The Stone Raft by José Saramago

After turning from east to west until a perfect semicircle had been traced, the peninsula began to incline. At that precise moment, and in the most rigorous sense, if metaphors as a vehicle of literal sense can be rigorous, Portugal and Spain were two countries with their legs up in the air. Let us leave to the Spaniards, who have always disdained our assistance, the task and responsibility of evoking to the best of their ability, the structural changes in the physical space in which they live, and let us say here, with the modest simplicity that has always characterized primitive peoples, that the Algarve, a southern region on the map since time immemorial, became in that supernatural moment the most northerly part of Portugal.

Incredible but true, as a Father of the Church preached, and has continued to preach even unto the present day, not because he's alive, for all the Fathers of the Church are dead, but because people are constantly borrowing the phrase and using it indifferently, as much for spiritual profit as for human expediency. If the fates had decreed that the peninsula should be immobilized once and for all in that position, the consequences, social and political, cultural and economic, not to mention the psychological aspect, which people tend to overlook, the various consequences, as we were saying, and their aftermath would have been drastic, radical, in a word, earth-shattering.