the salty coast

The man known as Sá Carneiro (real name: Francisco Manuel Lumbrales de Sá Carneiro) was born July 19, 1934 and died December 4, 1980. He was Prime Minister of Portugal for 11 months in 1980. Short history from Wikipedia : A lawyer by training, he became a member of the puppet National Assembly , where he became one of the leaders of the "Liberal Wing", which attempted to work for the gradual transformation of António de Oliveira Salazar 's dictatorship into a normal Western European democracy. In May 1974 , a month after the Carnation Revolution , Sá Carneiro founded the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), together with Francisco Pinto Balsemão and José Magalhães Mota , and became its secretary-general. The PPD was soon renamed the Social Democratic Party (PSD); despite Sá Carneiro's original claims to be leading a left-of-centre party, he and the party soon drifted to the right. He was minister without portfolio in a number of provisional governments, and was elected...

Christmas is always nice anywhere in the World. In Portugal, Santa is put to work driving the streetcar. Get going Santa! In other important events, December 1st is an important date around the world, but not as important as in Portugal, where in 1640 we regained back Portugal from the Spanish. To mark this holiday, 2 of the biggest soccer teams faced off - Sporting vs. Benfica with Benfica coming out the winner. Then today, Porto won... ..and that's about all the soccer news I can take. In other important events around the country... They've finally decided to hold another vote to decide whether abortion should be legal. Here are some women in parliament pushing their cause... Source Portugal's president has said the country's predominantly Roman Catholic population will vote on whether to legalise abortion on 11 February. Anibal Cavaco Silva said he agreed to the vote because the issue still dominated public debate in Portugal. The country will be asked if they wish t...

The Eurovision contest is coming up in May, and we should be really proud for our entry. Cheesy as ever, these girls are going to represent us with a ABBA-esque song, which, I've had the unfortunate opportunity to hear and sounds just like every other generic pop/dance song on the radio in Europe, so it's got a great chance to win! What else has been going on in Portugal? Lisbon Fashion Week took place, great event, great clothes. Nuno Gomes manages to do some acrobatic work, but still doesn't win it against Naval, almost taking themselves out of contention to win this year's championships, but they did win against Liverpool, and are off to the quarterfinals against Barcelona. Meanwhile, Porto and Sporting are fighting it out for first place in the championship. Go Sporting! The Portuguese national team played a friendly with Saudi Arabia, where they won 3-0. I imagine that Cristiano Ronaldo's perfectly coifed hair must have had something to do with the win. I...

It's a good thing we're not without representation at the 2006 Winter Olympics. The sole athlete there from Portugal is Danny Silva. Visit his web site here . Competing in the 15 km cross country classical, Danny competed yesterday , and made a great showing. Out of 97 athletes, he placed 94th. Be proud! Força Portugal.

Being Portuguese means you will talk about Port wine as often as a Canadian says 'Eh?', which is why I love finding articles in foreign papers about it like this one at The Age. I remember when I was younger living in Portugal going to the "quinta" my family owned and eating the grapes and watching people get ready to make the wine. The vineyard was in the Douro region, and it was beautiful. It really is a great tradition, and it's nice to see other non-Portuguese appreciating the tradition and what it all involves in making such a special wine. A wine of depth, concentration and majestic structure, port is produced from grapes grown on the steep, rocky slopes of northern Portugal's Upper Douro and its tributaries and was discovered during the 17th century when two British traders added brandy to preserve the local wine for an Atlantic sea voyage. The pioneers of the port trade soon found that "fortifying" did far more than just protect the wine, i...

Having RTP has made me feel like I was back in Portugal! The one show that I got hooked on in a couple of days was Filha do Mar, a Portuguese telenovela about Marta, who met her soulmate Salvador, was torn apart from him, but not before getting pregnant, had his child, someone told her he was dead, became a doctor and then, miracles of all miracles, was assigned to Ribatejo where.....Salvador, alive and well, living with his current wife Sofia and son, Tomas. You can read about it here - it's in Portuguese, unfortunately. Here's its official site . I would love to know how it ends....

For those who live in Canada, unless you have satelitte, getting RTP was not the easiest of things in the past, and most of the time, you'd have to endure old men in one of those cheesy tavernas downtown Toronto to be able to watch the soccer game. Well, not anymore! Rogers (and I think other digital cable providers) has now made it available, and in the past 2 weeks it's been free of charge. Besides getting hooked on the novela "Filha do Mar" (more on that later), I got hooked (mostly because I've spent a lot of time at my parents) watching the news. Earlier this week, while watching the news, one of the segments was about Benfica's acquisition of Moretto and the controversy relating to that. First off, the slap heard around Portugal: Source: SIC Here's my version of the story - both Benfica and Porto wanted Moretto, but Benfica thought of it first, so Porto supposedly told this Vitor Dinis to go to Brazil, and get Moretto to sign for Porto, and he t...