Story

The legend published by the Museum makes the masons try to build the bridge in Vila Franca and then by the Poço das Laranjeiras. In both places, a supernatural voice sent up the river. Tradition attributed it to Saint Bartholomew.

On the third attempt, the narrative places the work next to the chapel. It is a story about the memory of the place, not documentary proof of the choice of the site or an itinerary to look for the episodes.

In another passage of the tradition collected by the Museum, the food of the builders gains a miraculous explanation: there are sources of water, wine and olive oil and fish appear in the river. The narrative associates the effort of construction to religious protection. Reading it alongside the history of the works allows to know two different ways of telling the same place.

In May 1758, the vicar of Vila Nune registered 55 neighbors and 239 people. He numbered fourteen places, some with only one resident, and marked uninhabited houses in the place of Serra.

These numbers describe different categories of the document. They should not be added or confused with a current census. The small scale of the places helps imagine a scattered settlement, observed from the parish.

The enumeration allows to approach the look: Silva assigns eight neighbors; to Vale and Rossada, five to each. Fojães and Ribeira da Covilhã appear with one resident. The church was in Granja, near the Valley. The religious center was not confused, therefore, with the place called Vila Nune.

The vicar Domingos Leite de Andrade adds that there were unmarried women in poverty between neighbors and people from other parishes. It is the social description of an author and of a time, without allowing the life of each person to be reconstructed. By preserving the terms and date, the document allows different domestic conditions to be observed within the small places.