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Hi, welcome to my blog. I'm a writer of poetry, prose and plays but my best known work is children's fiction. My most popular books are the Selby series and the Emily Eyefinger series. This blog is intended as an entertaining collection of thoughts and pictures from here in Australia and from my travels in other parts of the world. I hope you enjoy it. (For more information have a look at my website.)

Monday, February 13, 2012

Treaty of Tordesillas

Why do they speak Spanish in most of the countries of South America except Brazil where they speak Portuguese? I found the answer quite by accident in Tordesillas in Spain. We were driving from Galicia in northwestern Spain to Madrid in the centre. It was getting late when we arrived in this town so we decided to spend the night. At our hotel they told us that it was the day of the annual celebration the Treaty of Tordesillas. We hurried to the main square and watched a re-enactment of the signing of this famous treaty in 1494. 


In the late Sixteenth Century, Spanish and Portuguese explorers were sailing around the world searching for a water route to India and claiming the lands that they found in the process. Christopher Columbus had just snapped up various islands in the Caribbean and the Portuguese and the Spaniards were madly mapping the coastline of the New World.


Instead of fighting over these newly-discovered lands, King John II of Portugal and the king and queen of this part of Spain---Castile and Aragon---made a deal. They would draw a line on a map from north to south through South America. Portugal would get everything east of it that hadn't already been claimed and Spain would get everything to the west of it. This gave what is now the coast of Brazil to Portugal and almost everything else to Spain. Not a great deal for Portugal and maybe this was because the pope, who had been born in Spain, was in on the negotiations.


We got to the middle of town just ahead of the troops of the Ferdinand and Isabella, the Spanish king and queen.


Then along came the striped soldiers of the representatives of Pope Alexander VI.


Followed by the the troops of King John II of Portugal.


They assembled in the main square, the Plaza Mayor, while the present mayor (with her back to us in the picture below) read out the proclamation of the Treaty. We listened respectfully, not understanding much of the mediaeval Spanish.


Towns and cities around the world have their celebrations but this one was especially fun for us because we'd happened on it by accident, because it was such a friendly atmosphere and because we seemed to be the only out-of-towners. It's rare to be the only tourists at an event like this. And we actually learned something.

The one thing missing were South Americans. This was probably not surprising since this was a celebration of the carve-up of their continent by a bunch of greedy foreigners.

3 comments:

Richard Tulloch said...

I read this with interest, Duncan, since we're hoping to get to northern Spain this year, maybe in May.

I also googled Toredesillas. This sounds like a better festival than their 'spearing a bull in a meadow' one.

Lana Patterson said...

Wow...they really get into this celebration! Love the authentic looking costumes. What a lovely festival to stumble upon. Thanks for posting the historical info (I never could figure out how Brazilians spoke Portuguese when the rest of S.A. speaks Spanish)and the photos.

Duncan Ball said...

I wouldn't really recommend going to Tordesillas with so many other interesting places in Spain with more to offer. It was fun and the people were lovely but the day of the Treaty is only on one day and there is that awful spearing of the bull festival. It was also the place where Joanna the Mad (Juana la Loca) who should really have been called Joanna the Depressed and Pissed off With Her Husband lived out her last years in a convent. But we did have a wonderful time.