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Published: October 22nd 2006
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For the first few days, Porto’s hardly showing its best face. Since the first patchy sunshine I saw the day after my arrival, a massive storm has rolled in. Gusting winds rattle the walls, rain lashes the windowpanes. From Gabriela’s balcony, looking toward the ocean, I can see the waves churning and crashing on the shore. Closer to her building, kids are running across a muddy football pitch. There’s an ethereal glow over the field as they play beneath the lights. During the day, gulls circle in the gray sky above it, swooping down to rest along the goal line.
It’s not just the weather that’s gotten to me. After a long day of lugging my bags around the city, my back is knotted and tense. By the end of the week it dawns on me that my exhaustion has less to do with a backpack than with a stomach bug that’s terrorizing my insides. I spend a long night tossing and turning in bed, making periodic sprints to the bathroom. For two days I don’t venture much further than the supermarket down the street - a place that, from a sociological standpoint, isn’t without its interest. Gabriela
lives in one of Porto’s posher suburbs - something she notes with gleeful irony inside her sparsely furnished place - and for a stricken traveler afraid to stray too far from the nearest restroom, the sight of glammed-up housewives fondling the produce in stiletto heels offers its own sort of pleasure.
For one feverish night, everything’s come to a head. I’m lying in a cold sweat in bed; the pain’s moved upwards from my lower back, past my neck and shoulders and into my cranium, where a bunch of hobgoblins have apparently decided to play handball with a hand grenade. Still, though most of my medical knowledge could be gleaned from medieval texts, I get the sense that the sickness is passing. By morning it feels like I’ve gone 12 rounds with 12 heavyweights, but my stomach has calmed. Outside the storm’s broken. Broad panels of light paint the rough waves of the Atlantic. Sitting at a café near Gabriela’s house, I watch a rainbow bending in a bright arc over the swank gated homes.
After my introduction to Porto, exploring its rabbit’s warren of dusty old shops and abandoned buildings, I’m surprised by the city’s
prosperity. The further you get from its rickety core, the more its affluence becomes apparent. Geography plays a major part here. Hemmed in by a river, a railroad and the sea, Porto proper doesn’t have anywhere to go. The satellite towns in its orbit have become the place for the upwardly mobile to migrate - legions of them in German cars and Italian shoes, in numbers that seem startling for a town of Porto’s size. I’m not entirely sure what I expected from this town before arriving, but unlike the women who pass me as I scribble away outside the café, it probably didn’t involve gold belts, gold shoes, or gold-stitched jeans by Dolce & Gabbana.
But while the money moves out, Porto’s trying to jumpstart its historic heart. There’s a lot of work to be done. Along the Douro, occupying some of the choicest real estate in town, are some of Porto’s poorest inhabitants. As a New Yorker, this is hard for me to grasp. You get the feeling most of these guys back home would’ve been swept out at least a couple of administrations ago. Send in some dubious zoning commission, write up a strongly worded
ordinance about building hazards, bus the poor folks to low-income housing on the other side of town, then build a few swank co-ops on the spot where there used to be dilapidated old houses. This is low-grade arithmetic for New York developers - the sort of thing a Larry Silverstein could sketch out on a cocktail napkin in his sleep.
Really, these Portuguese have a lot to learn.
Gabriela explains how many of the buildings in downtown Porto - long abandoned and fallen into disrepair - have been tied up in legal disputes for years. Ponderous rent laws which handcuff landlords make most a losing investment. Again, she shakes her head: so typical of the Portuguese. These handsome old buildings just aching for a facelift are left to rot, while along the Avenida dos Aliados, a lovely, leafy promenade of gardens and flowerbeds gets paved over after being “redesigned” by one of Portugal’s leading architects.
Not that all of Porto’s architectural leaps of faith are such grand misadventures. Bridges linking the city to Vila Nova de Gaia straddle the Douro in brash, soaring spans - the most famous of which bear the fingerprints of Gustave
Eiffel and his disciples. When the newest was completed just a few years ago, media flocked from around the world for its unveiling. True, most were looking for bold, bloody headlines: the smart money was on the shoddy Portuguese workmanship to fail within a week. But the fact that this impressive arch high above the Douro survives still - in spite of the best bets placed against it - seems, somehow, to cut to the heart of an important truth about this country. Their builders might be the butt of jokes across Europe, and you might want to take out insurance before trying to cross the street, but the Portuguese get things done - even if it’s in their own rambling way.
Gabriela tells me about the construction workers who, after their lunch-time coffee, will measure out a dose of strong, fiery liquor - “something to rinse the cup out,” as the saying goes. You can picture them with stubbly chins and rough hands saying it with a mischievous wink. And while it might go a long way in explaining the reputation of Portuguese contractors abroad, I can’t help but pour out a small shot of the stuff when
I get my first chance, feeling something that’s not quite a bond, but comes awfully close.
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