Islands as Liminal Spaces
Points of Reference
O filósofo do rei, quando não tinha que fazer, ia sentar-se ao pé de mim, a ver-me passajar as peúgas dos pajens, e às vezes dava-lhe para filosofar, dizia que todo o homem é uma ilha, eu como aquilo não era comigo, visto que sou mulher, não lhe dava importância, tu que achas, Que é necessário sair da ilha para ver a ilha, que não nos vemos se não saímos de nós
O conto da Ilha Desconhecida, José Saramago
The king's philosopher, when he had nothing to do, would come and sit beside me and watch me darning the pages' socks, and sometimes he would start philosophizing, he used to say that each man is an island, but since that had nothing to do with me, being a woman, I paid no attention to him, what do you think, That you have to leave the island in order to see the island, that we can't see ourselves unless we become free of ourselves
Tale of the Unknown Island, José Saramago, Mariner Books
“Paradise is an Island. So is hell.” This phrase serves as title of the introduction to Judith Schalansky’s Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands, subtitled Fifty Islands I have not visited and never will. Reading the first pages of the book - an introduction to the environment where the author and artist grew up and to the story of her atlas as a geopolitical design of a divided world - reminded me of the childhood stories shared by the elderly men and women of Culatra island. Paradise and hell, battling the rough sea in rudimentary clothing, enduring the winter cold seeping into their feet, legs, and arms. Harvesting clams since the age of nine, surrounded by the fear instilled by poor and, sometimes, violent parents. Hell. But, also, the memory of entering the sea naked, surrounded by friends. Of dancing in the water in hot summers. Paradise.
In her book The Corporeal Life of Seafaring (2024), Laleh Khalili investigates the relationships between the sea, movement, labour and global economies through the bodies of seafarers. Each chapter title the book features their corporeal experiences and resonates with the stories I have heard in Culatra. Those bodily memories exist at the intersection of idealization of the past as a time of both strong communitarian bonds (Paradise) as well as poverty and hunger (Hell), and the questioning of what the future may bring. What will climate change and neoliberalism bring to the people of Culatra? The present is a kind of liminal encounter between memory and expectation.
Culatra is not geographically remote. I can even imagine that Judith Schalansky has already visited it, as a German tourist wandering the Portuguese Atlantic and Southern coast. Culatra is only 3 kilometres away from the closest mainland city. However, remoteness extends beyond physical distance. It encompasses symbolic and social differences as well as other embodiments. Portugal embraced democracy in 1974, dreaming of progress and social equality. At the time, Culatra still had no electricity. It was only introduced in 1992. Judith Schalansky was twelve years old. So was I. Living more or less eight kilometres away from Culatra.
The Tongan writer and anthropologist Epeli Hau‘ofa, writes on how the island states and territories of the Pacific have been portrayed as too small, deemed to be poor, isolated from economic growth and, therefore, from modernity. With no resources and highly dependent on mainland governments, their state of remoteness was often evidence of what they lacked. Published for the first time in 1994, Our Sea of Islands represents one of the epistemological turns on the relationships between humans (the islanders) and more-than-human entities, such as water, animals, winds, and ancestors. The people of Oceania, Epeli Hau‘ofa tells us, did not perceive their world in microscopic proportions. The surrounding ocean and the heavens above were part of their expanded cosmologies and stories, which Epeli Hau‘ofa calls on to reject dichotomous perspectives on land and water, traditional and modern, stagnation and development, permanence and movement.
Sailing, trading, and cultural exchanges connect land surfaces. In nineteenth-century Oceania, imperialism erected boundaries, “transforming a once boundless world into the Pacific Island states and territories that we know today. People were confined to their tiny spaces, isolated from each other” (Hau‘ofa 2023:203). Remoteness is therefore a political agent. One opposed to progress, enlightenment and connectedness. The last fifty years of democracy in Portugal represented a pursuit of progress to overcome a peripheral position. Progress meant abandoning remote and primitive activities (they are not, evidently) such as fishing and agriculture which kept people poor and silenced during the dictatorial times (1933-1974). Governments saw small artisanal fisheries as the antithesis of growth and development. With a great lack of investment in such activities and their improvement, fishing became something to run away from.
In Culatra, as artisanal fishing was progressively (but not completely) abandoned, others arrived to the island. It became less remote. Tourists, politicians, photographers, scientists (among them anthropologists), filmmakers, environmental experts, and maritime officials. They all discovered that Culatra was a Paradise. Located in a unique reserve of wetlands and mangroves, seahorses’ nurseries, seagrass meadows, brackish plants, and migratory birds, it was now a beautiful postcard. Amid the chaotic streets of a vivid village, the houses and DIY buildings seduced the German photographer Joachim Brohm and can be found here. Sand, garbage and abandoned boats, materials tell the story of the liminality of Culatra, between the violence of fabricated objects and the romantic smells and landscapes of the inner sea, the ria.
The people of Culatra transformed the island into a liminal space of boundary and connectedness. Peter Hay's article “A Phenomenology of Islands” (2005) analyses the fault lines of a historically long construction of islands and islandness as isolated. The nature of the island “edge” and shoreline contributes to illustrating islands as liminal and daring entities. The island of Culatra builds a solid identity, a boundary of belonging to the place, expressed through the people’s vernacular languages to refer to waves, brackish streams, dunes, and changing winds. The toponomy of Culatra’s small and labyrinthic streets, features the strong figures of the community: names of midwives, local sports club (Clube União Culatrense) and founders of associations (Associação de Moradores da Ilha da Culatra and Associação Nossa Senhora dos Navegantes), as well as the many men who left to fight in the Portuguese colonial wars in Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau. Also, coffeeshops and restaurants proudly display photographs of the island. The prolific local literature empowers the local memories of sea adventures and ancestors. Those are the boundaries of local histories.
Culatra was settled long before any ecological and political concerns with the place. It happened mainly in the 1930s and 1940s, fuelled by the mobility of fishermen between coastal villages and the barrier islands – Culatra, Armona, Faro, Tavira, Abóbora, Barril – much before the Algarve was transformed into a tourist destination. Some older people remember settling seasonally on the southern islands with their parents during the tuna fishing season. Others came to fish sardines, which were then processed in the canning factories of Olhão, the closest mainland city to Culatra. This industrial heritage deserves a wider and wider attention from local entities as this regional newspaper article remarks here. This was a developing industry during World War II. At the same time, in Culatra, young girls and women, alongside boys and men, picked different kinds of clams at low tides in the ria. The price of clams was low in the 1940s, but this activity became more lucrative at the end of the 1970s, as Martinho and Martinho tells us in Culatra. Um Lugar de Pescadores [Culatra. A Place of Fishermen] (1982). They started to build their own houses. First with reeds, then with zinc sheets and wood and later with cement and tiles.
The first plans to demolish the houses emerged with the foundation of the Ria Formosa Natural Park in 1987. This was the year the people of Culatra decided to boycott the national elections to stand up for basic rights (electricity, drinking water and sanitation), well before they knew their houses were in danger. Culatra’s collective position was the first step towards communal development. The governmental coastal management plans, with their successive revisions, the different jurisdictions of the territory, and a widespread belief that human presence was detrimental to the environment was met with resistance from the people of Culatra.
The people of Culatra do not conform to a romanticized, idyllic or even traditionalist image of fishermen and women. Throughout the last decades, people constantly moved between the island and mainland, sought to improve their living conditions. Some left to work and study in other parts of the country, others moved back and forth to work in Olhão, the closest mainland city. Some emigrated to France, Switzerland and Germany, countries of reception for many Portuguese citizens. Some came back. Others decided to continue local family businesses such as restaurants, coffee shops, and small grocery stores. Oyster farming became an emergent industry, enabling young and educated “sons” and “daughters” of the island to keep their connection to the place. Some of these stories will emerge in next blog entries.
Saramago tells us the story of a man and a woman who decide to leave steady land to find an unknown island in a boat they don’t know to navigate with. The quote at the beginning of this text illustrates the obviously philosophical dimension of the quest: you need to leave the island to see the island, you need to cross storms and unsteady seas to uncover the precious lessons emerging from islands. The people of Culatra took on the rippling sea of politicians, laws and experts to see their own uniqueness in opposition. As such, their power was to be found in their stories of hardship at sea, from where they fought and have been fighting against the widespread preconceived ideas of their supposed awkwardness.
Many thanks to Diana Lixandru for proofreading the text into English
Author: Raquel Carvalheira
Date: 7. 6. 2026.
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