Post by account_disabled on Feb 18, 2024 4:16:35 GMT -5
Peter On the Portuguese side we have Rio de Onor . On the other side, in Spain, is Rihonor de Castilla . Confused? It's natural. Even the Portuguese writer José Saramago was stunned when passing by and described his experience in his 1981 book Trip to Portugal : “After all, where is the border? What is the name of this country, here? Is it still Portugal? Is it already Spain? Or is it just Rio de Onor and nothing more than that?” Rio de Onor has a very special characteristic: it is divided in half by the border between Portugal and Spain. But, for the inhabitants of this town in the municipality of Braganza , the border does not matter much, it is just an administrative formality. The population itself treats the two peoples – the Portuguese and the Spanish – as “people from above” and “people from below”.
It was common to see cattle crossing the border freely. The populations of both countries often owned land on the opposite side and worked it as if it were on their side of the border. River of Onor River of Onor. By M. Peinado Rio de Onor is a community village , which is a way of life that presupposes sharing and mutual help between all inhabitants and Cell Phone Number List translates into sharing community ovens, agricultural land where everyone must work and a flock that grazes on communal land. Nowadays, as Mário Gomes, president of the municipality of Aveleda and Rio de Onor, explained to EscapadaRural , this community lifestyle is no longer practiced, “due to the lack of people and the advanced age” of the inhabitants. According to Mário Gomes, currently in Rio de Onor there are “around 50 inhabitants, with an average age much higher than 70 years.” If in 1950 the town had 398 inhabitants, today this number has been drastically reduced. “The interior is becoming depopulated,” says the president of the city council. River of Onor River of Onor.
M. Peinado In 2017, Rio de Onor was the winning town of the “7 Wonders of Portugal” contest in the category of towns located in protected areas, in this case the Montesinho Natural Park , and tourism gained new momentum in the region. It is mainly Portuguese and Spanish who visit the town which, in 2019, received 5,200 visitors at the Casa do Touro, a museum dedicated to the history and culture of Rio de Onor. Whoever visits Casa do Touro will be able to learn a little more about the community lifestyle, one of the best-known characteristics of this town. In fact, this space is in the building that originally housed the town's bull, which was also, in distant times, the community's. River of Onor River of Onor. By M. Peinado The uniqueness of Rio de Onor extends to the unique way of speaking of the town's inhabitants: Rionorês , its own and almost extinct dialect, which belongs to the Asturian-Leonese group, similar to the Mirandese language. However, “at the moment only two or three people in the village speak Rionorês fluently,” explains Mário Gomes.