Fafe

Fafe is the Minho with a Brazilian accent. In the nineteenth century its sons emigrated to Brazil in their thousands, and those who prospered came home to build — the "brasileiros" raised the granite-and-tile mansions with palm trees and verandas that still give the town its confident air, philanthropy included: hospitals, schools and fountains bear the returned emigrants' names, a whole urban fabric of homecoming. The town's other fame is proverbial: "a justiça de Fafe" — Fafe justice, the rough-and-ready settling of scores — is a phrase every Portuguese knows, worn by the locals with a wink.

Around the town, the green Minho hills stage a louder ritual: the Fafe stages of Portugal's rallying calendar, whose airborne crest at Pedreira draws crowds that treat motorsport as pilgrimage. Musical life keeps the parish scale the record describes, and the record names it precisely: the Orquestra do Norte, northern Portugal's touring symphonic ensemble, performing in the Igreja Matriz — the granite parish church whose nave serves as the town's concert hall, orchestra and church both documented in the concert record. Emigrants' palaces, a proverb for a coat of arms, symphonies in the nave: Fafe is small-town Portugal with its passport stamped.