Lisbon, my part in its downfall
Gentrification is incoming and I don't like it
Irish bars are great. In Ireland. Where they are just - bars. I’m always up for a pint and a small one in some dusty shop that has a petrol pump outside and a Guiness one beside the bread and milk.
In Lisbon, two doors away from my rental apartment, not so much.
I take my share of responsibility for this. The clue is in the rental apartment, I was on holiday in a formerly locals-only part of the city, enjoying the lower prices, extra space and lack of annoying Americans but also bitching and moaning about the arrival of a theme pub in among the traditional eating places.
Can’t have it both ways. Am aware.
So, every day, The Corkman gets side eye. No fish chilling in the window or cheery signs announcing the arrival of the new season’s snails here. Just what they claim to be the best pint of Guinness in Lisbon, in case all that Douro and Albarino is beginning to pall.
On Saturday night, when Sporting Lisbon were playing an important home match, the street outside The Corkman was full of young Lisboas. Some were wearing novelty hats. Oh boy.
This is Almada, just across the Tagus from the old town. It feels like an area in flux. New since my last visit, at the end of 2022, are a supermarket with an extensive organic section, a gelato bar and a sushi restaurant and steak place directly across the strip from each other. They are owned by the same guy, have both menus on the same iPad and feature waiters carrying groaning platters of onion rings across the road for customers who need deep fried alliums with their sashimi.
Inland Almada is a sleepy Communist-controlled area with pleasing 1970s apartment blocks. The shops beneath are functional and traditional, untroubled by Starbucks, poke bowls and the other annoying trappings of advanced capitalism. If the local government has had anything to do with this, I salute them and wish they could send Glasgow some tips.
But near the ferry terminal there’s a strip of restaurants and bars that is becoming Byres Estrada.
At the start of the week it’s pretty sedate and old people who are staying in a holiday rental nearby can eat lobster with only other food nerds and locals for company.
On Friday and Saturday, it gets rackety. Even the anarchist centre, a divinely decayed old building that is usually padlocked, showed signs of life. Disembarking the ferry from the old town, earnest young Londoners discussed the varying merits of different hostels and how much safer they felt in the streets of Lisbon compared to their London homes.
Coming here a couple of years apart is watching gentrification in slow motion. The longisghted owners of my holiday let of choice have played a blinder, buying a whole traditional block and converting it into holiday lets that are smart and comfortable and nothing like student accommodation with a sunny view.
What I love about these flats is that they combine staying in a traditional neighbourhood with ancient grocery stores selling gnarly tomatoes with easy access to the brighter lights of Lisbon. There’s an 18m swimming pool in what we Glaswegians think of as the back court. I can have a morning dip beside the lemon tree, with the birds singing their heads off all around.
If I lift my head a bit higher, I can see the neighbours’ tights and sheets drying on their balconies. At certain times of the day, the nursery in the next street unleashes the weans onto a nearby trampoline. It’s like a mini holiday resort in Portugal’s answer to Partick.
The arrival of The Corkman undermines this idyll. And there is scope for so much more. Half of the strip is still falling to bits. There are several delightful buildings, some right on the waterfront, with boarded up windows and shrubs growing out of the roofs. It’s all too easy to imagine the likely lad behind the sushi-steak duopoly buying those up and turning them into backpackers’ hostels or pop up markets selling pastel de nata fridge magnets.
There is now a whole development along these lines in the old industrial area between the old time and the palaces of Belem. If Almada is Partick then Lx Factory is the bougie Barras. Down a previously forgotten lane is a work in progress development that’s a little bit Covent Garden, a little bit Cockburn Street. There is a large hostel with a roof terrace. Bars. Lots of bars. Smoothies, poke bowls, Aperol Spritz, everything the 21st century visitor requires.
It was not unpleasant (apart from the toilets) and I did buy some pastel de nata fridge magnets as well as enjoying an actual pastel de nata and cup of coffee for 2 euros. That never gets old. But it was full of people doing the aimless tourist walk, wondering exactly what they are meant to be doing there, then giving up and ordering nachos.
I am terrified that the next time I return to Almada, the Anarchist Centre will be LxFactory2. The garage opposite my beloved apartment block, which currently looks like something out of a Wes Anderson movie, will be a nightclub. There will be a permanent row of TukTuks outside the ferry terminal instead of just a handful on Saturday.
And the worst thing will be that it will be partly my fault for going there in the first place. Tourists can’t go and enjoy the cheap snails and rustic vegetables then pull up the ladder behind them.
The Corkman is, I suspect, only the start.
Love it and, loved Lisbon when I visited just over a year ago. Total tourist trail on that visit. Museum of contemporary art was the winner for me!
30+ years ago I was in Lecce for the first time. A beautiful baroque city in Puglia - really special. And there was an Irish pub. Not a proper bar owned by an Irish expat, a themed Beamish/Harp/Guinness, fiddly/diddly music, with added leprechauns.