Lisbon, Saturday
We were not at our best on the morning of our first day. Fortunately, we had booked a walking tour at 11 am, so we enjoyed the excellent breakfast offered at the Holiday Inn, checked our bags, and set off on foot down the road to Praça da Restauradores to meet our guide, Nina. She was an impressive source of information: a German-speaking native of St Petersburg, perfect English, and a PhD in Art History. We learned a great deal in two and a half hours and walked our legs off on Lisbon’s hills, so I don’t think we will have trouble sleeping tonight.
Portugal tends to fly under the radar for me, and I didn’t have the time to do my usual homework before we left, so we were left with vague impressions of Colin Firth learning Portuguese in Love Actually and the film and book Night Train to Lisbon. Oh, and the need to sample pastel de nata, wines from the Douro and a bit of port. But as we walked down an increasingly modern city into the Baixa and Chiado areas, which retain the architecture of late-18th and 19th centuries, some recogintion surfaced through Nina’s narratives. The grid of the lower city is inherited from the devastation of the Great Lisbon Earthquake of All Saints Day, 1755. The Baixa was wiped out along with 30,000 residents, so the area was razed and rebuilt on a grid with the first seismically resistant buildings by Pombal, the First Minister. As money comes in to the town, the older buildings are being gentrified, except in Barrio Alto, which is the rather attractively seedy party district.
We were also reminded about the Salazar dictatorship and the Carnation Revolution of 1974, which coup leaders kindly chose to place on Anzac Day. Franco gets all the attention, but Salazar’s control over Portuguese society was just as firm as the Falange in Spain.
It was a great tour, but as soon as we had finished down in the Ribeira das Naus (the Commercial Square), we grabbed some lunch, hightailed it back to the Holiday Inn, and took a taxi to our proper hotel, Solar dos Poetas, on the Praça Luis de Camoes. It is a bit hip, very comfortable, and very convenient. With a delicious fish dinner inside us, we slept for ten hours.
