Journalist Lígia Neves won second place in a fiction writing contest with "A Matriarca de Machico," a work inspired by the Legend of Machim that gives voice to Margareth in a fictional approach about love, loss, and the sea. At the Solar do Museu in Ponta Delgada, Pedro Fernandes would tell visitors this same legend with his own emotion and interpretation, until he was punished and removed by the Regional Directorate for Culture for the way he presented it.
The article raises the question of why a writer can recreate the Legend of Machim and see her fiction rewarded, but a guide cannot tell the legend in his own way. It argues that the story of the two English lovers cannot be recited, it must be told with a voice that feels it and makes the visitor forget the clock. Telling a legend in one's own way does not alter History; it merely acknowledges the nature of oral tradition, which crosses generations because it is retold by those who give it life.
The article argues that cultural heritage is not only in documents or buildings, but in the people who manage to transmit the story and make visitors carry it with them. A guide who moves people does not impoverish heritage; he honors it. Two days before the Bom Jesus festival in Ponta Delgada, the article makes an appeal for the decision to be reconsidered, for the door of the Solar do Museu to be opened again, and for Pedro Fernandes to be allowed to return to tell, in his own way, one of Madeira's most beautiful legends.
