my search, I came upon a Portuguese Master’s thesis by João Vasconcelos on the politics of folk culture that painstakingly documents how 100 years ago Catholic priests in northern Portugal deplored the summer festivals for their “pagan” elements.
According to Vasconcelos’ sources, from the 1930s-1950s, during the Salazar Dictatorship, the Church took firm control of the summer festivals and reinvented them as Christian processions with Mary firmly planted at the center of things. The aim, according to one priest quoted in the thesis, was to keep the villagers so busy with sanctioned activities during the festival, they would have no spare time to sin.
As I looked out from my hotel balcony at the distinct Lima river, Viana do Castelo right below, and the modern Basilica here on the edge of Monte de Santa Luzia, I could not help but wonder what other ancient secrets lie buried beneath the church’s foundations.
For me, one of the blessings of flanêuring is to have the time to pause and reflect when a certain story does not quite ring true. To question, dig a little deeper and perhaps uncover different narratives. Flanêuring, as I am coming to experience it, is not just about observing the surface of things. It’s also about wandering the poorly-lit byways of the past, rather than sticking to the main streets of history — no matter how well presented in a church record or tourist brochure.
