City’s Alfama Quarter : In Lisbon, Poverty Is Picturesque

It is hard for an outsider not to feel guilty about liking the magnificent, antique city of Lisbon so much. Most of its charm comes from its poverty.

A walk through the Alfama makes this clear. The Alfama is the oldest quarter of Lisbon, an enormous, aged neighborhood of red-tile, stucco houses clustered together on cobblestone streets leading up from the Tagus River.

Save for television antennas perched near chimneys and presidential election posters splattered on walls, the Alfama must look almost as it did 200 years ago.

Poor fishermen and dockworkers lived there during the 18th Century, and poor fishermen and dockworkers live there now. Old women in black gossip on street corners. Men in caps and turtleneck sweaters sip black coffee in tiny cafes. Rubber-booted women sell meager quantities of fruit and vegetables from crates in the streets.

Laundry Shades Streets

The buildings are so close together that laundry hanging from one rustles close to laundry across the way, shading the narrow streets below. A curious visitor can push aside a garbage can or two to get an unobstructed view of wonderful religious mosaics pieced together from blue tiles embedded in the walls.

A neighborhood like the Alfama, in fact, would have been gentrified long ago in most other major cities of the world by young professionals looking for an old and romantic place to live. But while Lisbon has many urban problems, gentrification is not one of them.

“There are not enough rich people in Portugal to gentrify the Alfama,” Goncalo Ribeiro Telles of the Lisbon City Council said in a recent interview.

Lisbon, a city of 800,000 people, with 2.5 million in the metropolitan area, was once the capital of a great seafaring nation of explorers and empire builders who divided the unexplored world with Spain. Now, official posters boast that the government is trying to exterminate rats in Lisbon.

Poorest in West Europe

There is a small wealthy class in Portugal, of course, and the rallies of the strong center and rightist parties are usually attended by well dressed, middle-class supporters. But Lisbon is the capital of the poorest country in the European Communities.

Portugal has inflation of 20% and unemployment of more than 10%. Its gross national product is $2,000 or so a person, a bit higher than that of Panama. Most foreign analysts who know the Third World well usually find familiar traces of inefficiency and inertia in Portugal.

In 1755, an earthquake devastated Lisbon. The Marques of Pombal, the minister of King Jose I, rebuilt the city, laying down wide carriageways, great plazas and rows of sturdy and elegant housing. Much of it is peeling, dusty, even tattered now, but Lisbon has retained the bustle, the character and the architecture of the old Pombal era downtown in a way that has eluded many wealthier European and American cities.

On Sundays, poor Portuguese like to walk in the downtown area. They do not seem desperate; they do not seem like beggars. Older people like to dress well, the men wearing suits but not neckties, their wives walking behind with other wives, all dressed in black.

It is easy for a visitor to sense that he or she is moving among the remnants of faded and fallen grandeur. Some of the elaborate baroque monuments downtown, all streaked and dusty, would probably be clean and world famous if they were in Paris.

‘Light, Fair City’

The reputation of Lisbon has not always matched its genteel elegance. In 1866, for example, Hans Christian Andersen, the Danish writer of fairy tales, was surprised to find a “light, fair city.”

“Where are the filthy streets I have read about, filled with garbage, the wild dogs, and the wretched figures from the African colonies?” he wrote. “. . . I saw nothing of this. . . . Now there are broad clean streets, friendly houses, their walls decorated with clean porcelain tiles, patterned in blue and white, and doors and balconies painted green or red.”

Lisbon has managed to retain its traditional character not because of protective laws but because of poverty. Until recently, there was not much demand in Lisbon to tear down old buildings to make room for larger and more profitable ones.

Ironically, poverty has now put many buildings in danger. In an economy so woeful that many companies are several months behind in the payment of wages, the government tries to hold rents down by law. As a result, many landlords feel there is little profit in renting space to tenants.

Ribeiro Telles estimates that 20,000 buildings in Old Lisbon are not occupied. Since landlords cannot make a profit on the rent, they often cut a hole in the roof and leave the windows open to let the rain in.

“In 10 years,” Ribeiro Telles said, “you can destroy a house like that.” He said the landlords hope to sell the sites to developers who will put up new office buildings.

Ribeiro Telles, a landscape architect and member of the Popular Monarchist Party who ran with the support of both the Socialists and the environmentalists, surprised himself and much of Lisbon by winning a City Council seat last December, on a platform of preserving Old Lisbon and solving its problems.

Lisbon is not all old. The high and sleek Amoreiras office complex and shopping center of glass and steel, designed by Portuguese architect Tomas Taveira, is going up just outside the downtown area.

The indoor shopping mall, with expensive boutiques, opened first, attracting many Lisbonites every day. But few seem to buy anything. Most still crowd into the old, bustling downtown area of Marques de Pombal to buy in the cheap shops. The contrast is so great that the main impact of the modern Amoreiras center is to make a visitor feel just how old everything else is in Lisbon.

“Amoreiras is out of proportion for Lisbon,” Ribeiro Telles said. “People take promenades there when they do not have enough money to go to the movies.”

Architect Taveira dismisses such talk. “In this mediocre country,” he said, “success immediately provokes jealousy.”

Election Campaign

Lisbon, like the rest of Portugal, is in the midst of an election campaign. After half a century of dictatorship, the Portuguese became exuberant about elections in the mid-1970s, and they have not lost their exuberance.

Almost every building in Lisbon, old or new, is covered with colorful posters pasted two and three deep. Political rallies still pull in crowds of tens of thousands. Men stand in front of cafes in the downtown square known as the Rossio, buy lottery tickets and argue the merits of the two presidential candidates, conservative Diogo Freitas do Amaral and Socialist Mario Soares.

In the mid-1970s, the government fretted over the way activists would use spray paint to clutter monuments with political slogans. A cartoon begging for restraint ran on television then, showing a constant progression of militants spraying slogans on a statue again and again and workmen rubbing the slogans off again and again until the statue disintegrated into dust.

Now, the monuments are almost free of spray paint, but no one attributes the new look to the success of the old cartoon. Instead, most people here believe that the cleanliness stems from either a diminution of radicalism, a tightening of police patrolling or--what is most likely--an increase in the cost of spray paint.

The wealth of the past has left great art in Lisbon, and it would be pleasant to say that the poor of Lisbon take advantage of it. The Museum of Ancient Art, for example, displays a noted 15th-Century triptych by Hieronymous Bosch, “The Temptations of St. Anthony.” A visitor stopping at the museum to see this great painting usually finds no one else in the room.

When you think of all the packed galleries of Europe, crammed with people obstructing everyone else’s clear view in the stale air, it is a joy to have a painting like that to oneself. But a nagging question comes up: Why aren’t the people of Lisbon there?

Perhaps they are too poor to pay the paltry bus fare to get there. Perhaps they are too poor to afford the minimal entrance fee. Perhaps they are too poor to worry about 15th-Century art. In any case, there is little doubt that the answer lies somewhere in their poverty.