Baleira (town)

The municipality (concelho) and island of Porto Santo (‘holy harbour’) have as their seat, or capital, the town (vila) of the same name, which is also known as Vila Baleira. This name is certainly very old, but it seems to have been little used, even in the earliest days of colonisation. From the rare references to it that we have found in old documents, we believe that this strange name gradually fell out of use and so, little by little, sank into complete oblivion. Only now and then, and only in official documents written on the island, does one still come across Vila Baleira, perhaps as a vestige of the ancient lineage of its inhabitants and of the old noble traditions of the descendants of Bartolomeu Perestrelo, the first donatary of Porto Santo.

What is the origin of this name? We do not know. Dr Rodrigues de Azevedo, in note XII to the ‘Longing for the Homeland’ (Saudades da Terra), says the following on the subject, word for word: ‘The name Vila Baleira is of unknown origin: but, reflecting that Baleira has the same root, bal, as the first form of the surname Perestrello, and combining this element with the ending eira, one readily recognises that Villa Baleira is a name signifying that the town of Porto Sancto was founded by Perestrello: it is as if we were to say Villa de Perestrello. The name of the town kept the letters of the original form, whereas the family surname replaced them in the manner we have already seen when we dealt with Bartholomeu Perestrello (note X, p. 446): and they became so different that they seem words foreign to one another, though they are in fact cognate, as has been said. This is a strong presumption that the said town was founded by Bartholomeu Perestrello.’

This explanation is very strange, and it undoubtedly takes too far the rapid transformation of a word which, within a short time, passed as if by magic from Perestrello to Baleira. Despite the great erudition of Gaspar Frutuoso’s annotator and the considerable philological knowledge he possessed, we may apply here the well-known saying: aliquando dormitat Homerus. Someone has already put forward the idea that the word Baleira was very dear to the Perestrelo family because it designated the place where they owned a manor house, or perhaps the cradle of their forebears. We cannot deny it, but neither have we any serious grounds for asserting it.

Various names of localities and settlements are found in Madeira that were, and still are, names of towns and villages in Portugal, chiefly in the Algarve, whence came the largest number of the first colonisers of this archipelago. Thus the locality of Boliqueme, in the parish of Santo António, bears the name of a parish (freguesia) in that province. In the Algarve there is a village called Baleeira, which could easily be corrupted into Baleira. It is Dr Azevedo himself who points this out, perhaps as penance for the bold explanation he had given earlier. Baleeira, or Baleira, in the Algarve is a seaside village, and moreover lies near Sagres, where Henry the Navigator lived and had his school of navigation. To his household belonged Bartolomeu Perestrelo, the first donatary of Porto Santo and the founder of the original settlement established there.

The royal decree (alvará) that raised the settlement of Porto Santo to the status of a town (vila) is not known. On this point, note XVI to the Saudades contains the following: ‘...we infer, in the absence of the respective charters, that the settlement on the island of Porto Santo, later called Vila Baleira, and that of Machico were likewise raised to towns and municipalities around the same year, 1452, in which the grant of the latter received royal confirmation: and it is certain that tradition points to these towns as the earliest.’

The settlement, and later town, of Porto Santo or Baleira progressed and developed in the early days of colonisation. However, little more than a century after the discovery it began to decline, and it has remained in an almost stagnant state ever since. This is despite the adoption of certain government measures intended to help it progress and lift it out of the decline in which it has languished for centuries, notably those of the Marquis of Pombal (see Fifths and eighths). This town is the seat of the municipality and of the only parish (freguesia) of Porto Santo.