Journey to Portugal by José Saramago

Sometimes it appears we set out from the furthest point. The most normal course to follow, having got to Braganza, is to take a look around what the city has to offer, then cast an eye over its surroundings, a stone here, a landscape there, respecting their natural order. But the traveller has an obsession: to get to Rio de Onor. It's not that he expects worlds and wonders of the visit, since Rio de Onor is no more than a little village: it cannot proffer relics of either Goths or Moors. Yet once you start reading up on the subject, certain names always stick in your memory, along with facts and associations, all growing increasingly elaborate and complicated until it reaches the point we've reached, where the myth becomes idealised. The traveller hasn't come in the guise of an ethnologist or a sociologist, nobody counts on him to make ultimate discoveries, or even lesser ones.

He is possessed only of the human and legitimate desire to see what others see, set his feet in the footprints of others. Rio de Onor is a place of pilgrimage to the traveller: through it, he came by a book which, as a work of science, is among the most moving ever to have been written in Portugal. It is about a land the traveller wants to see with his own eyes. Nothing less and nothing more than that.