Carrying Lisbon

There are cities we visit, and there are cities that quietly take up residence within us.

Lisbon did that to me.

I cannot say exactly when it happened. Perhaps it was an afternoon at the riverfront when the Tagus moved with that immense tidal force that already feels like the Atlantic. Watching the light drift across the water, it becomes clear that this river has carried centuries of departures, dreams, and returning.

Or perhaps it was one evening at the Miradouro de Santa Catarina beneath the brooding figure of Adamastor, the mythic giant from Camões’ epic Os Lusíadas. From that terrace the city spreads outward in soft hills, roofs glowing in the evening light while the river opens toward the sea.

Standing there, one feels that Lisbon is not merely a city but a story still unfolding.

My literary companions have helped me understand that story.

At the back of A Brasileira in Chiado I often imagine the quiet presence of Fernando Pessoa, who believed Lisbon contained a cultural richness the world had not yet fully discovered. His many heteronyms—Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro, and the reflective bookkeeper Bernardo Soares—turned the ordinary streets of Baixa into landscapes of philosophy and dream.

Yet Pessoa is not alone in that literary Lisbon.

Walking through Chiado I also think of Eça de Queirós, whose sharp and elegant novels captured the social life of nineteenth-century Portugal with wit and precision. In quieter moments along the river I remember José Saramago, whose work revealed the deeper moral and historical currents flowing beneath everyday life in the city.

And now I am discovering António Lobo Antunes, whose novels explore the psychological aftermath of Portugal’s twentieth-century struggles. Through him one sees another Lisbon: a city shaped by memory, by political upheaval, and by the quiet persistence of human voices.

Each of these writers shows a different Lisbon, yet together they reveal something essential—the city’s remarkable ability to hold many layers of history and imagination at once.

One of my favorite walks takes me west toward Belém. There the pines grow near the monastery of Jerónimos, and the river widens as if preparing itself for the open Atlantic. Walking there, the air carries the scent of resin and salt, and the horizon seems filled with centuries of voyages.

Portugal has always lived between land and sea, between departure and longing. Perhaps that is why the Portuguese speak so often of saudade, that tender mixture of memory, beauty, and yearning.

Over time I realized that my visits to Lisbon were not simply journeys. I was slowly gathering pieces of the city within myself—the miradouros, the cafés, the quiet streets of Baixa, the shifting light on the Tagus.

Now, with the years passing and travel becoming more complicated, I sometimes wonder whether I will return again. The long transatlantic flight feels daunting.

But the truth is that the city has already found its place within me.

Even if I never cross the Atlantic again, I have not lost Lisbon.

The river still flows through my memory. The cafés remain full of conversation. The pines near Belém still whisper in the ocean wind.

And somewhere in Chiado, perhaps at a quiet table toward the back of A Brasileira, the conversation continues.

Pessoa believed the world had not yet fully discovered the cultural treasure that is Lisbon.
Perhaps he was right.

To remember the city, to speak of its writers and its river light, is to keep that treasure alive.

And as long as imagination continues its quiet work, the journey to Lisbon is never entirely finished.

The philosopher Amadeu de Prado once wrote in Night Train to Lisbon that when we leave a place, something of ourselves remains behind there, waiting quietly.

Perhaps that is why Lisbon never feels entirely distant to me. Some part of my life is still sitting at a café in Chiado, still watching the Tagus from a terrace above the river.

And perhaps, one day, I will go back and find it again.

Mafra central to Saramago's wonderful saga of Balthasar and Blimunda

Luxurious evenings in a neighborhood park.

Antonio Tabucci offers recipes in his wandering amongst old friends in search of answers to old questions In Requiem, an Hallucination

Strolling on Avenida Libertad.

A literary group still meeting here after 40 years. The conversations continue at Brasileira..

You cannot cross the same river twice as the River goes on and on. (Heraclitus)