Garbage, that word that carries all the bad senses. If the meaning is literal, it is repugnant, the dictionary tells us. If figurative, it’s riffraff. And not even in verb does it mean good feeling.
Garbage can also be controversial when called upon to discuss a city: the management of collection in Lisbon has always given rise to controversy. But there is a man for whom it meant wealth and who earned the name written in history: Manuel Martins Gomes Júnior, known by the community that saw him grow up as “the king of garbage”.
Anyone who passes along one of the straights of Estrada Nacional 10, in the parish of Coina, Barreiro, sees it there, perched on a vacant lot, with cork oaks left at random: a tower, with the air of a castle from other times, proud, empty of people. and windows. It was a landscape that was once praised, but looking at it now, the Torre de Coina (or Torre do Inferno, as it was also known) does not suggest that it was the scene of one of the most enigmatic stories shared between Lisbon and the neighboring bank. And home of this man, Manuel Martins Gomes Júnior.
The appearance suggests years of old degradation and the president of the Union of Parishes of Palhais and Coina, Naciolinda Silvestre, adds a number: this building has been “abandoned for about 40 years”. About its origin there are few to tell. Those who “had enough knowledge of the subject and appreciation” can no longer explain how this tower became Manuel Júnior’s castle.
But a study carried out by researcher Vitor Manuel Adrião, from the University of Lisbon in History and Philosophy, immortalizes this story, which began there “in the first decades of the 20th century”. And it all started with the purchase of a water mill.
Born in Santo Antônio da Charneca, in 1860, “from a humble family”, Manuel Júnior grew up with the ambition of reversing his socioeconomic condition. It was not enough to conquer a more stable life, he promised himself “to become rich”, says the researcher.
“As a marçano” in Lisbon, he occupied his time and saved all the money to later invest. They called him a visionary, because he decided with that money to buy a water mill. A mill in the meantime destroyed by a fire of which the people of the land were accused of responsibility. All because the contract with the insurance company will have allowed him, after the destruction, to collect a high indemnity.
How important is this chapter of your life? It was precisely with this amount that he acquired “a small property and devoted himself to agricultural speculation, lending money, at heavy interest, to the neighboring owners of Coina to cultivate their land”, reads the document by researcher Vitor Manuel Adrião. .
The same property where, after a “time when the harvests were bad”, forcing farmers to go into debt, Manuel ended up joining plots (of the debtors) and forming his 300-hectare farm. The farm where the Torre de Coina would be born.
In a flash, he jumped from a modest life to that of a large landowner. He chose pig farming and became a rich meat exporter. On the other side of the bank, he found a second business with the potential to help him in the first: he “reached the peak of ensuring control of garbage collection in Lisbon”, then composed only of organic matter, which served as food for the pigs. that created.
The transport was guaranteed through its five frigates that crossed the Tagus from one end to the other. Each one baptized with a name, in an exercise in irony: Mafarrico, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Demon and Satan. In fact, says researcher Vitor Manuel Adrião, it was “an outrageous provocation to the secular ecclesiastical regime that the recent October 5th Revolution had deposed”. This, in fact, is how he gained a reputation as an obstinate antitheist.
He already had fame — he ended up being called “the king of garbage”—, but he needed to make real use of it. That’s why he built the building that still attracts attention in the landscape today: according to his possessions and ambitions, the Torre de Coina, also known as Torre do Inferno, was born. There he remained for several years, until the date of his death, in 1943, at the age of 83. He died under “strange circumstances whose causes were never established”, says the researcher.
Death, however, did not mean the disappearance of his name. In fact, he was immortalized on a street in his birthplace, Santo António da Charneca: Rua Manuel Martins Gomes Júnior.
Today there would be no place for a “garbage king”. Not only because the municipality of Lisbon is currently the entity responsible for the collection and transport of waste, whether common waste or recyclable materials. But also because Manuel Gomes Júnior lived in times when waste was only organic and that’s why he was able to make it food for his animals.
