The Intellectual’s Cork: The Management of Mário Saa´s Cork Forests (1893-1971)

Abstract

Mário Saa, one of the most outstanding intellectuals of the Alentejo of the 20th century, spent much of his life on a forestry farm in the municipality of Avis: Pero Viegas. The farm of Pero Viegas, built in the last years of the XIX century by the father, constituted the headquarters of the agricultural house. The family had leased most of the land in 1917 and lived mainly from that yield. Mário Saa, having not finished university courses, depended on the income from agriculture and cork. In the archive of the Foundation Paes Teles, there is documentation on the administration of the estates during the last thirty years of the writer’s life: from correspondence with cork industrialists, to cartography of the different properties. The Portuguese farms of cork oak are today a type of property almost exclusively of private ownership and, for this reason, archives are almost nonexistent for consulting the agrarian history of these great properties. The existence of this documentation in the headquarters of the foundation in Ervedal, allows a new look at the agrarian history of the Alentejo in the XX century.