Costa Nova

Costa Nova, or new coast was formed in the 1500s by a hugh storm. The old coast was left inland about 30kl, and the new coast was this new land left by the storm. As a testament of how big the storm must have been, the new coast is a whole new strip of land with huge sand dunes between it and the Atlantic Ocean. So the fishermen had to move onto the new land to reach the sea. There is a lagoon between the old and the new coast connected by a bridge now.

The village there is very old now and is unique in that many of the houses are painted with horizontal or virtical stripes in bright colors. They have been refered to as the “pajama houses”. It turned out to be jam packed on Sunday evening when we arrived, and almost totally empty on Mon. Morning. We found the church, which is a new octogonal structure. The evening we arrived it was open but no one was there. We checked the next day and it was the same.

So we started to walk through the seemingly abandoned streets and found a little cafe that was open. We asked the woman there when the priest would be at the church to stamp our passports. She said that in fact he lived down the street a couple of doors on the other side. So Eric went to find him. I sat in the cafe and talked to the woman. It turned out that she spoke pretty good English even though she said she didn’t. She had taken lessons and was soon warming to practicing her English.

Her name was Lucylaura. She was from Brazil. Many Portuguese have lived or come from or have relatives in Brazil since it was a Portuguese colony. She had a two year old daughter who she said was very naughty and didn’t mind her.

She and her mother had moved from Brazil to the UK and her mother now worked for Del Monte making more money at an easier job. However, Lucy’s husband had made this agreement with his cousin to run the cafe until 2011. However, business was not good and they were not happy in Costa Nova.

She said that all the pretty houses weren’t pretty inside. She talked about how the rich people who were there just two months out of the year lived on one end of the peninsula and at the other end lived the fishermen who were poor and lived in questionable conditions. She said they had lost the pharmacy in Costa Nova and then the post office had closed.

Lucy wanted to return to Brazil, although she knew that the economy was not good there either. She said that in Brazil everybody was poor and there was no problem about it. It was the norm. There was less stratification in Brazil. I think that’s interesting. That she would rather be poor among equals than make more money in the UK or stay in Portugal.

After a while, Eric came back and said that the priest had moved to the mainland and that the lady at the little grocery store had called another lady who would come down and meet us at the church and stamp out passports. Even the priest had moved away. Perhaps the place was dieing like Lucy had said. It was a casuality of the bad economy. Lucylaura chose the picture of Mt. Rainier with a blue shy full of fluffy clouds that Eric took from Nathanial’s place.

We finally got our Camino Passports stamped at the Church of Glory in Costa Nova. I spent a lot of time waiting in that church. I remember the huge beautiful antique chandelier hanging down in the middle of the modern new church with bright stained glass windows reminicent of the work of Picaso. We only stayed in Costa Nova one night. Back to Aveiro.