—QUARANTINE PASTORAL—
The COVID-19 crisis devastated remote and isolated communities in the northern interior of Portugal, however it isn’t the virus itself but the measures to contain it that have exacted the hardest blow
PORTUGAL 2020-21
[Reporting for this story was supported by the2021 National Geographic Society COVID-19 Emergency Fund for Journalists]
Even though the spread of the COVID-19 virus in the northern rural areas of Portugal has been less extreme than in its urban areas, measures imposed to contain the pandemic have had an immense impact in these disenfranchised areas. This series documents how the COVID-19 pandemic made remote, ageing and depopulating communities even more isolated and presented them with new challenges. But this is also a story about resilience: communities who maintain a long and proud tradition of fending for themselves far from the central power.
Isolation is a blessing and a curse for Portugal’s remote villages.
The extreme physical and social isolation of many communities on one hand likely saved many lives, but on the other hand it highlighted the many problems already challenging these isolated and ageing communities: remoteness, poverty, low birth-rates, ageing populations and emigration. All of this has ended up keeping these villages — and their mostly elderly inhabitants — relatively insulated from the virus but also, in the long run, from development and survival.
For this story I documented the phenomena of villages with less than eight and even just two or one single resident left who are used to living in extreme isolation and now see themselves confronted with the possibility that, should an outbreak result in even less than a handful of deaths, this could mean sudden extinction of what's left of their villages, and with it their histories, legends and living memory of life in them gone.
Another aspect I documented were new forms of crime that opportunistically arose during the pandemic and target those geographically or socially isolated. I documented how security forces dealt with new pandemic inspired tricks that fraudsters use — like selling vaccines or pretending to be health workers — in isolated communities targeting villagers who keep valuables in their homes rather than in banks, a traditional way of life which has left them especially vulnerable in times where public attention is focused solely on the virus and its effects.
Although a western European country, many farmers in the north of Portugal sustain themselves the same way their ancestors have for centuries. Accustomed to family based small scale direct trade, and untouched by the ever growing online market, farmers found themselves facing unprecedented hardship and were forced to venture into the online market. In a reality of quarantines and movement restrictions, it was do or die. I visited farmers when they started to venture, after much desperation and sometimes for the very first time, into the unfamiliar world of online sales and shipping of their produce.
The much debated issue of online school was anything but obvious for Portugal’s remote north. With limited or nonexistent internet access, the few children that exist in these villages had to struggle to keep up with their city counterparts during lockdowns. I documented how a local official reopened an old shuttered village school — closed for years for lack of students, who would instead travel to cities to attend classes — and provided internet and computers for children to be able to attend online classes.
The national vaccination drive was, and still is, an especially challenging feat for isolated communities, sometimes hours away from the nearest clinic. These areas of difficult access for the elderly, for whom having to travel to a distant clinic for vaccination is dissuasive or impeditive, presented a challenge to the vaccination effort. I documented how, after months of uncertainty, fear and loss, exhausted health staff travelled to these communities in vans, and how they were welcomed with palpable relief by people for whom a vaccine was the first sign of hope in a long time.
Many religious gatherings and festivities that were held since the middle ages were abruptly stopped and efforts to keep traditions alive gained a new sense of urgency. I documented the few holidays that were marked but with crippling restrictions on programs and attendance, becoming a shadow of its usual form. At the same time, these events, usually dedicated to Catholic miraculous saints, took on added meaning, with sermons dedicated to raising awareness to preventive measures against the virus and prayers asking for protection from the pandemic. These holidays used also to be the time when emigrants would normally return to participate in these centuries' old festivities around which villages gather and so I documented how these events looked like when mostly emptied of this seasonal migration back to ancestral lands.
Portugal’s rural interior North is also home to unique cultural traditions, some dating back to pagan times, that have been kept alive through local festivals and gatherings as well as by their last living practitioners. Many of these customs were already at risk of disappearing with communities ageing and shrinking. With the pandemic, restrictions on social gatherings, canceled events and the much feared demise of elders, many feared a mass vanishing of ancestral ways of life, art forms and oral history. Initiatives to preserve and rehabilitate these activities gained a new sense of urgency and documenting these activities and efforts to keep them alive became an important part of my attempt to document this mostly unseen toll on life under the pandemic.
Meanwhile, the first days without COVID-19 deaths were reported in the biggest hospitals with bitter sweet relief after a surge in the beginning of 2021 when Portugal became the world's COVID-19 epicenter with 300 people dying every 24 hours in a country of 10 million. For Portugal’s northernmost provinces, that landmark came when the mortuary house of the country’s second biggest hospital, the São João in Porto, went back to solely caring for the bodies of those deceased from more common causes of death. I documented one of those first moments of a painful return to a relative normalcy at the São João Hospital mortuary in Porto.
As the second year of the pandemic looms, winter sets in and with it new waves of the virus reverberate across Europe with new lockdowns being announced. This series is important as it sheds light on how COVID-19 containment measures, designed mostly for urban centers, impact these often overlooked sectors of European population.
Furthermore, the essay approaches issues of territorial inequality and peripheral disenfranchisement, topics not often covered in international media when it comes to extreme levels of underdevelopment in Western economies, with this type of issues more reported on in other areas of the globe. Because of this, and given the COVID-19 pandemic, which has become a litmus test for economies as it increasingly plays a social and economic indicator role, this series sheds light on unsuspected ways it has exacted its toll.