Every year on November 11, St. Martin's Day is traditionally celebrated in Portugal eating roasted chestnuts and drinking água-pé (a light alcoholic beverage made by adding water to the pomace
obtained after the grapes having been pressed for wine), jeropiga (a sweet liquor made in a fashion similar to água-pé, but with ‘fire water’ added to the water), or new wine.
This traditional celebration is known as magusto*.
A typical Portuguese saying tied to Saint Martin's Day goes: It is St. Martin's Day, we'll eat chestnuts and taste the wine.
The vendor of roasted chestnuts
Though St. Martin’s Day falls in late autumn, weather becomes unusually mild around this period of the year, called “St. Martin’s Summer”, and we find the explanation for it in the following legend.
St. Martin died in Candes, Gaul, (modern-day France) on November 8, 397. When his dead body was being taken to Tours (where he was buried on November 11) on a boat over the river Loire,
the people noticed that the flowers along the river banks were blooming in spite of the late autumn season. And this is the origin of “St. Martin’s Summer"!
The most famous legend about St. Martin nevertheless refers to his cloak. St. Martin started out as a Roman soldier deployed in Gaul, and the legend goes that one cold winter day,
when approaching the gates of the city of Amiens, Martin met a naked beggar there. Impulsively, Martin cut his cloak in half and shared it with the beggar.
That night Martin dreamed that Jesus was wearing the half-cloak he had given away, and he heard Jesus say to the angels that a Roman soldier who was not baptised had clad him.
(Sulpicius, ch.3). After this vision St. Martin hastened to receive baptism. He was 20 years old.
* Leite de Vasconcelos regarded the magusto as the vestige of an ancient sacrifice to honour the dead, and stated that it was tradition in Barqueiros,
a small town in the north of Portugal, to prepare at midnight a table with chestnuts for the deceased family members to eat.
