Nodar: Historical notes
Nodar is a village located in between mountains: The Montemuro mountains on the northern side and The Gralheira mountains (with two peaks: S. Macário and Arada) towards south, forming a deep valley where the Paiva river flows. The millenary Nodar is clearly one of the most typical villages of this region (S. Pedro do Sul municipality, Viseu region, center of Portugal).
It is hard to precise the exact origins of Nodar. The vestiges that could help us to locate the village’s formation are scarce. Even though it is admissible to defend the thesis of a Neolithic community that settled by the Paiva river due to the fish abundance, a fact that most probably was already evident.
It is known that throughout this region many villages were formed during the Iron Age (a Pre-Roman, Celtic period), specially the ones exploiting a rise in elevation for defensive advantage (“hill forts” in English; “castros” in Portuguese). Nodar, having a lower height, with a river that is literally inside the village, probably had a community settling there that could be fed by a combination of fishing, farming and cattle raising.
The origin of Nodar’s name goes back to the beginning of the Romanization period in the Iberian Peninsula, and it has the following possible explanation: The place was given to a Roman authority who’s name was “Notarius”. Therefore, the village was named after him (“Notarei”, that is, Notarius’ “villa”). Centuries after, during the early Middle Ages, the toponym was probably translated to archaic Portuguese, changing to “Nodar”. No other intermediate name appears until the 13th Century, where the kingdom’s census (“Inquirições”) mentions “Nodar” as being an inhabited village.
When Portugal was being reconquested from the Muslims (during the 12th Century), Nodar was given to the Benedictine monks of S. João de Pendorada (a monastery located around 80 km north of Nodar). This monastery became the owner of most of the region’s land (throughout the course of the Paiva river and in the Montemuro mountains). Much later, in the 18th century and until the early 19th century, Nodar belonged to the later extinct Parada county, a village just 3 km away, that nowadays is part of another municipality (Castro Daire).
(The monastery of S. João de Pendorada, presently Alpendorada, located in the Marco de Canavezes municipality).
Regarding buildings with some historical value, deserves some mention a communitarian cereal warehouse in the village centre; a chapel built on the late 17th Century with baroque iconography; a praying cross from the early 18th Century (“alminhas”) located by the bridge and last but not the least the bridge itself. This bridge is clearly Nodar’s landmark. It was built in 1889 and offered to the community by a local benefactor who belonged to one of Nodar’s most renowned families, Manuel Duarte Pinto de Almeida, an ancestor of the Costa family.
(Nodar bridge’s plaque. The inscription mentions: “This bridge was built by the decision of Manuel Duarte Pinto de Almeida in 1889″)
This man gathered a considerable fortune while emigrated in Brazil and according to some documents, invested most of that fortune in building the bridge. Before the bridge was built only by boat the local villagers would be able to cross to the other bank, namely farmers with land on both sides of the river. After the construction ended, the Nodar bridge started to be a known crossing point between both of the valley: for instance, cattle sellers going to the Parada’s centenary fair on the right bank, or believers going to the Saint Macary (“S. Macário”) annual procession on the left bank.
For what has been said, it is clear that there is a deep connection between Nodar and the Paiva river. We could say that these waters are one of the most pure of all Portugal (probably Europe) and are full of different types of fish (trout, eel, barb, boga, etc.). This abundance was namely very important during the II World War when there was an almost generalized famine throughout rural Portugal. During the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s there were big communitarian fishing sessions with all Nodar’s men involved (two huge fishnets would be placed across the river, with kids dragging one of them until it closed the other). Fishermen like António de Sousa, Manuel de Paiva Andrade, Fernando Gomes da Costa and António Fernandes (still alive) are still remembered for their amazing skills. Some ten years ago, the Portuguese government declared the prohibition of fishing using nets, which (almost?) killed this very old practice, part of Nodar’s most ancient culture.
(Nodar and the Paiva river: A perfect symbiosis)
The local family economy always depended on subsistence farming (vegetables, corn, wheat, wine), some cattle raising (calf, sheep and goat) and fishing. Since the end of the 19th Century, with the train crossing the rural Portugal, some foreign products started to arrive in places like Nodar. For instance, to Porto Antigo, on the Douro river’s shore (on the northen side of the Montemuro mountain) arrived sardines from the Atlantic Ocean that were later carried by men (from a village called Boassas) walking long distances to sell them (or to exchange with eggs or other local product when there wasn’t money to spend).
Like most part of the Portuguese rural space, Nodar is experiencing a moment of rupture between a past of hundreds of years where occupation of space and social bonds occurred thought a slow generational flux, within an essential agrarian culture, economically poor but culturally very rich, and a present of human and agricultural abandon, of disaggregation of the ancient and extremely intricate bonds between people and their place.
Nevertheless, Nodar is a place full of interest for projects departing from its social-geographic realities in its reflection and artistic intervention given the particular geographic location and the presence of specific types of social organization, namely the prevalence of a strong communal spirit and a genuine desire to keep alive ancestral work habits, rituals associated with the agrarian cycles, memories of tales and local legends, etc.
Text by Norberto Gomes da Costa