I was born in Portugal to a Spanish father and a Portuguese mother, and every Christmas I go to Spain to see my father’s family and I realized that Spain and Portugal have a very different reading culture even though both countries are next to each other.
For example, I never learned anything about spanish literature, nothing, the only thing I knew until now was a writer named Miguel de Cervantes because his face appears on the 50 cent coins.
However I know everything about portuguese literature, every single writer and of course all of their books and every single page of their books, and I dont want to talk about the amount of references to literature that can be seen on the streets of Lisbon (and all portuguese cities) and of course the PNL, Portugal’s literature promotion machine, (Btw I dont recommend portuguese literature, its too tedious)
This Christmas I was walking on the streets of Madrid and the only references to literature I saw were the Lope de Vega theather at Gran Via (Lope de Vega was a spanish writer), metro stations named after Tirso de Molina and Antonio Machado and a street plate dedicated to another writer named Valle-Inclán.
Other than that, I saw zero bookstores, zero libraries and zero references to literature, another thing that I realized was that spanish children dont receive books for Christmas (in comparison with Portugal, where I always received books for Christmas)
Another detail is related with a thing we have in Spain named the “Bono Cultural” (400 euros the goverment gives to teenagers to buy things related to “culture”) and all my spanish friends wasted those 400 euros in everything except books.
In conclusion, the two sides of the Miño and the Guadiana river have very different reading habits and I dont know why…
by CRNXD38