The book “Na língua da maré” was presented November 19th in Lisbon. It’s going to be released during the month of December and presented in public during 2023 throughout Portugal.
“Challenged to produce a book, we propose that, in its 80 years, Mútua dos Pescadores celebrates these communities, their relationship with fishing and the sea, their history and their aspirations for a future in which this organization intends to continue to have a leading role. With the help of Mútua’s collaborators and associates, we intend, over these months, to get to know better the coastal territories of this country, many of its protagonists and to produce, from that experience, chronicles supported by text and image, for a work to be launched in the end of year.
The chronicles, (text and photography), may be about people, places, boats and other means of production; about maritime spaces and the activities that develop therein, be they old, trying to survive time, or recent, trying to gain their space, such as leisure-tourism, among others associated with what today is more widely is called the Blue economy. We will go looking for men and women, the old who resist, and the young who, against the tide, still seek the sea as a source of work. They will be texts and photographs that will not focus only on Mútua, but on the territories and those for whom it works, expressing, in the possible multiplicity, not only our relationship with maritimity, but also concerns of this organization in matters such as job security, economic and social justice, gender imbalances and others that affect seaside communities.
The book will be a gift from Mútua to maritime culture – for which, in other projects, Mútua has done so much, which will also be worth remembering. We hope that the result has a quality that allows this to be seen not only as an institutional work, but that it can be appreciated by the community in general, and reach bookstores. For us, as authors, it would be a stimulus to see the work go further”.
Mútua is the first and only Portuguese insurance cooperative, which celebrated in 2022 eighty years of history as Mútua de Seguros. From 2000 onwards, the mutualist experience in the fisheries sector accumulated over decades was joined by intervention in other maritime activities, such as recreational boating, maritime tourism, sport fishing or diving, and today it has answers for the protection of all people. and their assets, their homes, all economic activities, associations, public sector entities and the cooperative and social sector.