Teixeira de Pascoaes (1877-1952), Portuguese writer and poet, was one of the main philosophers of “saudade”, a Portuguese word that expresses an emotional state of melancholic or profoundly nostalgic longing for a beloved something or someone, distant in space or in time. Pascoaes deeply loved Serra do Marão, near which he lived in São João do Gatão, Amarante.

No other sierra or mountain in Portugal is as closely linked to the work of a poet as Serra do Marão, on the border between the coast and the interior north of the country. “The mountain catalysed the poet and the poet spiritualized the mountain” (Sant’Anna Dionísio). An entire poem dedicated Pascoaes to this deep love for the Marão – Marânus, published for the first time in 1911. Consisting of around 3,420 verses, Pascoaes’ masterpiece meets the concepts of life/death, the contemplation of nature, the love/saudade and the embodiment of the beloved woman, being the creation of a new cosmos of Portuguese roots, having as its main engine the idea of saudade (Ana Bugalho Maia). Pascoaes’ love for Marão, which permeates the entire long poem, emerges vertiginously in verses such as: “I love you, Oh Sierra, in everything you are! / I love you, from the pious source / That flows from your sides, with a fresh / And chaste religious transparency; / From the black abysses that afflict you / To the relief of the high altitudes, / From where you touch the suns that guide you / The word of love and clarity!”

While walking through the Marão mountain, not long ago, on a winter day, with rain and a compact fog at the top of the mountain, near the old Marão Inn, I came across this landscape that immediately sparked my memory of Pascoaes and Marânus. It seemed to me that I was seeing the “pious source” “of a fresh and chaste religious transparency” of the Amarantine master and, in the middle of the fog, the two main characters of the long poem - Marânus and Eleonor. The moment was captured with a full frame Canon and a long exposure of 4 seconds. Black-and-white seemed to me to be the best representation of the scene, especially since the colour palette was very restricted.