Mount Torre (Estrela Range) is the tallest mountain in mainland Portugal and the second highest in the whole republic with an elevation of 6,539 feet above sea level. It is found in Seia, Guarda District, Portugal. A unique feature of the peak is that it is accessible by paved roads. Ruivo de Santana

The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel review – a

What other themes do you find in the novel—-for example, how important is faith and how important is love in each of the three parts? And which themes resonate for you personally most deeply? Interview questions attributed to Goodreads are from an interview between Heather Scott Partington and Yann Martel that appeared on Goodreads in February 2016 (goodreads.com/interviews/show/1100.Yann_Martel) and are reprinted here by permission of Goodreads. Introduction Fifty years on, a Canadian senator takes refuge in his ancestral village in northern Portugal, grieving the loss of his beloved wife. But he arrives with an unusual companion: a chimpanzee. And there the century-old quest will come to an unexpected conclusion. Part One of the novel is a quest, Part Two mixes allegory with magical realism, and Part Three is contemporary realism. Which section of the book are you most drawn to and which works best for you? Mount Piquinho, also known as Mount Pico, is the tallest mountain in Portugal with an elevation of 7,713 feet above sea level. It is found in the mid-Atlantic archipelago of Azores on Pico Island. It is a stratovolcano made up of several layers of hardened lava, pumice, volcanic ash, and tephra. Historical records show that the mountain has a history of violent eruptions. In 1562, an eruption produced lava that reached the sea in while in 1718, an eruption produced enough lava to reach the coast. The region around the mountain is considered seismically active and is monitored by the seismic and volcanic monitoring centers. Torre (Estrela Range) Mountain

Goodreads: Are the High Mountains of Portugal your ideal setting because they are, by name, an exaggeration? “An act of national vanity”? The setting in your novel echoes some of the ideas about truth, storytelling, and expectation. Can you talk about the importance of names as they relate to our interpretation? How did you think about the names in the story as you were writing? In Lisbon in 1904, a young man named Tomás discovers an old journal. It hints at the existence of an extraordinary artifact that - if he can find it - would redefine history. Traveling in one of Europe's earliest automobiles, he sets out in search of this strange treasure.

The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel – review

We re fortunate to have brilliant writers using their fiction to meditate on a paradox we need urgently to consider the unbridgeable gap and the unbreakable bond between human and animal, our impossible self-alienation from our world. . . . [Martel s] semi-surreal, semi-absurdist mode is well suited to exploring the paradox. The moral and spiritual implications of his tale have, in the end, a quality of haunting tenderness. Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Guardian" Homeward: Thirty-five years later Dr Eusebio Lozora is pootling around in his pathology laboratory one evening when his wife bursts in. “Hello, Maria,” he says. “Hello, Eusebio,” she replies. “Can we have another of our long and pointless conversations about the detective fiction of Agatha Christie?” The first narrative begins in Lisbon in 1904, when a young man called Tomás discovers a 17th-century priest’s diary, which reveals the existence of a hidden treasure. Tomás has lost his wife, son, and father within a single week. However, because the reader knows little of Tomás’s relationship with his family, this horrific series of tragedies is not appropriately moving. The High Mountains of Portugal, in Yann Martel’s novel of that name, turn out to be grassy uplands rather than high mountains; and the book turns out to be three stories rather than a novel. The stories, connected ingeniously, vary greatly in tone and quality. The first two display so little of the author’s narrative skill that they may offer more temptation to stop reading than to go on. Liking the last part of the book much better, I could wish that it stood alone. During a visit from his son, Peter comes to understand that his grandfather Rafael and his grandmother Maria emigrated from Tuizelo many years ago, and that the house that he and Odo occupy actually once belonged to his grandparents. Rafael and Maria’s son, who passed away under very mysterious circumstances, has come to be revered in the small town.It is a testament to the book's ambition, and Martel's novelistic abilities, that this evolution seeks to better the reader while also denying him or her any comprehensive sense of resolution – it refuses to conflate maturity with certitude, and in a sense insists on ambiguity. High Mountains resists the reader at every turn in the most pleasing way possible: it does not seek to offer you absolute truth, though it contains much wisdom; instead, it seeks to evade you, and in doing so deepens your sense of its mysteries, and the mysteries of the world we share with it. In the course of one week – Gaspar died on Monday, Dora on Thursday, his father on Sunday – his heart became undone like a bursting cocoon. Emerging from it came no butterfly but a grey moth that settled on the wall of his soul and stirred no farther”

The High Mountains of Portugal Summary and Reviews - BookBrowse The High Mountains of Portugal Summary and Reviews - BookBrowse

Whimsical magical realism . . . Fans of modern fables will feel right at home untangling the messages hidden within the narrative. Paste Gleefully bizarre, genuinely thrilling and entirely heartbreaking . . . While The High Mountains of Portugal is an exuberantly narrative novel, it is even more so a contemplative, philosophical one. . . . The book s prose [reminds] us of how subtle and elegant a craftsman Martel is. . . . High Mountains resists the reader at every turn in the most pleasing way possible: it does not seek to offer you absolute truth, though it contains much wisdom; instead, it seeks to evade you, and in doing so deepens your sense of its mysteries, and the mysteries of the world we share with it. The Globe and Mail

Goodreads: How did the idea for The High Mountains of Portugal come to you? One of the things I love about it is how it makes many of the same points over generations, but in very different scenarios. Was the novel initially conceived as these three very different parts, or did it evolve into that? Can you talk about what ideas excited you as you became immersed in this work? Martel titles the three parts of his novel “Homeless,”“Homeward,” and “Home.” Discuss the role that home plays in the novel and why he might have given the parts these titles. How is Tomás, in Part One, homeless? How do you understand “homeward” in Part Two? How is Peter Tovy, in Part Three, home? I took away indelible images from High Mountains, enchanting and disturbing at the same time. . . . As whimsical as Martel s magic realism can be, grief informs every step of the book s three journeys. In the course of the novel we burrow ever further into the heart of an ape, pure and threatening at once, our precursor, ourselves. NPR Ageing is not easy, Sennhora Castro. It's a terrible, incurable pathology. And great love is another pathology. It starts well. It's a most desirable disease. One wouldn't want to do without it. It's like yeast that corrupts the juice of grapes. One loves, one loves, one persists in loving-the incubation period can be very long- and then, with death, comes the heart break. Love must always meet its unwanted end.” His depiction of loss is raw and deeply affecting but it s the way in which he contextualises it within formal religion that gives this book an extra dimension. Martel s writing is enriched and amplified by the abundance and intricacy of his symbology (touching on Job, St. Peter, Doubting Thomas and the parables of Jesus) and his probing of religion s consolations. Martel is not in the business of providing us with answers, but through its odd, fabulous, deliberately oblique stories, his new novel does ask some big questions. "The Telegraph "(four stars)

List of mountains in Portugal - Wikipedia List of mountains in Portugal - Wikipedia

Written with nuanced beauty; not for nothing has Martel established himself as our premier writer of animal-based fiction. "Toronto Star" Ruivo de Santana also reffered to as the Pico Ruivo de Santana is located near the Curral das Freiras in Madiera Island. It has an elevation of 5,421 feet making it the highest mountain in Madiera and the third tallest in Portugal. Its peak can only be reached by foot with the easiest and the mot preferred route being from Achada do Teixeira but also the route from Pico do Areiro can be used though it is strenuous. Ruivo do PaulHis depiction of loss is raw and deeply affecting but it s the way in which he contextualises it within formal religion that gives this book an extra dimension. Martel s writing is enriched and amplified by the abundance and intricacy of his symbology (touching on Job, St. Peter, Doubting Thomas and the parables of Jesus) and his probing of religion s consolations. Martel is not in the business of providing us with answers, but through its odd, fabulous, deliberately oblique stories, his new novel does ask some big questions. The Telegraph (four stars)