Serra das Mesas, Fóios parish council, Sabugal municipality. It is a cold September morning, the sky is blue and cloudless. I am interviewing José Manuel Campos, the current president of the Fóios parish council, a remarkable storyteller with a deep knowledge of the smuggling activity of last century.
It is cold… Serra das Mesas… this is the path that the Fóios smugglers took. An ideal spot for this conversation…
The view is gorgeous, isn’t it?… the serra das Mesas is not very well known. Bernardino Henriques, a poet that was born here in Fóios, call it the “forgotten mountain”. I prefer to say that it is a treasure chest that is yet to be opened. We are now starting to make efforts to make it better known; the Sabugal town council intends to create a Geopark here in the municipality and the serra das Mesas will naturally be one of the noblest aspects of that park.
This area is magnificent! The source of the Côa river is right here…
In fact this mountain is very much associated with water. Two rivers have their source here. Close to where we are standing is the source of the Côa; on the other side of the mountain, already in Spain, we find the source of the Águeda river. Curiously, both the Côa and the Águeda rivers flow into the Douro river not far from each other – the Côa river in Vila Nova de Foz Côa and the Águeda river in Barca de Alva.
And there are these granite “tables”…
The Serra das Mesas has granitic features that are very specific indeed. According to a friend of mine, the geologist José Nobre, only in a mountain in Argentina do we find rocks that are similar to these cubic stones that we see around here – they seem to have been made by human hands, don’t they?
The serra das Mesas was part of the daily life at Fóios.
For us it is sacred. It was indeed this mountain that allowed us to survive. Most of our forefathers were farmers and shepperds here.
And there was smuggling…
In the middle of the last century – the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, before the emigration wave to France – hundreds of people, mainly Portuguese but also Spaniards used to walk through the serra das Mesas. Women in the daytime and men at night.
Women carried products such as milk, eggs, beans, products that could almost be called ‘treats’… sometimes a few trouts that their husbands fished in the Côa river.
The best products were for them; we needed quantity, not quality…
But besides subsistence smuggling there was also organized smuggling…
Exactly. There was organized profitable smuggling, it appeared later on. It was a men’s thing. They used horses to carry the ore. We can still see the mines in Spain, near Valverde. They were ficticious, they did not produce a gram… but there was even a guard house! The horses left Soito carrying 150, 200 kilos of wolfram, they arrived at those mines at night, they unloaded the ore and next morning the Spanish trucks appeared to transport the production of Spanish ore to the factories… it was a profitable business for everybody…
Once in a while the Fiscal guard or the carabineers appeared… how many guards were there here in Fóios?
I do not know… many! All the villages close to the border had guards… people used to say that if they held hands along the border, they would form a human cordon.
What kind of relationship was there between the fiscal guards and the smugglers?
The smugglers used to say about the fiscal guards: in the daytime we eat and drink with them; at night we run from them. They ate rabbits and a few trouts, they drank wine, they played card games but at night in the mountain if they met they pretended not to know each other. Everyone protected their own interests.
Have you ever been caught?
No. Fortunately I have never been arrested but two or three times guards and carabineers appeared suddenly in front of me. One day, at about 4 in the morning, as we were going through an olive grove in a single file already near Valverde we found ourselves surrounded by carabineers. We started running in total disorganization, we bumped against olive trees, we stumbled… I left my load there and I managed to escape…
I remember another night when they appeared and I had to hide behind a bush for more than two hours.
And how have things evolved?
Then came emigration. The men left for France and the smuggling decreased much. After that there was the Common Market. There was still much cattle smuggling but it had nothing to do with the former smuggling.
Honestly, I miss it. There were very difficult times: life was hard but smuggling also brought us much joy. People had great fun, friendships were forged, marriages happened… it was a busy region, there were many young people, the school was full of children. Nowadays there are only half a dozen and as soon as they have the chance they leave. Only old people stay!
