Josep Pla and Lisbon
In 1953, prolific Catalan author Josep Pla made the first of three extensive trips through Portugal. Traveling by car from Barcelona and entering Portugal through Badajoz, Pla would publish the essays that emerged from his travels as the eighth volume of his complete works, titled, Direcció Lisboa (1975). Jesús Revelles and others have written a great deal about the place of Portugal in Pla’s Iberianism, inspired at least in part by his brother Pere’s two-decade period of employment in the Portuguese cork industry, as well as his outsider’s affinity for the Salazar regime.
In Lisbon, Pla claims (at least rhetorically) to have met the limits of his talent as a writer:
Over the course of my stay, I became fascinated by the color of Lisbon. In these detours through streets and plazas and the banks of the river and its estuary, going uphill and down — Lisbon is an undulant city, with a prodigious amount of disorder and mobility, never mediocre or gray – it occurred to me to write a few lines about this city’s color. When I went to Rome the same thing happened to me with that city’s color. I have been turning this project around in my head for a few years now, and up until now I have written nothing, absolutely nothing. If the period of time deemed reasonable for accomplishing such things should pass and find my efforts still frustrated, then I will be forced to consider myself a poor, shriveled, and absolutely failed writer. (25)
Just after this passage, however, Pla offers up the “poor and shriveled” fruits of his efforts, a singularly moving description of Lisbon’s lingering dalliance with light and texture:
The plasticity of Lisbon’s color, its mobility, its diversity, are ungraspable. At times it seems to me that it possesses young and pink carnalities, that blood suddenly rushes to its face, and at times it tends to grow pale, like human skin. . . . Red rooves, whites, of palpitating walls, drops of rust or green or the color of pumpkin in some façades, small undulant hills, the alta and the baixa, stairs and curves, atmospheres alternated by a fainted cleanness and great watery concentrations, fine rains. The intermittence of the water that falls – and against an old wall, with a bit of ivy, a palm tree that pushes up an offering to the sun, perfumed, with a langor almost brazen, deliberate. All this is difficult to dissect on paper and constitutes for me an insuperable difficulty. (25)
Pla was right to point out Lisbon's sublime charms in 1953, and his description of Lisbon (or his rhetorical reluctance to attempt to describe it) stands up well over seven decades later. If the touristic developments of the past two decades have made Lisbon largely unrecognizable in certain areas (at least below Marquês de Pombal), the scenes described by Pla are still all around. Five minutes at the Miradouro de São Pedro de Alcântara are enough to reset one’s aesthetic expectations for urban design, and there are still surprises in areas like Santos, Campo de Ourique, and Estrela.
That said, it’s with mixed feelings that one praises Lisbon now. Like Barcelona, Rome, and Paris, Lisbon has been pushed almost to the breaking point by tourism. Tuk-tuks (electric and motorized) zip through the city, driven by guides speaking English, French, and (sometimes) Portuguese. English is everywhere, as are rented electric scooters and bicycles. Cars with Spanish license plates clog the streets by the Terreiro do Paço. Just above the Praça dos Restauradores, tourists from a dozen countries pay just over four euros to ride the Elevador da Glória for six minutes. The cost of everything has gone up, while Portuguese salaries have remained largely flat. Many here have moved north to Sintra or south to Setúbal and Almada, but the prices in those areas have also risen dramatically.
In many ways, Lisbon is no longer the city that Pla described. The colors and views are still there, and light rains still fall on old walls with ivy. Palm trees still raise up to blue skies. What has changed is the sound of the city and the sense of space one has walking through certain neighborhoods. There is a new loudness to the city, much like the youthful din of a shopping mall or amusement park, and it’s difficult to walk through the crowds in many neighborhoods. The soundscape has been altered in much the way that certain neighborhoods in Mexico City (e.g., Condesa, Roma, Juárez) have changed. Snippets of unnecessarily loud conversations in English are now like the din of cicadas in the American South.
Tourism is fickle, and it likely won't be long before most visitors learn to prefer Dubrovnik or some other “hidden gem.” All it likely takes are a few well-designed marketing campaigns and discounted flights from Newark and London. Until then, one needs earplugs and blinders to enjoy the Lisbon described by Pla. Perhaps soon a new Lisbon—amply democratic, affordable for working families, and once again recognizably Portuguese—will emerge. To speed this along, I’d like to point out that several airlines offer affordable flights from NYC to Dubrovnik.
