Ana Rosa do Cabo has been through and lived it all: pandemics, wars, regime changes and climate catastrophes during his lifetime. Has two children, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
It's from Vera Cruz, county Portel, the oldest woman in Alentejo and the oldest in Portugal. Ana Rosa do Cabo celebrates 108 years this Saturday, day 25 January. Born in that village in 1917, when the locality had 810 inhabitants and which is now reduced to 378 people, the overwhelming majority elderly.
There 5 years that the woman has lived in the village of Portel, in the Home of the Holy House of Mercy, and is described as “sweet, friendly, tireless fighter and with an indomitable strength to live”. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he contracted the disease at home, but overcame it with great resistance, despite having already surpassed the Centenary at the time.
Well, born daughter of Joaquim Bernardo and Maria Gertrudes do Cabo, has two children, four grandchildren, two boys and two girls and three great-granddaughters, having been widowed three decades ago and has experienced a bit of everything, since pandemics, wars, regime changes and climate catastrophes, in addition to a long life of work in the field.
José Espadeiro, one of the children, remembers that her mother “was a tough woman in difficult field work. I went out with my father before the sun came up and they arrived home after the sun had set., after they do 25/30 kilometers on foot every day”, justified.
She is a devout woman who whenever she could went to the Church of Santo Lenho, named after what is believed to be part of the cross where Christ was crucified, having arrived in Vera Cruz at the hands of crusaders who fought in North Africa.
“I remember my mother as a very devout woman. Whenever I could, I went to church to give thanks for everything I got., fruit of a lot of work. At the beginning of this century, on a pastoral trip to Vera Cruz, D.MaurĂlio de Gouveia, Archbishop of Évora, He paid a visit to our house to meet and pray with mine.”, said JosĂ© Espadeiro.
Ana Cabo still talks to her children today, grandchildren and great-grandchildren harvesting the silarcas (Amanita Ponderosa), a species that lives among holm oaks and cork oaks and can be found, in March, in the cork oak forests surrounding the village of Vera Cruz.
Teixeira Correia
(journalist)
