Lisbon’s inebriant bohemia
Hugo Coelho
04.08
Andy Warhol was no sailorman. Pablo Picasso no football player. And the blonde of Lichtenstein was no Fado singer. Still, they are in every mouth in Lisbon these days.
Sure you have heard about it even if not for the most artistic reasons: Lisbon city of football and Fado, nostalgic metropolis of a lost empire. But tradition is no more. These days the capital of Portugal is also the centre of contemporary art.
In the Belém district, there where the river meets the ocean and the Portuguese remember the heroes of maritime discoveries, Lisbon placed its new collection of contemporary pieces of art.
The Berardo Collection (Museum of Contemporary Art) gathers works of Bacon, Picasso, Mondrien, Dali and was compared to London’s Saatchi gallery.
The museum is the new face of the transformation going on around. The freed children of the April Revolution – the put down the fascist dictatorship with red carnations – are sweeping old town. And Lisbon is getting a new bohemian look.
Saturday night.
The sound of the accordion escapes the room beneath the white wooden door but the spell cast is all kept inside. In the last room of the tiled corridor of Fábrica do Braço de Prata (Factory of the Silver’s Arm), the characters of bohemian Lisbon enjoy the music of their new best-kept secret.
Indoors the scene is surreal. Mismatching iron-made tables and chairs, looking one hundred years old, share the space with hanging miscellanea imported from a never-happened past. The artist in the centre shows his smiling teeth not getting any younger as he stretches the boisterous French accordion. And the audience of no more than 40 boggling eyes gazes his washed-out sailor hat. Only the cat of glass in the table refuses to turn his head from me.
The Fábrica, to be one-year-old next month, is indisputably Lisbon’s most bizarre bookshop. The building, located in the abandoned East sector of the Portuguese capital, used to be a powder factory producing rifles, cannons and bullets for the armies of a decadent colonial empire. Nowadays, it crafts culture in industrial quantities.
There are books: 40 000 of them asking to be taken off, leafed through and talked about, in the shelves and tables of the room devoted to Nietzsche. There are also petite concerts, independent cinema showings or themed photo-shootings every evening from Wednesday to Sunday, around the other eleven rooms of the converted factory.
The first dozens of the Fábrica’s visitors, dissidents of the predictable Bairro Alto, ended up dragging here certain hundreds. “Today it is a meeting point for nameless artists daring to show their works and starving intellectual Lisbonners who want more than a drink when going out at night”, says José Pinho, one of the owners.
Saturday at sunrise.
For the vintage loving folks in Lisbon, the weekend starts in the legendary Feira de Ladra (Thieves’ Market) in old town.
The clock has yet to strike seven but already a large crowd gathers at the Campo de Santa Clara, in the East hill of Lisbon. Sellers are busy spreading out their wares on the warm flagstones yet but eager locals already wander around, peering at the displays If to bag the best bargains, it is worthy to arrive early.
The flea market got its name from the thieves that gathered here to shift their ill-gotten stuff. The market kept its ramshackle appearance and a shabby and laid-back style but today’s vendors seem to be a fairly honest bunch.
As the day moves along the bohemian wanderers of Lisbon gather at the esplanade of the hidden vantage point of Graça. The gothic twin towers of the Sé (Cathedral) in the west and the white dome of the Pantheom in the East frame the landscape of crammed and coloured walls and tiled roofs of the quarters of Graça and Alfama where white tower of St Michael’s church stands alone.
In Paris, the view would have driven the brush of some old man in Picasso’s hat. If the artist could help his eyes to find their way in the maze down there, he would sketch streets of half open doors with bag’s of fresh bread hanging in the locks and old women, wives and widows of fisherman, throwing water buckets down the streets or carrying baskets of dirty clothes to wash in the public basin.
The quarters of Alfama, Graça e Castelo, in the East hill, are Lisbon’s most typical ones. After the earthquake of 1755 and the reconstruction of the city according to the Parisian rules of Baron Haussman, those were the only quarters that kept their old medieval looks and old traditions.
These days, in the winding, steep, cobbled streets, the tolling bell of the church still marks the time. But the hours are not the same for everyone, anymore.
For the clowns and jugglers of Chapitô the day starts at 7:30 p.m. The bar and restaurant sited inside the walls of Lisbon’s city school, in Rua da Costa do Castelo, is a quirky island in the hill of the castle different from everything around. The place has a certain Moulin Rouge and cabaret air to it and is famous for the stylish multi-ethnic meals overlooking the river.
Smell of coffee.
After all, the Tagus is the essence of Lisbon. Europe’s most western capital has turned to the continent a long ago but its people can’t take their eyes from the river dying in the ocean.
There was a time when the waves brought stories of adventurous sailors, discoverers of half the word, and the smell to Asian spices and gold and diamonds from Africa and Brazil.
The smell of coffee still lives in high ceilings and stonewalls of trendy Pois Café, in Rua São João da Praça. The café occupies what once was a warehouse of spices and it keeps an inebriant ambiance that makes costumers to lost track of time. The old maps pasted in every table, help them to travel all around the world.
It is worth to know, that in the great days of the Empire, the Portuguese felt like they owned the world – they agreed with the Spanish on a line dividing the globe and each one’s share in it.
The waterfront square of Terreiro do Paço, where the Palace of Paço was located, was the symbol of power of that lost empire. Nowadays, its ruins lay below the yellow ministries of the Republica. But Lisbon still lives the memory of those gone glittering times.
The lesson of a poet.
The buildings and shops in modern façades and the black patterns in the white sidewalk of Rua Augusta cast a spell that makes you feel like travelling back in time.
The journey to the past stops somewhere around 1800, at Travellers House, in the first floor of number 89. The walls are 200 years old, but the decoration and international mood are modern enough to make it to be voted world’s best hostel.
The time is set forward as the iron lift of Santa Justa appears on the left. It was an apprentice of Gustave Eiffel, the architect of Eiffel Tower, who designed the world’s unique public elevator.
The lift takes passengers up to the Chiado district, with a cracking sound from the end of the nineteenth century. These were times of political change and Chiado’s famous cafes and esplanades, once artistic and intellectual centres, tell stories of writers and revolutionaries.
On the top of Rua Garrett, there is the famous bohemian café, Brasileira. Here revolutions were planned, literature discussed and poems written.
Rarely are there any empty chairs in the esplanade, but among the changing crowds, there is one costumer that stays and gleams. His leg is always crossed and his eyes always travelling down the street. The bronze statue of Fernando Pessoa, modern Portuguese poet, catches all the attentions.
Pessoa created and wrote under 72 alter-egos, most of them with a date of birth and death, lovers and address. All he needed to hand to write was a black coffee, absinthe and endless cigarettes.
He was arguably the most influential poet of modernism but surely one of Lisbon’s most bohemian and stirring characters. Maybe that is why what he said for himself goes well together with Lisbon’s new face.
“If after my death you want to write my biography, it is very simple thing to do. It has but two dates – my birth and my death. The days in between, they are mine”-
Going Further
They are whining all the time about it, but Lisbonners are really proud of their city.
You will hear often from their mouth: “Lisbon is Portugal, the rest is its landscape”.
Landscape or not, even they like to roam around town and it is well worthy to follow their trail.
Beach all year long
Lisbonners can’t live without beach and sea and all around the year, they go to south bank’s beaches of Caparica. The beach here extends for more 30 miles.
Walk along it and sit down watching the crowds of surfers if you want to experience laid back Portuguese way of life.
Romance in Sintra
Lord Byron compared it to paradise and surely not without reason. Less than 20 minutes away, gloomy Sintra is centre of European Romantic Architecture.
It is well worth it to climb the mountain to the ruined medieval Mourish Castle and to the romantic pink Palace of Pena.
As the sun goes down go back to the village to taste well-known Sintra’s muffin (queijada) at Piriquita.
The Eden of posh shoppers
A short journey to the west of Lisbon brings the visitor to the upper-class town of
Cascais.
Its people are said to be the prettiest in the region, which together with the old aristocratic houses give the town a sense of glamour.
Cascais is also famous for its posh shops and romantic esplanades looking over secret beaches.
Lisbon in a nutshell
Travellers House – single-beds from £16.71
Rua Augusta nº89 1st floor
Easyjet flies from Bristol, Liverpool, Luton and Gatwick to Lisbon from £19.99
www.easyjet.com
Short breaks to Lisbon with Original Travel from £335 http://www.originaltravel.co.uk/ Phone. 020 797 873 33
Lisbon Walkers – tours in Alfama and Baixa from £12. www.lisbonwalkers.org
