Uma Aventura

A series that left its mark in the period in which it appeared.

I don't believe there is a youngster in Portugal who hasn't read at least five or six books from the “Uma Aventura” collection. This collection of small books, still active today and with new releases on a regular basis, has been written by Ana Maria Magalhães and Isabel Alçada, and has been one of the great successes of children's and youth literature in Portuguese. For those who don't know, it's very similar to other collections of the same genre, in which a group of teenage friends meet to live several adventures where they fight against all kinds of criminals, find treasures, explore different places and go through different dangerous situations. The influence of renowned foreign collections such as “The Famous Five”, by Enyd Blyton, is clearly present in these books, which basically work in the same way, but with Portuguese characters.

What this SIC series simply did was, over several years and five seasons, bring some of these adventure books to television. It was, in large part, an attempt to respond to the fearsome competition from its rival channel TVI, which was also betting on a young audience thanks to “Morangos com Açúcar”. I don't know to what extent the series really helped to popularize the books it was based on, what I can say is that it found a space among the generation of children and teenagers who consumed it. Initially, the series aired in the afternoon, but even recently I saw some episodes being rerun on weekends, early in the morning, in the time that is traditionally reserved by Portuguese broadcasters for youth programming. In my personal case, and despite the fact that I avidly read most of the books when I was a teenager, I didn't attach much importance to the series. The reasons are simple: when it premiered, the successive scheduled times it was airing were never very convenient for me because of school and, when I finally had time to see it, I was already leavin...