Florbela Espanca, a Portuguese poetess born in 1894 in Vila Viçosa, was raised by the couple João Maria Espanca and Mariana do Carmo Toscano, known as "Mariana Inglesa." Mariana, being infertile, consented to her husband maintaining a relationship with Antónia da Conceição, a domestic servant, with whom Florbela and her brother Apeles were born in 1897. Despite economic difficulties, the couple provided their children with a careful education, and Florbela's relationship with her stepmother oscillated between affection and demanding discipline.
The poetess's life was marked by numerous adversities. She began writing poetry at eight years old and faced constant melancholy, the stigma of illegitimacy, several suicide attempts, two failed marriages, and the premature death of her brother. In 1918, she suffered a miscarriage that affected her ovaries and lungs, worsening her health.
In an attempt to recover physically and emotionally, Florbela came to live in Quelfes, in the Algarve, where a sister-in-law who was a teacher resided. The months spent in what she described as the "hermitage of Quelfes" already reveal the state of deep neurosis that dominated her, having written in the work "Charneca em Flor": "I am so sad and bored! I hate the Algarve." Subsequently, her judgment became more balanced, as expressed in Letter No. 72: "There are not fifty people in Portugal who would say the Algarve is more beautiful than the North. I do not dislike the Algarve, but I do not find it anything special."
From a cultural perspective, the article proposes that Quelfes, in the municipality of Olhão, be integrated into a literary route dedicated to Florbela Espanca. Such an initiative would evoke the passage through the Algarve of one of the greatest Portuguese poetesses, whose life, ended at 36, was of rare intensity and left a deep mark on Portuguese literature.
