Armando César Côrtes-Rodrigues was born on February 28, 1891, and died on October 14, 1971, in Ponta Delgada. Unrivaled figure of the Azorean literature, Côrtes-Rodrigues was a writer, poet, chronicler, playwright and ethnologist.
He graduated in Romance Philology from the Faculty of Letters of Lisbon (1915), where he became acquainted with Fernando Pessoa, having even integrated the Orpheu Group, collaborating in the first two issues of the magazine with poems written under the pseudonym Violante de Cisneiros. In 1917 he returned to the Azores to teach in the High Schools of Angra de Heroísmo and Ponta Delgada.
Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues would dedicate himself to the study of Azorean ethnography, publishing remarkable works on popular Azorean traditions, especially the «Cancioneiro Geral dos Açores» and the «Adagiário Popular Açoriano», both in 1982. In 1953 he was granted the Antero de Quental Prize (an award created by the national propaganda unit of the dictatorial regime of the time) for the books «Horto Fechado e outros Poemas». Much of his poetic work is scattered through numerous literary publications of the time. As a writer and playwright, he wrote the plays, «O Milhafre» (1932) and «Quando o mar galgou a terra» (1940). He was one of the founders of the Cultural Institute of Ponta Delgada (1943), an entity currently based in his last residence, where the Armada Cortes-Rodrigues Writing House is located.
Armando Cortes-Rodrigues is one of the great Azorean intellectual figures of the twentieth century, bequeathing a vast and valuable literary work. The bronze bust was made by J. M. França Machado.
