202 stalls, 12 themed areas and six days left at Santa Maria da Feira's medieval festival
The Viagem Medieval turns 30 this year and closes on 9 August, replaying the quarrel between Teresa of Portugal and her son Afonso Henriques.
Six days remain. The Viagem Medieval em Terra de Santa Maria opened on 29 July and closes on Sunday 9 August, which gives anyone still thinking about it precisely this week to stop thinking about it.
This edition marks 30 years, and it has gone back to the beginning: the Portucalense County, and the quarrel between Teresa of Portugal and her son Afonso Henriques, young and already impatient. It is the eve of São Mamede staged across an entire town, which lends the programme a narrative tension that historical reenactments do not always manage.
What is actually there
Twelve themed areas spread through the streets, squares, gardens, the banks of the river Cáster and the castle itself, with 202 trading stalls and 19 places to eat. This is not a fair with a castle in the background. The castle and the town are the venue.
The processions anchor each day. “Afonso Henriques, o poder da vontade” sets off at 4.30pm and “Teresa, por vontade rainha” at 6pm, daily. After dark the register shifts: the “Rumo a S. Mamede” procession begins at 10pm, and at 11pm the castle hosts “O Discurso do Rei – Na Véspera da História”.
Opening hours, and how to time it
Monday to Friday it runs from 1pm to 12.30am. Saturdays and Sundays it opens an hour earlier, at noon. Plan around that, because the gap between arriving at 5pm and arriving at 9.30pm is the gap between catching two daytime processions and catching the entire night programme. Plenty of people simply do the whole day.
If this is your kind of thing, the calendar has more of it. The Festa da História in Bragança works the same seam at a different scale and in a different century. The full programme and ticket details sit on the Santa Maria da Feira council website.
Thirty years on, the thing holding it together has not changed: a town decides that for twelve days it is going to pretend we are in another century, and then commits to it completely.
Image: JFVP / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
