My Portuguese vacation

David Sherman

It is a nation of contrasts. Beaten, worn facades on narrow cobblestone streets hiding wondrous, beautiful courtyards and gardens of gnarled, dying trees and swooping doves. Ancient monasteries now lux hotels filled with massive furniture of aged wood. Kitchens manned by Black ex-pats from Cape Verde, plating the inventive and the conventional, served by white waiters. All work too hard and too long for too little.

Lisbon, like Portugal is a historic wonder, once renowned for its hegemony and power, now weary and struggling. A mirror of its long coast of a sea treacherous and beautiful, inspiring and fearsome. The colonizer now the colonized.

We have packed three carry-ons and one bag to check. It’s three by five and made of canvas scarred by thousands of miles. It weighs 70 lbs. It has destroyed my back and neck. My new, budget redwood guitar is in a bag strapped around my shoulders. I’m dragging a hard-shell suitcase of airline-dictated dimensions and a beaten hand-made leather bag stuffed with electric toothbrush, glasses, wires, chargers, iPads, transformers, a computer and other indispensable 21st Century treasures.

If I can walk when we climb off train at Albufeira to pick fall into our midget rent-a-car, I’ll be surprised. This is but a pit stop. More than 50 years ago, a family friend abandoned his winter retreats to Albufeira, in the Algarve, saying the tourists had destroyed it. I visited a little time after, and found it hospitable. Swam through waves washing beached fishing boats.

Today it is Miami Beach times three. British and German visitors, seduced by cheap Ryanair fares, cheap beer and cheap hotels, use an escalator to float to the beach below. The beach takes second place to a village dedicated to selling everything and anything to tourists not yet too zonkered to buy.

Restaurants trumpet, “British food made with British ingredients.” The identical signs can be seen in Spain on a seaside identically sullied.

The enclave of condos, banks, cafés and shops an escalator ride above the beach is a last gasp of what the Algarve used to be. A traditional café where locals gather for espresso and a sandwich offers neither pretension or English. We are invaders and treated with scorn.

Like Lisbon and most towns and villages neighbouring the ocean, Airbnb has eaten up housing and pushed up prices of the homes that short-term rentals have not consumed. Pumped-up housing costs have not been accompanied by increases in salaries. Uber has usurped taxis. Foreign cuisine for tourists has quelled appetites for Portuguese food.

Life is hard, and, we are told by several, getting harder every year. Service industry workers commute long distances after days that run 10 hours or more. A friendly waiter tells us, over tender gizzards and chicken soup juiced with floating strands of egg, he works from 11 a.m. to midnight, a few hours off after lunch to hit the gym. Weekend nights he works security at bars.

A typical lunchtime earns him five euros in tips. The payment machines for credit cards do not offer tipping options.

The ultra-modern train station Oriente in Lisbon, near the waterfront from where more than 500 years ago Portugal launched its colonial ambitions and trade in slaves, is built with sweeping concrete arches. It is open to the elements, save for a soaring glass roof and plastic windbreaks bordering rows of tracks between platforms. The architecture is impressive but the restrooms are without toilet seats and smell like outhouses.

To save electricity and improve your health, signs urge you to take stairs. Wit five or six bags, why not?

The station is a concrete jewel attached to the new Lisbon, a small city of 21st Century office buildings and apartments that seem to have dropped from the sky. An artificial city of empty sidewalks, bereft of life or street-level commerce, it could be Manhattan or Dallas, a kilometre or two from the small fishing boats that still bring in the daily catch to appease Lisbon’s expanding appetite for fresh fish.

Lisbon is a city of the past, its aging architecture preserved from the days following the 1755 twin earthquake and tsunami that flattened, burnt and flooded much of the coast.

Behind the rebuilt, albeit ancient, weathered facades are refreshed homes, restaurants, hotels and offices.

The storied waterfront is an anything-goes territory of glass, steel and concrete towers, as soulless as it is modern, a pretentious middle finger to the past.

Its dual personalities are also displayed under the soaring roof of the station. Several generations of trains, electric and diesel, conventional and bullet-shaped, high-speed rail cars sharing conventional, rusted steel tracks, put VIA to shame.

Passenger trains slice through the country and beyond, on time or a few minutes early. The high-speed cars went into service in 1999 and were refurbished in 2017. They silently hit 240 kms/hr. Their efficiency is a by-product of closing the doors and pulling out the instant everyone is on board. Part of the joys of Portuguese train travel is bouncing onto the laps of fellow passengers as you attempt to stow your luggage and get to your seat as the train accelerates.

The trains, the station, the cold new city surrounding it, is another study in contrast. A tourist magnet where locals struggle to survive, its wealth and power a tale for students of history. It is now one of Western Europe’s poorest cousins. Minimum wage is 870 euros a month. In Ireland and Germany, it is more than 2,000.

If one takes the time to speak to the people who drive your taxis, serve your meals, check you into your hotel, make your bed or sell you books, one hears a repetitive chorus of how life is getting harder and harder.  

Every year the ocean, the quaint seaside villages, the party-hearty atmosphere of Lisbon, from Pink Street to Bairro Alto, sucks in more and more tourists, with the added bonus of relatively cheap prices and endearing warmth of the Portuguese. The attendant Uber cabs, Airbnb and fancy fusion restaurants, where English is essential, drives up housing prices and working hours as it drives down income for the Portuguese. Locals in Lisbon can’t afford to live in their own city, find their cuisine and traditional tascas disappearing, their language insufficient.

We befriended Rui, a cab driver who starts his car at 6:30 a.m. and puts it away 14 hours later. He lives across the sea from the city, in a small house surrounded by a garden that he shows us as part of his guided tour of Lisbon. He makes a pit stop on the tiny street of the city he played football on as a child. It was a time when life was easy.

He says he wishes there were 48 hours in a day so he could work enough to pay the bills. Every year gets tougher. The washing machine is broken, he says. His tone is desperate. There are no excess euros to fix it or buy a new one.

His wife has waited four years for surgery. Here, like Quebec, there is a parallel health care system but private care cost is as unimaginable to him as the 500,000-euro price of a one-room apartment in the new Lisbon by the waterfront he heard a passenger discuss.

Reisa suggests if he had 48 hours a day, he’d kill himself. He says he’s killing himself anyway. Portuguese are too poor to take taxis, he says. Tourists summon Uber.

Comfortable on the high-speed train to Sagres, the most southern tip of Europe, flying past olive groves and cattle and sheep farms at 220 kms/hr., the ride is smoother than a car on a highway doing 100.

There is an elderly man, meaning my age, in front of me reading a newspaper. A singular image. The country and its people are poor but everyone is attached to a phone. The young man across the aisle, has one eye on his phone, the other on the young, pretty woman in a second skin of lycra and spandex, sitting beside him. She has white buds planted in her ears and is whispering into her phone. Her easy smile tells me the attentions of men, surreptitious and otherwise, are a welcome burden. She finally wraps herself in a coat and closes her eyes. The man beside her concentrates on his phone.

The fields, farms and forests sliding by, impress no one.