Port anD the Douro uP to Date 7the english ‘FaCtory’
By the late sixteenth century, Portugal’s second city was already home to a well-
established community of foreign traders including dutch, Flemish, French, and
Germans, most of whom were engaged in selling cloth and bacalhau to the Portuguese
in exchange for oil and fruit rather than wine. they had their own feitorias or factories, a
term that in its original sense meant a body of factors or merchants carrying out their
business in a foreign country. the Portuguese already had their own feitorias in india
by the end of the fifteenth century and it is probable that the english usage of the term
derives from the Portuguese. certainly by the mid-seventeenth century there were
english Factories in india as well as in Portugal at Lisbon, oporto and Viana.
Following the restoration of the Portuguese monarchy in 1640 under the duque de
Bragança, João iV, treaties were concluded with the dutch, French and swedish giving
them preferential trading rights in Portugal in return for their support of the continuing
war against spain. however, relations with holland quickly deteriorated and when the
dutch finally made peace with spain in 1648, they changed from being equivocal allies
to undeclared enemies. the english, who had already negotiated one accord since the
restoration, then exacted huge privileges from the Portuguese in the commonwealth
treaty of 1654. this made the english traders in oporto more powerful than the
Portuguese themselves. the english were granted their own judge-conservator, were
exempted from any new taxes and, upon death, the Portuguese courts were to have no
jurisdiction over their property. they were free to hold Protestant services and acquire
land for an english cemetery. With their own judges, consul and chaplain, the english
Factories in Lisbon and oporto became independent colonies in their own right. their
special status was further reinforced following the restoration of the english monarchy
when charles ii married afonso Vi’s sister, catherine of Bragança, in 1662. in another
treaty concluded in 1661, the english committed themselves to defend Portugal ‘as if it
were england itself’.Although vineyards had been planted in the region in the thirteenth century during the
reign of Dom Diniz, ‘the husbandman’, wine was still very much a secondary product.
Vines grew from pilheiros, small holes specially constructed in the vertical terrace walls,
thereby leaving all the available flat land for essentials like corn. Writing just over a century
later, F. P. Rebello de Fonseca remarks that ‘in 1681 there were no large plantations of
vineyards’, adding that they mostly comprised small plots of land scattered amidst the
scrub. The region was ‘one of the poorest in the kingdom, as is shown by the wretchedness
of the buildings’. The Visconde de Villa Maior, writing in 1876, adds that with ‘the
English taste inclining to sweet wines’ growers were obliged ‘to rear vines in choice seats
on the banks of the streams more exposed to the solar action, these comprising small areas
scattered here and there in the woods’.