In Spain, long weekends are usually puentes—literally, bridges: a festival falls on a Thursday, for example, and people “bridge” the festival and the weekend by taking Friday off too. Or, as in the case of this particular weekend, a Monday-Tuesday combination. I think it’s a fabulous concept, one we should adopt in the U.S. as soon as possible, along with siesta. Sure, less work gets done. But we’d all be a lot happier! Anyway, as for the title… well, that’s one of the teachers at my school trying his best to ask about vacation plans in English. Some things just don’t translate.
I did, in the end, “make a bridge” and finally made it to Lisbon! I arrived at my bed & breakfast (!) early Saturday morning. The owner, Antonio, promptly sat me down and gave me maps and advice in a combination of English, Spanish, and Portuguese that quickly became the standard for my trip. Then, instead of just pointing me to a supermarket to buy some shampoo (sigh, airline restrictions), he took me there in his car… by way of a long detour through the old part of town and a stop at an overlook for an enchanting glimpse of the city. Quite the welcome, eh?
Cuesta la cuesta!
Lisbon is a rather vertical city made up of seven hills, and therefore seven distinct neighborhoods. I mainly covered one area of the city per day, so I’ll organize by neighborhood. Regardless of the location, though, I did enough walking and trekking and navigating steep hills and rough cobblestones to be guilt-free when it came to indulging in some of Lisbon’s many delightful pastries! How often is it, after all, that despite all your best efforts you lose weight on vacation?
Baixa & Rossio
The elegant part of town, the heart of downtown Lisbon, with grand plazas and statues and fountains and a triumphant arch (which was, oddly enough, flanked by giant sculptures of the Beatles). I spent a fair amount of time hovering in and around the bakeries and pastelarias there, and taking pictures of the Christmas lights strung over the perfectly straight, criss-cross streets of la Baixa. I ran across an artisan jewelry fair in the grandest plaza of them all, Praça do Comercio, right next to the river. Lots of leather and glasswork, which almost made up for the fact that much of the plaza was under construction and cut off from view.
I think every time I wandered through Rossio I ended up getting a delectable pastéis de nata (cream-filled pastry) or a strawberry-shaped marzipan treat or a lovely suspiro, a swirl of hardened meringue that melts immediately on your tongue. I ate well in Lisbon, and cheaply. Bacalao dorado, a lovely cod dish I had tried once before, is still my favorite, though. And the coffee was every bit as strong as I expected it to be! Almost like coffee-flavored syrup… with effects akin to a small caffeine bomb.
Bairro Alto & Chiado
The hip part of town. Though I didn’t bother going out on the town, I did stumble across an elegant little wine tasting erected under a pair of tents. Live musicians, expensive wines, good cheese—and extremely cheap (Lisbon is far less expensive than Madrid, across the board). And, oddly enough, I ran into a few Americans currently studying in Madrid and also vacationing in Lisbon. Actually, I think I may have met more Spaniards than Portuguese on my little trip. It seems everyone in Spain flocks to Portugal for puente!
I saw relatively little of Bairro Alto compared with the other neighborhoods I spent my time in, but I did spend several hours in the burned out ruins of a church up there. Instead of a ceiling, the stone arches overhead look like the blackened skeleton of an inverted ship’s hull, and everything is open to sky. I found it rather enchanting at sunset—the photos do far more justice to it than my description does.
Alfama
La Alfama is the tangled, sprawling Moorish neighborhood that climbs its way up the hill to the castle and then slips down on the other side, stretching tendrils of narrow streets out to the river. It is low-slung decrepit houses and tumbledown gardens flanked by gull-white churches. Entire façades covered in colorful, hand-painted tiles. Rippling terracotta rooftops. Rain glistening on uneven cobblestones. Stray cats slinking in the shadows. A lonely, shaggy sunflower climbing up an iron trellis. And faint strains of fado from somewhere further up, further in… It is the home of fado, that mournful Portuguese song that traces its roots to the sea, and goes hand in hand with one of my favorite words, which coincidentally has no good translation. Saudade, a sort of nostalgia for something that never was.
After wandering through Sé Cathedral, pausing at every overlook to capture dazzling glimpses of the city and the sparkling river Tejo, and stumbling across a gem of an old church, garden, and tile-covered patio, I heard someone singing and followed it to a little restaurant I probably couldn’t find again if I tried. I listened to a few songs of fado: one woman sang, two men played the guitar. Beautiful, haunting, sweet. And when I went to sit down and eat, I discovered that the fadistas were actually the owners and waiters as well. Go figure. I ordered an octopus salad, and one of them came up to me and proffered his guitar. “You’re next!” he said. (People speak a fair bit more English in Lisbon than they do in Madrid…) He gave me two more chances before the meal and concert were over! They do say blondes have more fun…
Castelo Sao Jorge perches atop the Alfama, overlooking the whole city of Lisbon. It was spritzing rain when I made the trek up, but I think it was the buffeting wind that drove away most everyone else. Luckily, I´d had the foresight (or sheer dumb luck) to bring a miniature tripod, because between the wind trying to snatch my camera away and the weak, dim light that managed to filter through the looming clouds, my poor camera wouldn’t have been up to a single steady shot on its own. But the view was amazing, past the droplets of rain coating my glasses!
One last delight of the Alfama is the network of trams that run throughout. Wires overhead curve with the streets, and cars and trams roll in line with each other up and down the hills. Yellow number 28, the most famous, takes a circuitous route through the heart of the Alfama, but there are others—red, wood-paneled, white paint peeling, that wind through the neighborhood.
I wish I could have spent more time wandering the Alfama, and I wish I’d had better light. It was the one thing I missed: the fabled Lisbon light. It was raining off and on for much of my vacation, though never too heavily. Naturally, the day I left it cleared up!
Belém
Belém is further out from the center of Lisbon, and at first glance almost looks like a smaller town rather than part of the same city. Smaller houses in chalky hues of red, blue, green, and gold; orange trees lining the sidewalks; a famous pastelería with a line winding out the door, everyone waiting patiently for a little cream-filled, cinnamon-dusted pastry; and, of course, the more monumental highlights.
The Monument to the Discoveries is a monolith rising over the river with much larger-than-life, angular statues marching up its sides. Down the road… er, river, pier, whatever… is the Torre de Belém. Sadly, I didn’t have time to go inside, but it seemed to have much the same style of architecture as the Monasterio dos Jerónimos, which is certainly the jewel of Belém. (Hm… a Belém gem… heehee! Sorry. I think I was weaned on Dr. Seuss.)
The monastery is impressive enough on the outside, grand and eloquent, with a beautiful church inside, naturally. But the two-story cloister is far and away the best part. I spent two hours winding through grapevine columns and past filigreed windows, peering at miniscule carvings of leaves in that most intricate of styles—Manuelino, named after a Portuguese king who must have had some phobia of empty space because everything is carved, engraved, sculpted, or otherwise decorated. Up on the second level of the cloister, I even saw my first ever grasshopper gargoyle. Now how can you beat that?
Up next: Sintra.
