Rosalía de Castro, Porto

This statue, placed in Porto’s Praça da Galiza in September nineteen fifty-four, honours Rosalía de Castro, and it is the work of sculptor Barata Feyo. Take in the monument for a moment: it brings a major Galician literary voice into this Porto square. Rosalía was born in Santiago de Compostela in eighteen thirty-seven and became a poet and writer whose work moved between Galician and Castilian.

Her book Cantares Gallegos, published in eighteen sixty-three, opened a new chapter for Galician poetry at a time when Galician had fallen out of use as a written language. Its poems drew on popular songs, but they also confronted hardship, poverty, and the mass departure of Galicians from their homeland. The seventeenth of May, the date she dedicated that book, became Galicia’s Day of Galician Letters.

Rosalía’s writing gave shape to longing for Galician culture and identity, while also challenging narrow expectations of women writers. She died of cancer in Padrón in eighteen eighty-five, aged forty-eight; in eighteen ninety-one, her remains were moved to the Pantheon of Illustrious Galicians in Santiago de Compostela.