At the end of XIXth century, beginning of the XXth it was hunger that made fishermen to leave Praia da Vieira, at Marinha Grande council, in search of those conditions of life that the sea would deny them during the winter.

After discovering that in those days the Tagus was very rich in fish, they changed their life by the sea for another by the river and they came. First they came alone, then they brought the whole family and lived inside the boats, up and down the river. And they were called Avieiros, «the river gypsies».
For a long time they lived and worked inside their boats. The bedroom was at the prow, the kitchen at the middle and the fishing workshop at the stern.But, as the years passed by, the land lords allowed them to come ashore and settle in the Tagus banks. There they built their first wooden shacks on the top of tree-props, covered with straws or reeds. The props, already used at the dunes by the sea preventing sand to enter, were now their salvation against the river floods.

The Avieiros built many villages all along the Tagus following the tradition of fishermen of Praia da Vieira; today, very few of them still resist. Besides Palhota, the only one keeping some resemblance to tradition, the ruins of Patacão, a village abandoned around 1988 still exists. At Caneiras, the new brick and ready-made wooden houses took the place of the avieiros’ shacks. Esteiro do Nogueira, at Vila Franca de Xira gave the place to a modern marina and at the mouth of Alviela River the two villages called Barreiras do Rio and Barreiras do Tejo, are waiting for the wind and the rain to pull them down since the middle of last century.

The Avieiros are obstinate and always had struggled for survival since they saw that Tagus had begun to die slowly. Their sons, which emigrated or went to work at Azambuja factories, stood and wait, always watching their river. And one knows why, the fish that had also gone, like them, came back. The shad came back, so did the lamprey. And the sons of the last avieiros of the Tagus coming back to their roots, now fill the river of beautiful fishing boats with the prow facing the sky.