Port anD the Douro uP to Date 27woMen who shaPeD the Douro
dona antónia Ferreira (1811–96)
Port is often viewed as a male fiefdom and, until recently, very few women were involved
in the production or shipping of Port. dona antónia Ferreira is a notable exception and
her influence is still felt in the douro today. Born at Régua in 1811, dona antónia, as
she became known, was born into a Port-shipping family whose business had been
established since the middle of the eighteenth century. she was a small but powerful
woman, known locally by the affectionate diminutive ‘Ferreirinha’ meaning ‘Little
Ferreira’. over the course of her life she became the largest landowner in the douro
with a domaine stretching from Peso da Régua in the Baixo corgo (where she lived)
to Quinta do Vale do Meão in the douro superior. she amassed a total of twenty-four
quintas including some of the best estates in the douro such as Quinta do Porto, Quinta
de Vargellas and Quinta do Vesúvio. the entrances to her properties are distinguished
with elaborate stone and wrought iron gateways, many of which are standing today.
charles sellers, writing three years after her death, portrays dona antónia as ‘the
richest of landed proprietors, but there are few ladies in the land who had seen so little
or knew so little of the world. her thousands of acres of mountain land covered with
vines were her chief thought...’.
she was married twice, firstly to her cousin antónio Bernado Ferreira ii and, following
his death, to her estate manager Francisco José da silva torres. sellers records that
‘there were never two men who spent more money in the douro than the two husbands
of dona antónia’. dona antónia survived an accident on the river in 1861 in which
her friend and companion, Joseph James Forrester, was drowned. When dona antónia
died at Quinta das nogeiras near Régua in 1896 her properties were producing more
than 1,500 pipes of Port a year and she left her company, a. a. Ferreira, with a stock of
13,000 pipes.the incident will never be precisely known. Forrester’s son William was said to have been
told that the corpse was found downstream at Pinhão, robbed of the gold by a local who
subsequently confessed to the crime on his deathbed. One fact is indisputable: a notice
in the deaths column of The Times dated Thursday 23 May 1861: ‘On the 12th inst.,
accidentally drowned while descending the River Douro by the upsetting of a boat at
the Ponto do Cachão, Joseph James Forrester Esq. Baron de Forrester in Portugal, in his
52nd year.’ Ironically, a small engraving of the Ponto do Cachão appears on Forrester’s
1848 map. Denied a place in the British Cemetery in Oporto, a plaque mounted on the
granite rock above the rapids is his only memorial. Although the river was subsequently
tamed by a series of dams built in the 1970s, Cachão de Valeira, now calm, still feels dark
and forbidding.