Ox-pulled floats with sacred images of Mary draw thousands to Portugal’s wine-country procession
In the small town of Lamego in Portugal's Douro River Valley, where harvesting grapes for wine is in full swing in early September, one of Portugal’s largest and oldest religious festivals draws thousands
LAMEGO, Portugal (AP) — Galego and Cabano, two dark-haired oxen, pulled the sacred image of Our Lady of Remedies on a procession float for more than two hours through this small town in Portugal’s wine country.
They remained unperturbed even when two cannons fired salutes at the procession’s end, but their owner, a local farmer, beamed with pride.
“I love to work with animals, and I have a lot of faith in Nossa Senhora dos Remédios,” said Antonio Faustino, who guided the massive animals in the celebration of this particular image of the Virgin Mary, venerated here since the 1500s. “There is no word to explain the emotion.”
Lamego’s festival, nicknamed “Portugal’s pilgrimage,” is one of the oldest and largest of the many religious feasts that throughout summer draw tens of thousands of people to hamlets and metropolises. They remain popular in this rapidly secularizing country, where the Catholic Church has been reckoning this year with a long-ignored clergy sexual abuse scandal that Pope Francis addressed when he marked World Youth Day last month in Lisbon.
