Camoes Garden

This guide to Camoes Garden in Macau follows Luis de Camoes, Portugal's future national poet, who held the strange job of Superintendent for the Dead and Missing, managing the estates of men lost in Asia's trading ports. Tradition places him in this grotto around 1562, writing part of his epic Os Lusiadas between accounting duties, though no surviving document actually confirms he ever set foot in Macau. You'll hear the scraps of evidence for and against the legend, and what an eye lost in Moroccan battle and a Lisbon jail term had already cost him by the time he reached this remote outpost. Look for the bronze bust cast in Lisbon long after his death, standing in for a man whose presence here is still disputed.