Saudades da Terra is a manuscript, was published by father Gaspar Frutuoso, which forms a reference work on Macaronesia in the late 16th century.
The manuscript was written between 1586 and 1590,[1] divided into two volumes, based on the author's observations, providing a detailed description of the archipelagos of the Azores, Madeira and the Canary Islands. It also has material on Cape Verde and other Atlantic regions.
It represents the most important repository of information on the geography, history, clothing, genealogy, toponym, and fauna and flora of the mid-Atlantic archipelago, before the 17th century. The author writes from the perspective of a typical Renaissance humanist: including encyclopaedic coverage of literary, artistic and musical fields, observed natural phenomena, alchemic experimentations and speculations concerning geology, biology, mineralogy and petrography.
The manuscript covers each of the islands in the chain, three volumes featuring one or more islands of the Azores, and one volume is a poem:
The work was completed with a last volume, titled Saudades do Céu, a philosophical-theological dissertation during the Azorean crisis during the Portuguese Succession Crisis of 1580.
Gaspar Frutuoso apparently intended to publish his work, since it was clear that the plight of the manuscript with additional amendments made with his fist. For reasons which are unknown, it may be linked to the Spanish (or Castilian) occupation during the Philippine Dynasty, he did not, adding it to a library of Colégio dos Jesuítas de Ponta Delgada (Ponta Delgada Jesuit College), which remained until 1760 when the Jesuits were expelled from Portugal. The manuscript changed hands, in the 1920s, in a context of commemorations of the Tri-Centenary of the Birth of Gaspar Frutuoso in 1922, owned by the Praia e Monforte family, which had prevented access to the work, unfeasible for an chance for its publication. Later on, it was donated by the General Board of Ponta Delgada and was added to Ponta Delgada Public Library and Archives (also known as the Azorean Public Library and Archives) where it is founded today.
The first part of the book which came to light was Book III in 1873, with thirty notes by Álvaro Rodrigues de Azevedo, and a historic synthesis written by the Portuguese Illustrated Universal Dictionary by Fernandes Costa.. It was followed by a genealogical part of Book IV, published in 1876 by an initiative of Francisco Maria Supico and José Pedro de Jesus Cardoso. In the 1920s, it was inviable the integral publication of the work was published in two relative volumes on the islands of São Miguel and Santa Maria, for which complete copies were available. The Book III edition about Santa Maria was in charge of Manuel Monteiro Velho Arruda. The same copy was taken and later published an edition the first book, based on a manuscript copy that was founded in the Ponta Delgada Public Library and Archives[2]
It has different parcel editions of Saudades da Terra with added editions, added to the Ponta Delgada Cultural Institute in 1966.
In 1968 an edition was published in Ponta Delgada.