Centro Region, Portugal known as the Princes of Beira. Along the region’s mountainous border with Spain are a series of fortresses and castles that once protected the country from its many invaders. Over the centuries, Moors, Christians, Spaniards and Portuguese have all tried to take these villages, but their higher elevations usually gave them a distinct advantage. On that border, the more than one dozen fortified frontier villages beckon today’s visitors to come explore a 900-year history — full of the heroism, epic battles and romance upon which Portugal struggled to become a nation. Today, Portugal boasts the longest-standing border in all of
A land without a people for a people without a land a people without a land". John Lawson Stoddard, a popular speaker and author of travel books, published an 1897 travelogue in which he exhorts the Jews, "You are a people without a country; there is a country without a people. Be united. Fulfil the dreams of your old poets and patriarchs. Go back, go back to the land of Abraham". According to Adam Garfinkle what Keith, Shaftesbury, Blackstone, Stoddard and the other nineteenth century Christians who used this phrase were saying was that the Holy Land was not the seat of a nation in the way that Japan is the