Impressions of Portugal, Last Day in Lisbon

King José I, Praça do Comércio

On our last day in Portugal, there was much to do: purchasing gifts for family and friends and a pilgrimage to the Café-Restaurante Martinho da Arcada. The café is another favorite Pessoa haunt, with a table reserved for him in perpetuity. As the café was in the Praça do Comércio, we decided to end our Portuguese journey where most tourists would have begun, in the Lisboa Story Center.

Impressions of Portugal, Belém

Padrão dos Descobrimentos (western profile)

Illustrious Gama, whom the waves obey’d,
And whose dread sword the fate of empire sway’d.
—Luís de Camões (from Os Lusíadas)

The Museu Coleção Berardo, described as “the main museum for modern and contemporary art in Portugal,” lured us to spend a day in the Lisbon parish of Belém. The Museu is housed in the vast Centro Cultural De Belém (Belém Cultural Center or CCB), which was “erected as a showpiece for Portugal’s 1992 presidency of the European Union.” [Time Out Lisbon, p. 98]

Impressions of Portugal, The Chiado

The child that laughs in the street,
The song one hears by chance,
The absurd picture, the naked statue,
Kindness without any limit –

All this exceeds the logic
Imposed on things by reason,
And it all has something of love,
Even if this love can’t speak.

—Fernando Pessoa, 4 October 1934

A nice thing about settling in for a few days in one location is the chance to poke around at leisure in the neighborhood, which for us was The Chiado in Lisbon. I hadn’t connected all the dots beforehand, so a sense of serendipity accompanied our realization that the Café A Brasileira—a well-known Fernando Pessoa haunt—was nearby.

Impressions of Portugal, In Sintra

National Palace of Sintra and surrounding town from Castelo dos Mouros

Lo! Cintra’s glorious Eden intervenes
In variegated maze of mount and glen.
Ah, me! what hand can pencil guide, or pen,
To follow half on which the eye dilates
Through views more dazzling unto mortal ken
Than those whereof such things the bard relates,
Who to the awe-struck world unlocked Elysium’s gates?
—Lord Byron
(from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,Canto I, Stanza 18)

João Cristino da Silva, Cinco artistas em Sintra (1855)

Ah, those Romantics! Surely no one does awe-struck better. Time has moved on since Romantics of all stripes waxed lyrically about Sintra, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site it seemed we should not miss. Cloudy skies, a chilly wind, and no clue how far (and how far up) we’d have to go induced us to buy tickets for a hop-on hop-off bus tour, something we usually go to lengths to avoid. The efficient tour bus operation made short work, for the most part, of longish Easter break lines of tourists, and off we went, uphill all the way. Had Lord Byron seen Sintra as we did, I suspect his waxing might have waned, but we were grateful to preserve our “museum legs” for the sights themselves.

Impressions of Portugal, First Days

To get at even a modicum of what I wanted to know about Portugal, which I visited for the first time this March, would have required a good bit of research, preferably in the context of a university course. (I wondered, for example, what impact Portugal’s colonialist history and the Salazar dictatorship might have on its current collective mind.)