VIII
LISBON
No capital city in Europe, with the exception of Constantinople, can compare with Lisbon in beauty of situation. On approaching the city up the Tagus from the sea the panorama presented is most striking; although the unæsthetic Portuguese have done their best to mar it by fringing the foreshore with possibly profitable, but certainly hideous and offensive, industrial and commercial excrescences, from the noble and historic tower of Belem at the mouth of the river, almost hidden in the midst of defiling gasometers, to where the city merges into the country at Poço do Bispo three miles away. Piled up upon a grand amphitheatre of hills, the city rises tier over tier, the river opening out before it in the form of an extensive bay. Away above Belem the vast square Ajuda palace stands conspicuously upon a hill-top backed afar off by the huge mass of Cintra; whilst at the other end of the panorama towards the east the ancient citadel-palace of St. Jorge looks down from its height upon the busy river-bank and the central valley running inland, in which the rectangular main streets are cramped.[[5]]
The noble Praça do Comercio, Black Horse Square, as English visitors call it, fronts the river in the foreground, the most imposing public square in Europe, with the exception perhaps of the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Previous to the great earthquake of 1755 a royal palace stood upon a portion of this site, and the valley behind it was a closely crowded congeries of narrow and filthy lanes. In my manuscript already referred to of Lord Strathmore’s travels in the country, an interesting account is given of the condition of things in 1760, when he saw the ruined city; and a quotation from his description of the plans then existing for rebuilding the portion destroyed will give a good idea of the present aspect, since the plans were executed precisely.
“The prospect,” writes Lord Strathmore, “of this great city rising from its ruins is still distant, as besides ye arsenal there are but three houses built upon the intended plan. The plan of the streets and squares is extremely well imagin’d. There is a pretty broad valley between two hills, running down to ye Tagus in ye part where ye palace stood. Thro’ this they intend to make their principal street, all ye houses regularly built after one model and tirés au cordon, terminating in a noble square open in front to ye river, which is of great breadth here, with old Lisbon upon high ground opposite. The other three sides [of the square] will be surrounded by a very handsome, narrow arcade, with public buildings above and an equestrian statue of ye King in ye centre. The other streets will likewise be regular, and will lead at right angles into ye great street from ye hills on each side. Tho’ ye design is extremely noble ye architecture is as bad [i.e. as before] except in ye square already described. They seem to consider ye front of a house only as a high wall with holes larger or smaller to admit light as occasion requires.”
This exactly pictures Lisbon as it stands to-day. From Black Horse Square on the Tagus bank run the Rua Augusta and two other parallel streets, called respectively the streets of “gold” and “silver,” straight as a line to the busy centre of Lisbon, the fine parallelogram, called the Praça de Dom Pedro, or the Rocio, paved with its inevitable mosaic of black and white waves, at the end of which is the theatre of Donna Maria, the central railway station, and the entrance to the handsome Avenida da Libertade, a garden and tree-shaded drive of good houses occupying the whole of the narrow valley for nearly two miles into the suburbs. On either side of the Avenida and the principal rectangular streets in the valley the hills rise precipitously, and when the tops of these have been surmounted a series of sudden dips and rapid ascents succeed east and west. The city is, therefore, a most fatiguing one to explore, as to go anywhere away from the river-bank, which with the exception of Black Horse Square is irretrievably ugly and squalid, and from the streets “tirés au cordon” in the central valley, formidable hills have to be faced. This of late years has been much relieved by a complete system of electric trams, which practically cover the city, and by the instalment of funicular railways and lifts up some of the more difficult ascents.
The city, on the whole, is decidedly disappointing at close quarters. The straight principal streets and rectangular cross thoroughfares, with their flat, prosaic architecture, the high white houses all alike, are the antipodes of picturesqueness, whilst the authorities seem perversely to have done their utmost to make the river-side as ugly as Rotherhithe or Wapping. This is the more to be regretted, as since I first knew the city many years ago, great tracts of land have been reclaimed from the sludge and ooze of the foreshore which might well have been treated with some regard for public amenity. The large strip reclaimed from the river, however, almost as far as Belem, has for the most part been turned into untidy deserts of dust, shabby-looking docks, and dumping-places for débris. The utter lack of æsthetic taste is observable on all hands. The terrace before the king’s residence, the palace of the Necesidades, for instance, is upon the brow of a low hill, and commands a splendid view of the river and the opposite shore for many miles on either hand; and yet even here, between the palace and the river factory chimneys belch black smoke day and night, hopelessly ugly industrial buildings block the prospect, and the reclaimed foreshore and docks are as desolate as elsewhere.
Of the pure picturesque, indeed, little remains in Lisbon; but what still exists must be sought amongst the fisher folk on the river-side, and especially in the markets that have been built on the reclaimed land of the Ribeira Nova, not far from the centre of the city and close to the Hotel Central. It was pleasant to turn into the cool, spacious, covered fish-market out of the brilliant sunlight, which even quite early in the day drove people to welcome shade. The air was clear, crisp, and elastic, and every object seemed to sparkle with light and colour. Inside the market hundreds of people were bargaining quietly, for even here the absence of vociferation was remarkable; servants buying their stocks of provisions for the day, housewives of the humbler class doing their own marketing, baskets on their arms, and women fish hawkers by the score laying in their stocks. They were all shoeless, as usual, wearing under their vast head burden black pork-pie hats over red or yellow kerchiefs, and they have girdles below the hips into which the upper portion of their pleated skirts is drawn to relieve the waist of their weight. Upon the ground, spread around the women sellers, were great heaps of glistening fish; cod, dory, skate, whiting, and large quantities of squids or cuttlefish, which are much liked by the Portuguese poor.
ON THE QUAY, LISBON.
The male fish-sellers of Lisbon are for a wonder even more picturesque than the women; for here on the Tagus the seafarers of the south are first noticeable, quite distinct in racial characteristics as they are from those of the north. These Lisbon fishermen go barefooted, which the poorest men of the north never do, they wear breeches only to the knee, girt by a crimson sash, and the hanging tasselled bag-cap falls and waves over their shoulder as they loup along with a peculiar springing gait under a long flexible pole balanced transversely across the shoulders, at each end of which a flat, shallow basket of fish is suspended. The vegetable market adjoining that devoted to fish is a brilliant sight in this favoured land. Heaps of scarlet pimentos and tomatoes are flanked by enormous yellow gourds, and mountains of purple grapes incredibly cheap, pomegranates, and big luscious pears jostle piles of humbler vegetables of the kitchen, and some of the groups of bright-coloured produce seem to reproduce the old pictures of the mythical cornucopia overflowing with all the best fruits of the earth.