Journey to Portugal by José Saramago

Facing Santarém is Almeirim. The past here is only a distant memory. A favourite place for royalty in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the chosen altar for imperial weddings: even the most ingenuous of travellers might expect to find here plentiful reminders of its former glories. Not so much as a stone. It looks like a town born yesterday, with no history apart from the anonymous one of work, which exists everywhere. The traveller, who deals with everything in its time and place, cannot find any trace of art worth mentioning, except for the palace of the Marquesses of Alorna, and that is nothing out of the ordinary.

The route is an easy one, following the path of several waterways: the Tagus, the Alpiarca canal, the Muge, and then further south shortly before Benavente, the wider River Sorraia. In Salvaterra de Magos, the traveller went to visit the chapel in the royal palace, a strange building which goes against the normal proportions of spatial relations. The most attractive work in the chapel is the sixteenth-century Pietà, which shows Christ stretched on the Virgin's lap. He lies there rigid, his arms flung out, and the work as a whole reminds one of the Pietà at Belmonte. The sculpture in the chapel is made of wood, but apart from the Virgin's bent back, there are few signs that the sculptor was able to resolve the problems posed by the material.