The Barcelos cockerel: the legend and what is documented

A Galician on his way to Santiago de Compostela passes through Barcelos just as the town is looking for whoever committed a crime. He is arrested, he swears he is innocent, nobody believes him, he is condemned to the gallows. Brought before the judge, who is feasting with friends, he points to a roast cockerel on the table: it is as sure that I am innocent as it is sure that this cockerel will crow when they hang me. The cockerel stands up and crows, the knot of the rope does not tighten, the judge has the condemned man freed. That is the account published by Barcelos town council and by the Visit Portugal tourist portal.

The story carries no date and no name: not the judge’s, not the pilgrim’s. It ends in a monument, since the man comes back years later to have a cross raised in honour of Saint James and the Virgin. No contemporary document attests it, and neither of the two pages that publish it cites a source. It is a legend, and it reads like one.

A stone cross does exist, the Cruzeiro do Senhor do Galo. It stands in the Archaeological Museum of Barcelos, an open-air museum set in the ruins of the palace of the counts of Barcelos, above the bridge over the Cávado. Barcelos town council describes it as a cruzeiro alluding to the miracle of Saint James, the one the cockerel legend came from. The Visit Portugal file on the museum adds that it was not born there: it comes from Barcelinhos, the parish on the other bank.

The oldest known description of it dates from 1867. It is in the Noticia descriptiva da muito nobre e antiga villa de Barcellos by A. M. do Amaral Ribeiro, whose pages 112 to 116 Pires de Lima copied out in 1965. Amaral Ribeiro measures the monument to the centimetre: two steps, a pedestal, a slab of 1.54 metres, a cross of 1.42 metres. On the southwest face a man hangs from a slack rope, and a figure holds him up by the soles of his feet, staff and gourd in hand, which marks him as Saint James. Above, under the Christ and just above the hanged man’s head, a cockerel, turned towards the gallows visible some eighty-odd paces away.

The gallows is dated. Amaral Ribeiro cites the contract made by the municipality, of 26 January 1712, to rebuild it in dressed stone at Barcelinhos, and notes that a permanently standing gallows was to be seen, so far as he knew, only in Lisbon and in Porto. On the roast cockerel, by contrast, he stops dead: nothing being written on the subject, he writes, he declines to report the matter with the episodes that run in the people’s mouths.

The age of the cross is not settled. Amaral Ribeiro judges it very old, but from the crude workmanship of the figures, not from a document. Pires de Lima writes in brackets “fourteenth century”. Barcelos town council and the Visit Portugal page on the legend speak of a medieval cruzeiro. The file of the same Visit Portugal on the museum dates it to the early eighteenth century, that is, to the time of the gallows. None of these pages says what it relies on.

It was not born at Barcelos. Its oldest written version is in chapter V of the Liber Sancti Jacobi, the twelfth-century collection also called the Codex Calixtinus, which Pires de Lima translated in 1965: Germans on pilgrimage to the tomb of Saint James, in the year one thousand and ninety of the incarnation, stop at Toulouse with a host who makes them drunk, slips a silver cup into their bag and has them accused of theft. The son is hanged in the father’s place. In that version the cockerel only gives the hour at which the pursuers set out, and it is Saint James who holds the hanged man up for the thirty-six days the father’s journey lasts.

The miracle then travelled and changed town. Luis M. Calvo Salgado, of the university of Salamanca, describes it as one of the best known and most deeply rooted in the popular culture of all Europe at the end of the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, and ranks Barcelos in Portugal and Santo Domingo de la Calzada in Rioja among the places it was adapted to, not by chance. At Santo Domingo, pilgrims came to see a live cock and hen kept in the cathedral: Calvo Salgado cites the accounts of Nompar de Caumont in 1417, Sebastian Ilsung in 1446, and the German monk Hermann Künig in 1495.

At Barcelos itself, the versions collected do not agree. Pires de Lima gathered several in 1965. In A. Gomes Pereira’s, it all starts with an innkeeper furious that his customers brought their own sausages and chickens: it is a cold chicken, pulled from the condemned man’s bag, that starts to crow, and the innkeeper is hanged in his place. In Teotónio da Fonseca’s, it is a roast cockerel on the judge’s table. None of these versions gives a date.

The clay cockerel is attested before anyone linked it to the legend. In 1900 the ethnographer Rocha Peixoto published in the review Portugália his survey of the potteries of Prado, the Barcelos region. He writes there that the cockerel surpasses in number and in variety every species of the fauna modelled by the potters, and that it is the best treated. He explains that place by what the people tell of the cockerel, in their tales, their superstitions and their songs. Of the Barcelos pilgrim he says nothing.

João Macedo Correia noticed this in 1965, in a notebook of the regional ceramics museum of Barcelos: if Rocha Peixoto does not mention the legend of the Senhor do Galo, it is doubtless because he saw no connection between the plucked cockerel of the story and the potters’, plumed and richly coloured. Macedo Correia goes further: tying the legend to that craft is in his view a mistake, because the legend was not even known to the modellers. He adds that he found no early mention of the big wheel-thrown cockerels, which he holds to be recent, and credits one Gonçalves Torres with the first retouchings that gave the cockerel its elegance.

The move from regional figurine to national emblem is dated. The historian Miguel Metelo de Seixas writes that the legend stayed in relative obscurity until the nineteenth century, when the potters of Barcelos began to represent it in coloured clay figures, and that it was the Salazarist New State that spread them. A polychrome clay Barcelos cockerel was shown at Geneva in 1935, in the exhibition of Portuguese popular art mounted by the Secretariat of National Propaganda, directed from its foundation in 1933 by António Ferro; the exhibition was taken to Lisbon the following year, with great success.

Ferro was trying to recover or reinvent Portuguese popular traditions, writes Metelo de Seixas, and the cockerel answered well: a simple product, suited to the decorative taste of the Minho, with roots that could be called both archaic and religious. It became the emblem of Portuguese emigration around the world, then a fetish object reproduced in great quantities and sold as a souvenir, therefore made industrially. Barcelos town council puts its rise to the rank of national tourism symbol from the 1950s and 1960s.

The two readings do not match. Metelo de Seixas has the figurines born of the legend in the nineteenth century; Macedo Correia held in 1965 that the potters did not know it. Barcelos town council writes that the icon comes from the legend, as the story indicates. None of these three pages produces the document that would settle it.

Barcelos joined the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in 2017, for crafts and folk art. UNESCO presents it as the cradle of the Barcelos cockerel, a Portuguese emblem and a symbol of good faith and justice, notes that about 8 per cent of the working population of the municipality works in the creative sector, and that its biennial crafts and ceramics fair has passed 100,000 visitors.

The figurine has come loose from the Minho. Visit Portugal recalls that its image served for years as a symbol of Portuguese tourism. Barcelos town council writes that from the 1980s the cockerel detached itself from the ethno-political context that had made it a tourist symbol and reinvented itself as the image of a country offering the world its freedom.