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Thirty years after the Commemorations of the National Day of Portugal, of Camões and of the Portuguese Communities were celebrated in this style, Setúbal has finally been chosen as their stage. If there were no other justice – and of this I will speak later on – poetic justice would be observed, since the greatest of this city’s poets – it’s most celebrated figure, at least since António Feliciano de Castilho promoted, in 1865, the celebrations of his centenary anniversary – was the first to invoke Camões in verse: "Camões, great Camões, how similar / Your destiny is to mine, when I compare them! / The same cause made us, losing the Tagus, / Challenge the sacrilegious giant".

Bocage, since it is him whom I speak of, did not imagine that, with that famous sonnet in which he said of Camões: "Model mine you are…” he was inaugurating an endless series of poems in honour of the Poet whose day we are celebrating. It was his voice and that of his generation that established – approximately two hundred years after the death of Camões – the equivocal unanimity that proclaimed him and proclaims the Portuguese “Prince of Poets”. In spite of those that in the XVII century rushed to steal everything from him: "the ideas, the words, the images / and also the metaphors, the themes, the motives, / the symbols, and the primacy / in the pains suffered for a new language" (I am citing another great amongst our poets, Jorge de Sena, and the admirable poem "Camões addresses his contemporaries"), the dominant criticism in the XVIII century either forgot the poet, or venomously attacked him, not recognizing that new language. It was the pre-romantics, such as Bocage and later, the romantics, such as Garrett, who recovered him, even in the mythical image with which the XIX century was so prodigal.

I spoke of “equivocal unanimity”. The expression is equally applicable to Bocage, so often saluted as our greatest poet since Camões. But if we were to give them – to one and to the other – such an ethereal seat, we gave them little more. One day, in one of these speeches, I have already asked myself, and now ask you: where are the critical editions of Camões? For which part of his work was the text retained? What do we know of his life with any certainty? What reason had Sena when he said – I cite him again with pleasure – “that in the case of Camões it is dangerous to say anything”?

And in the case of Bocage? The anecdotes are known, as are some erotic poems and it is when we remember them that we hide, with a smile of complicity (or roguish or prudish), the references to his name. Some will know that, near to death, Bocage did not compare himself to Camões anymore, but to Aretino, a great poet of the Italian renaissance, whose libidinous reputation traversed the centuries. But if at least Bocage had been studied as Aretino was! He who named pleasures as his partners and his tyrants, in a rather singular analogy, did not disappear “dissolved in the wind”, or in a “dark hole”, as he prophesized, but was dissolved in our ignorance, in the stubborn lack of knowledge or disfigurement of our heritage and in the rare relationship with memory which seems the Portuguese lack more than any other attribute, or which the Portuguese care less about than any other attribute.

Poetic justice was what I mentioned as being the case when commemorating the Day of Camões in the city of Bocage. Not to speak of the totally forgotten Vasco Mousinho de Quevedo, who Faria de Sousa also considered, in the XVII century, "the greatest after Camões" and of whom even the dates of birth and death are ignored. They figured him, in the XIX century, at the feet of Camões, in the Chiado statue, but I have not met anyone who has read his Afonso Africano, to the glory of the king that, under the brilliant sunlight of Túbal, here, sailed in 1458 to the conquest of Alcácer Seguer. And I am citing, once again, Bocage and the sonnet which commences with: "I only saw of that day the brilliant light / That of Túbal in the celebrated emporium".

But there are other justices, more or less poetic, which should be spoken of in this city of sun and salt, which is also – poets should be used and abused on this day – my remorse, my remorse of us all.

Of the numerous poets that have sung its natural charms (Arrábida, Palmela, Outão) of which Andersen, the Dane of the tales and marvels said, of the Machadas Estate where he stayed when in Portugal, that he had found the terrestrial paradise, what remains is the cold synthesis that Raul Proença made, about such encomia, when writing that this “fantasy of décor, of the framework, make us forget the reduced charm of the city itself – which is like an old Lisbon quarter, amongst orange groves, with the same type of housing, the same narrow streets of Mouraria or the Bairro Alto, with one or two little squares and filled with sunlight”.

It is true that the city, in spite of the vastness of its landscapes, always remained hidden from them, and it is true that it is one of the secret cities of Portugal, in its apparent openness. It is true that certain of the more primitive traces were knocked down – still more than in Lisbon – by earthquakes that partially destroyed it in 1531, 1755 and 1858. It is true that it wasn’t spared either by the Spanish invasion of 1580, neither did the Phillips Kings of Spain forgive it for the support given to the Prior of Crato, neither by the French invasions, nor even by the civil wars in the beginning of the XIX century. It is true that we cannot imagine its splendour when the River Sado reached what today is Luisa Todi Avenue, and the Dutch came to the city searching for its most precious product: that salt, said to be the purest of the crystals of Europe, which served as exchange for a treaty with Holland, aiming for the recovery of the African and American colonies and for what remained of the East. It is known that in ten years only, from 1680 to 1690, 7500 ships sailed from Setúbal loaded with salt for the Netherlands.

"The whole land is quartered from the sea, into what jointly becomes sea and land, and the men, whom we may call sea people or terrestrials, live in either one element or the other. The streets can be walked on one side and sailed on the other, and above the roofs you can either see the masts and the flags, or you can spot the towers among the masts and the flags (…). In many places the ship docks at the doors of its master, tying itself to it and the house thus become the anchor of the ship and the ship one half of the house, which as such is used”.

Father António Vieira, that so often used salt as a metaphor – and, in spite of being in his city, I prudently keep from citing the Sermon of Saint Anthony to the Fish or what happens when salt is not salty and the land does not allow itself to be salted – described Amsterdam as I cited above, alluding to the Dutch, or Setúbal, which he well knew and where the Dutch had re-discovered a city which, under the same conditions, presented the same aspect? Is it doubtful? Well, just walk purposely round the old city (with a purpose that is not usually given) and there are still a few houses which, were it not for the use of different materials and methods of construction, could well be taken for houses in Amsterdam.

A secret City, I said. A secret it was when it was born as a city – our first historians do not mention it; secret is its development from the date it was given a charter by King Afonso II (1249), the legend of the Lady of the Water or of the Small Lady, the foundation of the House of the Holy Ghost (1340), and the building of the town walls, in the time of King Afonso IV, for the purpose of which the city’s people taxed themselves with the first property transfer fees paid in Portugal.

But Setúbal only became a city of note during the XV century, with the House of Cabedo and the wedding of King John II with Leonor de Lencastre, his germane cousin. Why did the Perfect Prince choose Setúbal as his elected city? As his father had left him “king of the roads”, to use his own expression, so many were the benefits that King Afonso V had given the noble families, nothing better than Setúbal, that no great family had chosen as residence, to destroy that power which threatened him.

And it was in Setúbal that came about "the night of great terror and fright”, as Garcia de Resende refers to the night of August 23, 1484, during which King John II assassinated with his own hands his cousin and brother in law, the Duke of Viseu, and later called in the latter’s younger brother, the future King Manuel, to kiss the royal hand next to the corpse of the other brother of his own wife.

But it was that same King Manuel who awarded Setúbal, by charter dated 1514, the title of Notable Town, whilst building there his most celebrated monument: The Convent of Jesus.

Blood can also be washed with salt. In the following centuries the salt yachts, as they were then called, carried from the salt ponds to the centre of the city its most wealthy product. If the XVIII century is that of Bocage and of Luisa Todi, these and other figures were not born in the city by chance, but were as much a reflection of a commercial wealth that attracted Hamburg bankers (the Torlades) as of having promoted the founding of academies, such as that adequately named Problematic, in a city that so was and so continues.

But Setúbal remained a secret city, even in more recent times. Of all the cities of Portugal, maybe this is the one which has more to tell and of which little is told.

For this reason, today, I took so much time over it. This, being the day of the Poet, is a day of memories and memories have greater worth the more forgotten they are. In this city, which lived from preservatives, preserves and preservation, only memory was not preserved. Safeguard the future? But the future can only be safeguarded when what each time brought back in time is given back to time, an elementary truth but a truth of which little notice was or is taken.

Honourable President of the Republic: thank you very much for allowing me to speak. Ladies and Gentlemen: thank you very much for having listened.