This may be a farm life newsletter but this week is about our trip to Lisbon.
We drove out of the Valley on Thursday morning. As we left, two Stags stood by the road, their gigantic antlers making them seem like giants standing sentinel. It felt like they were bidding us farewell.
From there we drove to a local town where we boarded a bus to Lisbon. The bus wound its way through the hill roads to pick up more passengers from the towns in our region. About half way into the journey we'd only covered about a third of the distance, and I was worried that we'd be on that bus all day.
After a while though, we descended from the higher ranges of hills and entered the sleek new highway that leads south. From there we covered longer stretches of road in less time. As we entered the outskirts of the city, the toddler began to lose his patience and we struggled to keep him entertained.
Eventually, we disembarked the bus at Sete Rios bus station, and went down into the metro line. A few train journeys later and we were at our friends place, she is a Brazilian who moved to Portugal about four years ago. We dropped off our bags and went back to the metro.
Our main purpose for leaving the farm was to get a new passport for our son, his old one only lasted a year and had already expired. Within the German Embassy, it was quite surreal, sitting in a room that for all intensive purposes felt like - and kind of was - in the Federal Republic of Germany. It was refreshing to step back out into Portugal.
Still, the bustling streets of Lisbon are a far cry from the sleepy mountain that we call home. As nice as it was to be there, when I closed my eyes, I could'nt help but think about the thousand little jobs that needed doing on the farm.
Directly outside of the embassy is a park filled with chickens. We were surprised to hear the crowing of a cockerel as we crossed a busy city street... Sure enough, after a brief examination of some bushes, we noticed that the whole park is full of them. Mostly cockerels but also a few hens. There were ducks, geese and a turkey I think.
Lisbon; the city of a thousand broken elevators.
Of course most of the metro stations in the inner city are underground, but almost all of the elevators were out of service, so getting around the city with a small distractible child, a push chair, and two rucksacks involved juggling the toddler with the bags, and hauling the push chair between us up and down many flights of stairs. Add to this that one of the wheels had a flat tire and we quickly decided to leave the chair at our host's place and just carry him everywhere.
Jackie went through three interviews to get this new job, the second interview was on the second day of our trip. Whilst she stayed at the flat talking to her potential new employers on the phone, I strapped the kid to my back and began walking south into the heart of the city.
The beating heart of Portugal.
Lisbon is a grand city. It's one of the three great metropolises of Iberia together with Barcelona and Madrid. If you draw a line directly through the middle of the peninsular from the north west to the south east, it connects the three cities almost perfectly. They are grand statements, built to display the greatness of themselves, but they are also very practical cities, packed with efficient blocks of flats designed to house as many poeple as posible. I was taken aback to realise that each building typically housed more people than the three closest villages to our farm, combined.
If you walk the streets of Lisbon, you will see the legacy of the past alongside the new. You can see the waves of growth and immigration that stretched from the thirties to the seventies reflected in the architecture. And then there are the new glass towers - hotels, offices, and luxury penthouses - standing above all, that appeared with all the investment capital and tourists.
Lisbon is a cultural melting pot, a place that attracts people from across the globe. There are strong communities from the old African colonies. It is a haven for Brazilians. There are the aforementioned digital nomads, who have found a home of sorts by moving into cheap apartments, perhaps not quite realising that they have displaced a working class household by pricing them out. There are the golden visa people, who become resident because they are rich and are willing to put some of their money here. The city is also home to vibrant communities from across Asia, with many small shops, their shelves stacked with an assortment of spices that we’ve not seen during the year since we moved into the rural countryside.
It's a Cosmopolitan place. It's bustling. That is until you get into the old town. The streets are suddenly no longer so expansive, but narrow and winding. The old tenements cling to the hillsides, switching back on themselves. There are charming lookouts with shady trees and benches. The streets are cobbled. And it's not just bustling, it's exploding with activity.
This whole part of the city is swarming with tourists. I've been to many cities in my life, but only a handful compare to Lisbon in terms of tourist swarms. The roads were actually congested with rickshaws, electric and petrol powered; the drivers pointing enthusiastically and vividly describing the story of every cornerstone to the passengers in the back.
It's places like this where history has become a product. I don't think that this is a new phenomenon, afterall I remember walking on the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, rolling out my sleeping mat beneath the arches of castles built by the Knights Templar; a whole organisation that existed to protect tourists in the days long before budget holidays. Now I witnessed tourism on an industrial scale.
It reminds me of my teenage years. I left home at the age of sixteen and ended up in Venice, helping to run a cheap hostel in an ancient city that seams to only exist for the purpose of showcasing it's self. Most of the people that actually lived there have long gone, and the spark of life went with them.
Lisbon is different of course because it's a large metropolis with lots of activity and a much more diverse economy. But I still think that tourism has fundamentally altered the city, for better and worse.
Further out, closer to the airport, we visited the Aquarium. It's an amazing construction; a large block sitting on stilts above a harbour. Inside are a selection of huge tanks occupying the central space, all adjacent to each other and they appear to be connected, but they are actually separated by internal perspex windows. This way you can stand on one side of the tank and look through the widow, with the impression that you are looking into an ocean, in reality you're looking through several separate tanks. The place was spectacular, even the toddler loved it, but it didn’t stop him from running out of patience so we couldn’t really take the place in.
That part of town felt very different from the places where we had been so far. There are shiny new buildings rising up everywhere, if you look closely you'll see that many of them appear to be empty or still being fitted out for use.
It’s another thing that makes the place feel like all of this money is pouring in from the outside. Boom towns are great places to put capital when you dont want it sitting in a bank. This has the knock on side effect of disrupting local peoples lives. Our Brazilian friend told us that when her neighbours moved out of an apartment above her, the land lord raised the rent from eight hundred euros to fifteen hundred…
Now we are back home and trying frantically to re-organise everything in preparation for Jackies new job. As I said in the last edition, we will welcome some volunteers onto the land this summer and with their help, I should be able to get a portion of our to-do list under control.
For those who are interested in our latest video about eucalyptus plantations, here is the script and source list.
We also published a document describing the death of our pigs for those who may be able to offer insight into that situation.
Update:
Now that Jackie has landed the new job, it will affect our ability to produce videos for the youtube channel. We will have to stop making videos once per week and try a monthly upload schedule instead. I’ll continue posting this newsletter on Thursdays. In addition to that I’ve been working on a new project, for the last few weeks I’ve been writing a post about the abandoned houses and villages in the area where we live. Whilst trying to understand the deeper reasons that the area changed so fundamentally during the last fifty or so years, I kind of fell down a rabbit whole of history, and the resulting post is taking much longer than what I usually write.
It should be ready for publication during the next few weeks, but instead of releasing it as one of the weekly updates, I’m going to open up a new, paid version of the newsletter. Some readers have already expressed interest in a paid model of the writing, and Substack is a great platform to release both free and paid material. Nothing will change with this newsletter, but for the readers that want more, there will be extra material, talking about a range of subjects that relate to our life and possibly a few that do not.
I will publish one article per month to start with and it would cost five euros per month or fifty euros per year. Ultimately I’d love to write even more than that but at the moment I can’t guarantee more than a monthly edition, considering the amount of research that is needed for this kind of essay. Subscribers who support this project would get access to all of these new posts and by doing so will support all of our projects here (reforesting / learning how to farm in a traditional way etc…).
Most content creators these days have a Patreon account where subscribers can support their work, but in our case I’m more interested in exploring ways in which we can use Substack to generate a form of income. After all, Substack only takes a ten percent commission on revenue, whereas YouTube takes a thirty percent cut from donations!
Thanks again for reading. The first results from the latest round of cereal crop experiments are manifesting themselves now so there will be more information about that coming out next week, with lots of new garden and compost updates. See you then!