SOME HISTORY … The Minde® Blanket
Natural space is the support and often the condition for human action.
Minde is a village in the northwestern extreme of the district of Santarém. A great part of its originality lies in its natural position in relation to the relief units that frame it. It is located on the margins of the polje, having around it, the sharp peaks (feathers) of the Minde coast and the slopes of Serra d’Aire, which delimit its horizon. This reality favours its isolation and helps to understand how difficult it was for man to adapt to these lands of thirst. Limestone dominates the landscape and the people of Minde insisted on staying there, even when, by force of ploughing the land, it continued to appear bare and poor; their hopes rested on a strip of felgar and on the floodable polje in winter.
Poor agriculture was associated with pastoralism. The shoots of the garrigue plants and the undergrowth were the pasture for goats and sheep, small and undemanding cattle. From here new directions opened up for the life of the mindericos – the activities linked to wool. Minderico looked after his flock, sheared, washed, carded, spun and wove for himself and his family. The limited world in which he lived, triggered the will and the need to card for strangers. He moved away, he went to the villages of the neighbouring mountains; he moved further and further away and started buying wool in the places where he worked. He brought it to Minde, washed it, carded it, spun it and transformed it into cloths, burls, blankets and stamenhas. Throughout the country he sold what the women and younger people wove at home, bringing back money, basic necessities and more wool to wash, card, spin and weave.
In a clever way, the Mindericos, in their business, used their own linguistic variety (A Piação dos Charales do Ninhou), today the Minde language.
Travelling, first on foot or on horseback, then in open-topped vans, the manteiros travelled mainly in the south of the country, selling their mantas:
- “manta preta” – uses wool in its natural colours (brown and white). The shepherds protected themselves with it from cold and rain;
- “manta parda” – comes in bright colours, in bars at the ends. Despite the scarcity and limitations in the use of water, in the 1930’s the 1st dyeing plant appeared in Minde and with it, these new possibilities;
- “manta sombreada” – it is all stripes of 6 different and progressive shades of green, brown and orange;
- “manta janota” – a few years later, the “manta janota” appears, with strong colours in its very worked compositions. This process implies great dexterity and coordination of movements.
The apogee in the number of looms and in production was reached in the fifties of the 20th century, but, in the seventies, the looms began to disappear: some were abandoned, others broke, others were dismantled, many were used as firewood, and few were saved. From these, some pieces and other complementary equipment were used to set up the workshop that the Centro de Artes e Ofícios Roque Gameiro supervises and directs. Here, tradition and memory are combined with contemporaneity. In the manufacture of the real Mantas de Minde the inherited products and techniques are respected: 100% wool and 100% Portuguese, the dyeing recipes, the original patterns and the whole production process. Three young weavers work here and the blankets are sold through strategic partnerships for the internal and external markets.
In a hostile nature, the mindericos have played with local circumstances, established relationships, substituted forces. This is how, over time, the territory became precise and the Manta de Minde appears as a medal coined with the effigy of this people.
