Through Portugal

A remarkable travelogue from the twilight of the Edwardian age, Through Portugal documents one man's unexpected love affair with a nation he initially dismissed. Martin Hume set out expecting to find little of value in Portugal, a country often overlooked by British travelers in favor of France or Italy. What he discovered instead was a land of startling beauty, ancient cities where history lived in every stone, and a people whose warmth and dignity quietly disarmed his prejudices. Journeying from the northern mountains to the sun-baked south, Hume captures Portugal at a moment frozen in time, before the upheavals of the twentieth century transformed it forever. His prose carries the patient attentiveness of a man who learned to see, moving through Lisbon's steep streets, the quiet towns of the Alentejo, and the fishing villages of the Atlantic coast. The thirty-two color illustrations by A.S. Forrest preserve this Portugal in luminous detail, making the book itself a kind of time machine for readers curious about what has endured and what has vanished.