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“I love to work with animals, and I have a lot of faith in Nossa Senhora dos Remédios,” said Antonio Faustino, who guided the massive animals in the celebration of this particular image of the Virgin Mary, venerated here since the 1500s.

On a sweltering May morning, when the sun had already melted buckets of ice at the seafood market and the priests at Nossa Senhora da Ajuda church were just beginning their morning verses, a series of unfamiliar sounds emanated from the top of a former military hospital in western Lisbon.

To accommodate its swelling number of coffins, the public Nossa Senhora Aparecida cemetery razed an area of tropical forest to dig dozens of trenches in the rust-colored soil for burials.

“Senhora Michelle Bachelet, if Pinochet’s people had not defeated the left in 73 – among them your father – Chile would be a Cuba today.”

On this occasion, our first day, the taxi driver has dropped us in the wrong place – a result of our over-reliance on Google Translate – and Conor is insisting that we must walk back to the start: the Church of Nossa Senhora da Aparecida on a hill in the village of Balugães, northern Portugal.