Portugal: colonizers happily colonized

David Sherman

It is a nation of cobblestones, pastels, restaurants, beaches and tourists. And of ancient majesty of tiny winding streets of two- or three-story shuttered stucco homes.

Portugal, once a great colonial power, is now obligingly colonized by visitors from every land, hunting for the ubiquitous national delicacies of frango piri piri and fresh fish, uncommon hospitality and commonplace cheap beer — an admitted passion of many a Brit.

They zoom in on cheap flights for weekends of barrels of brew offered in the blight of restaurants in the Algarve offering “British breakfasts with British ingredients,” if anyone’s in shape to digest after a weekend of quaffing.

Half the people we know have visited and happily provide lists of “must sees.” The other half plan to go. Do I have a list of places for you to see. Tourism has doubled in the last year, forever changing the atmosphere and landscape and slowly, irrevocably eroding its once ageless charm.

In Lisbon and tiny town, streets can barely accommodate the compact taxi fleets of Skodas, Renaults, Peugeots, Citroens, stretched BMWs and unrecognizable others whose shocks, drivers and passengers are battered by roadways cobbled by hand centuries ago by artisanal stonemasons. Working with the speed of rock drummers to hammer stones smaller than fists into place, the labours of a declining number are a tourist attraction itself.

The cobblestones are to Lisbon what the food carts are to New York. But the near-indestructible fabric of near every sidewalk and street are treacherous, heaved and caved in spots, slippery when wet and notorious for inflaming backs, hips and knees.

If you’re curious, you’ll learn most of the country’s labourers, cabbies, service people are underpaid and overworked, but remain gracious and hospitable. If their English and your pigeon Portuguese can puzzle together a conversation, you’ll quickly learn pride in their work, disdain over sloppy jobs, lowly wages and chronic injury are a way of life. As are their third hand, the smart phone.

Minimum wage is between 700 and 900 euros in restaurants and manual labour jobs, unionized factory labour pays more as does white collar work which allows some to pay rents of 2,000 to 3,000 euros a month. It has become a haven for computer-tethered mobile workers from many nations.

Developed nations’ salaries can go a long way.

Portuguese working-class rent rooms for 700 euros, give or take, sharing flats is a way of life and often depend on second jobs or minimal tips and free meals at the restaurants they serve lunch and dinner, with a few hours off between. Cabbies cruise 14 hours or more, six days a week, racing Uber to stay alive. Calling for a taxi is a foreign notion though most every driver is happy to give you their private number.

We befriended Rui, a handsome six-day a week driver with excellent English who happily gave us a personal tour of Lisbon, through the city to the tiny streets he grew up on playing football, to his home on a suburban garden patch where he introduced us to his wife. He brought us to a restaurant where he instructed the owner to treat us like family – he did – and called his son, a waiter and proud gym rat like his father, who made us at home for several dinners, with sides of pictures of his girlfriend, his brother and his gym.

Rui was happy to arrange by text to take us to train station and airports and meet us at same, introduce us to Portuguese politics as well as lookouts and favourite menu items.

Authentic food was almost always less than 10 or 12 euros, unless you were diving into the tanks of fresh seafood and exotic lobster, giant crabs and ugly taste-of-the-sea barnacles.

As an added bonus, it was impossible to find a bad cup of coffee anywhere. Even the machines in the room, fed with cartridges the size of miniature hockey pucks, poured out thick, dark espresso, better than the best back home.

Tips, we’re told, are often as foreign as the diners. Large bills with proportional service might be rewarded with one or two euros. No, gratuities are not included. More than one waiter said their lunch-time take rarely exceeded five euros.

The Portuguese we met, either in Lisbon, Albufeira, which is a cross between Miami Beach and a modern suburb of your choice, sans clusters of Tim Horton’s and its ilk, or Sagres, a tiny jewel on the most southern tip of Europe, are unfailingly polite, welcoming and appreciative at the tiniest efforts to speak their language.

Sagres is a village buried in a national park, protected from development, and remains Portugal, albeit overrun with surfers and parking lots on the edge of town for camper vans – the road weary and the luxurious -- usually with wet suits, looking like deflated bodies, hanging from doors to dry.

Building is not permitted in Sagres, Airbnb forbidden and short-term rentals being harassed, and, therefore the magnificent beach, bracketed by high limestone cliffs topped with ancient forts turned tourist attractions, is short on parasitical cheap eateries and hotels and rooming houses that despoil most beach towns.

Follow a half dozen paths along the coast of the town to the rocks tumbling down to the beach dating back millennium and you'll see surfers bobbing in the tide, like black birds, waiting to catch the next wave. Or jump in yourelf and let the wave ride you to shore.

A late-night walk around the village will bring you past concrete and stucco fences of homes that are long gone, flattened by the Earthquake of 1755, mailboxes still embedded for mail that will never arrive. Freshly painted homes, shuttered for the night stand beside abandoned graffiti besotted shells of what used to be.

A tour through tiny coastal towns reveals typical two-storey homes in freshly-painted pastels to contrast with the bright white stucco and blue sea and sky and narrow streets that took divine guidance or blind luck to maneuver.

The closer to the water a restaurant is rooted the worse the food and the bigger the bill.

Like the choice of colours used to decorate homes as well as fashion in Lisbon’s shopping areas, the country is one of contrasts. Cranky wooden trolley cars share tracks that engrave most streets with whispering ultra-modern streetcars.

Here, too, the ancient architecture of the towns and cities, rebuilt after the earthquake that flattened most of the country, faces ultra-modern architectural and engineering marvels — buildings that seem to float, massive office bloces that look to be toppled against each other.

Poverty is plentiful, yet stores display fabrics and fashion in vivacious colour combinations, weekends bring out crowds of partiers to fill streets drinking and laughing along with buskers that dance, sing, flip and fly, and retailers await late into the night.

There are unhoused and drug use is not illegal, though sales of same is, but we saw evidence of neither.

Cross-county trains come in three varieties— the Via Rail eccentricities that stop at every town, that start moving before you or your luggage have been stored so you and your baggage can ricochet off seats, passengers and overhead luggage bins. And should you attempt to use a washroom as the train bangs around a corner, men, be warned, steel toilet seats fall inopportunely and hand dryers or towel containers are positioned to dislocate vertebrae as you are thrown backward.

The express trains move quicker with less propensity to inflict wounds and the high-speed trains are the envy of every Canadian train traveler. They hit 200 kms/hr on what appears to be the same roadbed as the sadistic slower versions.

In catering to the ever-increasing numbers of invading tourists, restaurants dominate almost every main street, heavy on expertly grilled to order 400-600 kg chickens basted in the nation's infamous fiery piri piri sauce and plump juicy fish, often plucked from the sea that day. Beef as in lamb, pork and "cow steak" is offered but expertise in kitchens seems limited to fish and chicken and imaginative uses of cod.

The multiplying fusion cuisine aimed at tourists who come to Portugal to avoid indulging in Portuguese cuisine is a malignancy.

Much of it is excellent, servers almost always speak perfect English, menus come in English, American music is pumped up to 100 dbs, heavy on beats and percussive bass drums and you can easily think you’re in Toronto.

Not being able to converse over the sonic barrage may be moot. A glance reveals couples dine in foursomes, two humans holding two cell phones. Or one person with phone and one lonely diner staring at the walls or the top of hir of her partner’s head.

Despite the welcome invasion, or perhaps because of it, Portugal is home to the friendliest, most amiable population who will welcome you regardless of how much you spend. Make an effort to speak their language and they will happily speak English, taught in school and at work.

And, perhaps, it’s a result of how children are raised. Here, we never witnessed them scolded, pulled, harassed or punished. Nor, as in a trip to Spain revealed, are they pacified with iPads during dinner while parents explored their phones. Instead, mothers and fathers watch over toddlers on sea legs from a distance, allowing them to explore, to climb on rocks, to fall if they will, splash in the sea to learn to embrace it, to discover the world that will soon come to discover them.