Garden of Padim Ciço: narratives, imaginary, interventions

Taking different paths to get to Horto do Padre Cícero, this book presents a set of paths that combine to tell a story of devotion and enchantment, full of nuances that only those who exhaust investigative possibilities can offer. Transiting between aspects demarcated by different points of view, the chapters are presented as steps on a ladder, making us understand in detail and scope the various dimensions that make the sacred space comprehensible.

Using various methodological and documental resources for her writing, like a good historian, Fátima Pinho transits from the ancestral ritualistic garden, a refuge island of ancient and last waters, to the Horto do Padre Cícero, conceived in the light of an imagined geography of the scriptures and, still, the garden resulting from tourist appropriations, which is defined in the destruction of vestiges of what can be understood as “fanatical and outdated religiosity”. Uses, resistances, political, cultural and economic appropriations derive from the set of places that are designed in the same space. It ends in the meaning of the Horto for devotees and residents defined in the intimacy with the space and the processes of transformations that they witnessed over time.