Sometime in the fifteenth century, the story goes, a pilgrim passing through Barcelos on the road to Santiago was accused of stealing silver and sentenced to hang. Brought before the judge, who was sitting down to a dinner of roast rooster, the pilgrim said that when they hanged him, the bird on the table would stand up and crow to prove his innocence. The rooster stood up and crowed. The pilgrim walked.
Six hundred years later the Galo de Barcelos is the unofficial symbol of Portugal. You see the little hand-painted ceramic rooster on every shelf of every souvenir shop in the country: black body, red comb, a heart on its chest. A national emblem that belongs to a town of about sixty thousand people in the Minho, the green wedge of northern Portugal between Porto and the Spanish border.
That town is where our cut and sew knits are made. The Minho has been making textiles for centuries and it still does, more than almost anywhere else in Europe. For the people on our production floor it isn't a heritage story. It's their trade, and they are very good at it.
Barcelos also has a football club, and the people who make our knits support it. Gil Vicente Futebol Clube was founded in 1924 and named after the Renaissance playwright whose theater company performed in the square where the club's founders liked to gather. That may make them the only top-flight team in Europe named for a dramatist. They play at the Estádio Cidade de Barcelos. Their nickname is Os Galos. The Roosters.
Their history is the honest middle of Portuguese football. Two fifth-place finishes, twenty-two years apart. A first European campaign in 2022, nearly a century into the club's existence. And a long tradition of developing players that bigger clubs come north to collect. Ljubinko Drulović was carried off to Porto in the nineties and won five straight titles there. Samuel Lino was sold to Atlético Madrid for a club record. Barcelos develops the thing carefully and the world comes to buy it. The scouts and the knitwear buyers are running the same route.
If you own one of our Portuguese-made knits, it was cut and sewn within earshot of that stadium by people who will be there on Sunday, August 9, against Rio Ave.
