Surely you’ve already come across a ceramic swallow – or many – on the wall of a Portuguese house, in a restaurant, in traditional gift shops, or even in a modern design shop.
But do you know the great significance these little birds carry with them?
The swallow is a symbol of Portuguese culture, a migratory bird that always returns to the same place to nest. It is said that this happens because they have only one partner for life, raise their chicks together and only leave the nest when all of them do.
When we see a swallow’s nest on the eaves of a Portuguese house, we know that by early spring their ‘tenants’ will be back. Every year they travel long kilometres, from North Africa to Portugal – where they stay until the end of summer – as a harbinger of spring and good weather.
That is why these little birds are intrinsically linked to values as fundamental as family, love, loyalty, freedom and represent so well the Portuguese word ‘saudade’.
According to the dictionary, ‘saudade’ is a “feeling of sorrow, nostalgia and incompleteness, caused by the absence, disappearance, distance or deprivation of people, times, places or things to which one was affectionately connected and that would wish to have near again’, the ‘affectionate memory of something or someone absent’. In practice, it is what makes us always bring with us the memory of the places and people who have marked us and want to return to the places where we were happy, such as the swallow.
It is not by chance that one of the most recent songs by the famous Portuguese singer Ana Moura is called, precisely, ‘Swallows’:
I spend my days in long queues
In villages, towns and cities
Swallows are queens
Flying the lines of freedom
The tradition of swallows in ceramics, which transformed this symbolism into something physical that we can offer our loved ones, began in 1896, when Raphael Bordallo Pinheiro registers the patent of his ceramic swallows. Probably, realizing that they could become a true Portuguese symbol. And today we know that he wasn’t wrong.
We here also have a very special affection for everything that this little bird represents, since we share the same values. And that’s why if you go to azeitona Restaurant at 3HB Guarana you will discover a wall dedicated to swallows, just as in any of our hotels we love to see the nests on the eaves when we are lucky to be chosen as their home.
Because for the same reasons that so many guests choose Portugal and our hotels as their home – good weather and good food – so do swallows.
The Algarve is waiting for you! And so does the swallows! In a photography, made of ceramic, or in a more modern version – like a magnet for the fridge – take one with you to always remember you have a second home to return to, or to offer to someone special.
