Fernando Namora’s Old Surgery

Monsanto

Fernando Namora (1919-1989), substitute municipal doctor, later, a renowned and acknowledged writer, set up his practice in this house. The hard living conditions of most of the local inhabitants, or the neighbouring vllages, or the villagers living out in the country turned the clinic into an exercise that went far beyond medicine, in which humanism, social welfare and the fight against obscurantism intermingled. The writer was marked by this medical and human experience in the lands of the “ship of rock” – a metaphor he used to define the hardness of the place in clear opposition to the happiness of the rurality of the “most Portuguese village”, glorified in the propaganda of the Estado Novo. Until he settles in Lisbon, he will reflect these experiences, plus others, in some of his works, a literary set known as the “rural cycle”.