Ah, Portugal!

The Kid and I flew to Lisbon on a Friday night in February – arriving Saturday morning local time. Despite our weariness (alas, no sleep on the plane), we dropped off our bags and headed right out to explore. We started with our neighborhood in the city – the ancient warrens and winding alleys of Mouraria, the birthplace of Fado music, seen here at sunset from the park near our house. To the left, on the hill, is the Castelo de Sao Jorge – one of the highest points in the city and where the Portuguese could eyeball the harbor where the Tagus River meets the Atlantic. As a seafaring people – and near neighbor to a much larger country with a famous Armada – this was essential. In the distant background is the bridge that spans the Tagus, a virtual clone of the Golden Gate. We would cross it by train later in our stay.

By the end of our first explorations and a museum tour with a local friend, we were tuckered and opted for a dinner close to home. Jasmim de Mouraria, a local tapas place the size of a McMansion linen closet, turned out to be a stunning find. We could walk out our front door and nearly fall into the place – though the actual stumbling mostly happened in the opposite direction. Here Jethro waits for food while I explore the tiny alleyway outside.

Due to the size of the kitchen, food options are limited. Nevertheless, we returned several times during the week, called back by the cheese, charcuterie, bean and bacalhau salad, and wine – not to mention the hospitality of Walter, the Cape Verdean host/cook/waiter/dishwasher, who was greeting us by name by the end of the week. A typical meal looked something like this:

Another great advantage of Jasmim was the presence of a Portuguese guitarist (which is to say, he was a guitarist of Portuguese descent and played an instrument called the Portuguese guitar) named Alex. He was usually around and happy to play and share the history of the music of Mouraria. He also played a mean cover of Hotel California on the thing and treated us to his conspiracy theorist view of politics, Portuguese history, and the world in general. The Bushes and the Bilderberg Group figured heavily, and 9/11 was an inside job. Imagine if one of the guys in the Gipsy Kings had a talk radio show.

Downtown Lisbon manages to be ancient and modern at the same time. For this, they can thank one of the most unlucky incidents in the history of nations – an earthquake in the 18^th century that spawned fires its wake – fires that were then doused by a tsunami. Most of the lower part of the city was destroyed one way or another. The chap that fixed the place up, the Marquis de Pombal, was an enlightenment sort, so what is now the downtown is laid out geometrically in grand circles and broad avenues and sweeping green spaces reminiscent of Washington D.C., but with Iberian rather than classical flair.

There is a park in the middle of the city, sloping down to a gorgeous view of the river, that, although it is named for Eduardo VII, is surrounded by things named for Pombal – metro stops, hotels, a statue of him in the avenue from which I took the picture below. Even the main grassy square behind Jethro is called Marquis de Pombal Square.

Great views abound in this city – sort of like San Francisco might look if the Spaniards had held it another 200 years. (Unlike Frisco, however, everyone in Lisbon spoke English. And despite Portugal’s decriminalization of drugs up to and including heroin, you can walk the city for days – and we did! – without seeing a strung-out, panhandling casualty using the sidewalk as a bathroom. Go figure.)

 

As you climb the hills into the city, it feels like going back in time. The buildings get older, the streets narrower, and the decrepitude more obvious. It’s not a Detroit kind of decrepitude, but plaster flakes, paint peels, and iron scrollwork rusts wherever you turn. It does manage to be a charming shabbiness, though I couldn’t explain exactly how.

However, as you climb those hills, you also discover amazing monuments to the ancient life of this city that are lost in the reconstructed lower town. The Castelo de Sao Jorge, for example, on which Jethro is perched below. (Our house is in the neighborhood directly below.) Originally a Moorish castle, it was won by the Christians during the Reconquista of 1147. While maintenance has been required over the years, the foundations of the castle are well over a thousand years old, and excavations below indicate that it was a fortified site as early as the Celtic times, before the Romans arrived around 300 BC.

Jethro loved the little cars of Portugal – here a Mini, there a Fiat, everywhere a Citroen. Almost all the streets in the hills are paving-stone creations, laid with near-Germanic precision. I suppose it gives a sense of the value of labor in 1755 that some of the streets and many of the sidewalks have mosaic patterns in the stonework. And it’s not just painted on. There are literally miles of sidewalk around Pombal Square with hand-laid stone scrollwork patterns in the paving.

Also in the hills near the Castelo is the lovely Igreja de São Vicente de Fora. The soaring arches and the Baroque embellishments are typical of the style, but the pinks and turquoises on the walls make it look like maybe the local monsignor had seen a little too much Miami Vice.

Speaking of such colors, the backyard of the church looked out onto this. Directly below, again, is our neighborhood of Mouraria.

If you are willing to indulge some more church pics, the Lisbon Cathedral is just over the next hill from the Igreja – and it is fabulous, inside and out. As with everything in Lisbon, earthquakes have taken a toll on the building, and its current appearance is the product of a restoration less than 100 years ago – but a restoration that incorporates elements from the 1100s, including the rose window here.

Inside, the nave and choir are stunning. I can’t imagine painting that ceiling -- and it’s only half the height of the Sistine Chapel.

One of the many side chapels in the cathedral, all of which feature some intense artwork.

In the Cathedral’s cloister is an archaeological dig that has turned up ruins of the old Roman city of Olissipo. Streets, hearths, and stone plumbing can be seen clear as day in the rubble.

The historic hills of Lisbon not only afford splendid views, they are a view in themselves. From a café in Barrio Alto we looked out at the Alfama neighborhood rising from the river, with the Castelo in the trees on the left, the twin towers of the Cathedral in the middle, and the looming Elevador de Santa Justa at right. This lift, built by a student of Gustave Eiffel, carries passengers 150 feet up from the lower town (Baixa) to the heights (Barrio Alto).

After a long weekend in Lisbon, we decamped for Evora, an ancient walled town in the heart of Portugal’s Alentejo – the wine region! The old city walls are still standing around the original town, with variations in structure and stone type showing its history – from small patches of extant Roman stonework to the medieval fortifications seen here.

Inside the walls, the most famous site is the renowned Capela dos Ossos – the Chapel of the Bones. The bones themselves were harvested from an ancient cemetery when the land was cleared in the 1500s to site a church, and the bones were built into a commemorative chapel nearby. It looks every bit as creepy as it sounds.

Bacalhau – dried, salted codfish – is the national dish and the most astounding piece of fish I’ve ever had, served here with just a smidge of garlic. This was our first meal in Evora and our discovery that here, in the countryside, we couldn’t count on the English skills of the locals. Our Portuguese skills got their best test here, and we were pretty successful! Nobody mistook us for locals, I’ll grant, but we got smiles and nods as a reminder that trying is what counts. (A couple of people corrected my pronunciation and offered a word or two, but nobody gave the famous French eye-roll.) Jethro and I ended up agreeing that Portuguese, with its slushy S-sounds, comes across sounding like Russian spoken by a Spaniard. Or is it the other way round?

In the old town square of Evora is the ruin of the Roman Temple of Diana. Let’s be frank here: it looks exactly the way something like this should look. It was also the one thing in the country that we were not allowed to climb on. You can walk right up to the very top of a fort, a castle, a church spire with a hundred-foot drop, and nowhere is there a guardrail or even, most places, a sign saying “Cuidado!” Ledges that in America would be fenced off for a hundred feet in any direction – in Portugal you can walk right up to the edge (with a beer, if you want). Back in Lisbon a day later we got ourselves up on the dangerous pitched roof of a church by giving the guard a couple Euros. (Nice view!) When you are tired of Donald Trump making America great again, move to Portugal and become a personal injury lawyer.

Four hundred years under the Moors left Evora with little Arabesque touches – spheres and arches and window detail that vanished from Lisbon in the earthquake. Here in the Moorish quarter, Jethro stars in a soda commercial.

Cutting through the town is the Prato Aqueduct, built in 1531 to bring water from a river five miles away. Because of the local topography, the arches of the foundation must rise from shoulder height in the town to three stories just past the city walls.

Back in Lisbon after an overnight in Evora, and back to the wonderful ubiquity of coffee and pastries. It was difficult to walk two blocks without being pulled into the shops by the scent of something like an aptly named Pao de Deus (God’s bread) or a brioche croissant, which Jethro really loved. The drink is not a milkshake. This is what you get if you order a latte. It’s about 60 ounces, served at roughly 5000 degrees – and with no handle on the vessel, Jethro had to stare like this for another 15 minutes before he could even touch the glass.

After less than 12 hours back in Lisbon, we were on the train again, this time bound for Sintra, a coastal town that rises from the Atlantic to dizzying height. Atop a strategic hill sits the Castelo dos Mouros, built by the Muslims in the 9^th century. God knows how this thing was constructed. It tumbles up and down hills with towers along the walls that seem to grow out of the rocky landscape itself. As libertarian as I am, this was one of those places where a guardrail or two would be handy. This was the one place we were cold, as a damp, chilly wind was coming in off the ocean.

In the fog across the crag is the Palacio da Pena – built by the queen of Portugal for her husband Ferdinand, a cousin of Victoria and a very fussy Germanic dude. The interior is the typical tiled and tapestried 19^th century splendor and a reminder that Europe of the era had yet to match ancient Rome in its technological prowess.

The exterior, however, is as colorful as it is rambling, a patchwork of yellow, red, and purple towers and arches. Jethro refused the long climb up, so I visited solo.

The next day brought us to the Lisbon district of Belem, where we munched a local pastry, the locally legendary custard-filled pasteis de Belem, and climbed the lookout tower that has guarded the Atlantic shore at the mouth of the Tagus river since 1514. (It’s a popular sight, so it is difficult to get a picture without tourists pulling weird squatty poses in front of your camera.)

It’s a very impressive bit of construction, though, and something that would feature well in a Master and Commander kind of movie. There are cannons poking out of nearly every window, and you can just imagine opening up on a French privateer back in the day.

Here’s Jethro in a lookout port of the tower. Notice the stairs to allow diminutive 16^th century blokes to have a peek. (In point of fact, Jethro was taller than everyone we met aside from one fellow who turned out to be Brazilian.)

Like the Hudson and the Thames, the Tagus has been narrowed by landfill projects over the years, so the tower, which was once well into the river, is now separated from the land by what is at best a token strip of brine.

Sharp-eyed readers will note Jethro’s omnipresent flannel. Grunge, ahoy! He does have three copies of this shirt, so don’t think he wore the same shirt the whole time. Although I think people in our neighborhood in Mouraria started to recognize the long-haired kid in the red and black after a few days. I will say that we did not look “American” to the locals. Americans, we discovered quickly, all wear nylon ripstop hiking clothes (even in the city) and have outlandishly garish sunglasses and hats. Everyone asked if we were English.

Despite an ungodly early flight the next morning, we spent our last night in Lisbon seeing the nightlife for real. Or as real as we could manage. Dinner at 9:00 here is like an earlybird special for the bluehair crowd. Jethro wondered if we could go out to the clubs one night. When we hit this wine bar in the super-hip Barrio Alto at 7:45, we were the only ones on the patio, despite the mild weather. The very friendly bartender told us that we’d be up quite late if we wanted nightlife. Being at a disco at 1:00 a.m. means dancing alone, as all the self-respecting Lisboans are still pre-gaming up in the hills.

Well, we did our best, and Jethro even traded flannel for Oxford for the occasion. Note the Portuguese behind him wearing puffy arctic coats. Apparently 65 degrees is considered winter here.

Dinner with our friend Tulia was at 9:00 at a steak-and-beer place in a former convent dating from 1294. Destroyed at least 3 times by fire and earthquake over the years, it has been an operating beer hall since the early 1800s. Everyone else had the beef. Always out of step, I ordered an astounding sea bass served whole. (Lots of bone picking!) 

After dinner we went to a place that could only be described as a grotto to hear fado music performed in the traditional style of Portuguese guitar, Spanish guitar, and alternating male and female singers. (Sadly, no pictures of that – flash photos were not allowed, and the place was as dark as a crypt.)

Despite being out until nearly 1:00 am, we caught an Uber to the airport at 5:45 am and then a plane to the Azores island of Sao Miguel, where we staggered around in the tropical sun until our hotel let us into our room for a well-earned nap. The main town of Ponta Delgada is fronted by a harbor and an ancient fortress, looking very Puerto Rico. It’s a lovely place, where we had one of our best meals of the trip in a little tapas bar that stuffed us like Thanksgiving turkeys full of bread and cheese and local jam and honey and sent us staggering back out onto the streets. But if you aren’t in the Azores for sun and surf, it’s a pretty sleepy place to stay.

So sleepy, in fact, that we ended up at the local mall (beg pardon: The Parque Atlantico) that evening to seek out some fun, where we came across a store with a familiar name. (As Elvis Costello asked of the Spanish namesake for an Ohio city, “Do the people living in Toledo know that their name hasn’t traveled very well?”) Whether they mean the Springfield in Massachusetts or in Illinois (or in the Simpsons), I believe they are barking up the wrong tree, fashion-wise.

And so our time abroad ended, awaiting a bus to the airport in front of the Hotel Talisman, reflecting on our adventures, and sorting out a jumble of memories – with the goal of ordering them, as I’ve done here, before they fade too far and we end up asking, “What was the name of that place...?”