Camino de Santiago Day 40 - Porto to Lisbon
I make it to Lisbon and do the only thing I know how: walk.
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Daytime
Someone at home asked me what Lisbon is like.
“Bright”
They laughed, but it’s true, and when I think of it now my eyes squint.
The sun is the hottest it’s been on the Camino, the highest in the sky, which is the clearest and bluest it’s been, like there’s a hole in the ozone layer over here that hasn’t reached Spain. All the buildings are painted pastel colours: blue, pink, yellow - it just feels sunny.
I walk through the long tall grids of the city’s centre running from the river, which I call the ocean, towards a large important-looking square. Everyone I pass seems to be a tourist or trying to sell things to tourists. I’m terrified I’ll pay 2 euro above market value for a meal so I find the greasiest looking spoon I can in a desparate grab for authenticity. I find it in a narrow cafe staffed by a deliberately-paced older gentleman who must run the place. I eat a delicious dish of cod and rice - bacalhau a braza - as I look past the diner at the narrow fourth-wall view of yellow trams and pastel-pink holiday makers in England and Ireland football jerseys.
It’s hard to adjust to not being on the Camino. Nobody knows who I am, nor do they care, nor do they instinctively understand much of what drives me due to the shell-bearing backpack I carry. I have a story just like everyone else, though our purposes vary, even the ones who like me are not from here, we’re all just on holidays.
Afternoon
The only other days I’ve taken off from walking in the last few weeks - in Leon and then Santiago - have ended with me clocking between 10 and 20 kilometres over the day. It’s part muscle-memory part the fact that walking is the best thing to do in a city.
I like walking, and I need to have a destination in mind, so I choose the Torre de Belem, which is about 7.5km west of where I am in the city centre, which I’ve seen in pictures and looks like would be a good place to watch the sun go down. It’s a few hours til sunset so I figure I’ll walk it rather than get an over-packed tram - that way I’ll be able to see a good chunk of the city, and have enough time to meander my way through some lesser-seen suburbs (I presume, I’m only judging by the top-down map on my phone, which is a terrible way of judging the relative crowdedness or notability of a place.
It’s good not knowing though, and I’ve enough time where it doesn’t matter where the streets take me. I start at Livreria Bertrand, which claims to be the oldest bookshop in the world, though all the books are in Portuguese so I don’t buy any. I head up to Cafe Argentina in the Barrio Alto on recommendation of a friend though it’s closed. There are many steps, alleys and hills in this city, and I’m still in the relatively flat part of it.
I start making my way away from the heavily trafficked centre and along a shaded boulevard, where I stop for a refreshment and listen to some elderly people speaking Portuguese under the fat trees. I wander into the Jardim Guerra Junqueiro where kids play and people do yoga, before looping back around and into the sun which cuts through the trees and church spires. With no set route I follow the light: every street in this city rises and crests into the burnt sky with a promise, and if it doesn’t I simply orient myself towards the light and walk upwards again. The sunset is west but even the streets leading east are bathed in light at the end.
Lisbon is bright.
Twilight
All good things come to an end though, and unfortunately, long before I reach the tower from the pictures, Lisbon is dark. I’m wandering so hard that I only get about halfway to the tower before deciding to turn around; the sunset beyond the Golden Gate-esque bridge that I’m sure has a name that is both Portuguese and not a nickname derived from another, more famous bridge, that probably doesn’t even look like the one I’m referring to, though it’ll have to do because it’s my only reference point, not being much of a bridge connoisseur.
The sunset does do - it’s wonderful, painted strokes of colour rather than distinct disk as I turn back intermittently walking along the river-that-might-as-well-be-ocean. My mission has failed, in that I didn’t reach the tower, though my aim was to flaneur my way through Lisbon, so in that sense I succeeded, as the purpose of flaneury is to walk without purpose, though I better stop now because claiming success for such a task means de facto defeat.
I console myself that I got to see more of the city than I would if I hadn’t had that mission, and feel elated at just having enjoyed the walk; it was also the least tourist-frequented part of the city I’d been to - and would be to - and had the spread-out charm of suburban London, for some reason. There seem to be many ex-pats here, distinct in their energy from temporary visitors and tourists, Hollywood-style Web Summit signs erected not on the ample supply of hills here but on odd streets and plazas looking more permanent than temporary.
Sunset joggers and rollerbladers and animated mothers vie for the vibe of the city with gushing dreadlocked ex-pats, eye-melting subway graffiti, animated night-outers, whistling would-be hash salesman moonlighting from their jobs as supermarket salesmen, and fecklessly overt subway-injectors, as I turn my back on the sun and walk back to town, into the night.
Night-time
At night the Barrio Alto - Lisbon’s famous nightlife area, of which I’ve heard and read so much about over the years - heaves with more tourists carrying monster fishbowls of caiprinhas. I realise the next day it’s obviously Lisbon’s Temple Bar - and that the last person I’d heard about it from was my mother - and am conscious of the very Irish response when a tourist asks about this famed district of watering holes and inauthentic pub nightlife culture -
“Oh, I don’t really go out there myself” we’d say - there’s even an article in the Times later that week by an Irish woman returning from London and overhearing a Ryanair hostess repeating the same line to an English stag party - as if we have to remind the person we’re speaking with of our nationality and throw in a passive aggressive assertion of our own tastes, as if the person we’re talking to has a clue what we’re on about - they just think we’re a boring fart rolling our eyes at the thought of a session.
I chat to a few Irish a Turkish lads as crowds stroll by as if in a parade or walking tour of the area. Everyone looks like a deer in the headlights, as if we’re all watching them. We notice the same Chinese girl keeps walking by making TikTok videos and wonder if she’s famous back home. A guy following her taking photos is playing a good boyfriend of Instagram, we ask her she’s famous as she live streams her part in the parade of holiday-makers:
“No” she replies with a wry matter-of-factness:
“Only 304,000”.
If you’ve done the Camino, are thinking of doing it, or are just interested in discussing the Camino or travel in general - then please leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you.