Lisbon, Coimbra and Porto 🇵🇹 Destroyed and Reborn, Guarded by Bats, Named by a River

Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Nordic & Western Europe Region 🪡 Journal 19

Lisbon. Coimbra. Porto. A capital that was erased and redrawn in a single afternoon, a university town where bats are librarians, and the city that gave an entire country its name and never asked for it back. Portugal.

Lisbon broke before I arrived. Two hundred and seventy years before.

On November 1st, 1755 — All Saints’ Day, when the churches were full — three massive earthquakes struck Lisbon back to back. Then a tsunami rolled up the Tagus. Then fires burned for six days. Somewhere between fifty and eighty-five percent of the city was destroyed in what might have been the most consequential natural disaster in European history. The Enlightenment shifted because of it — Voltaire wrote about it, Kant studied it, theologians across Europe struggled to explain how God could permit it. Lisbon didn’t just lose buildings. It shook the philosophical foundations of a continent.

The Marquês de Pombal gave orders that same afternoon. Bury the dead. Feed the living. Rebuild. He didn’t restore the old city. He redesigned it. The Baixa — Lisbon’s downtown — was rebuilt on a grid with wide avenues and earthquake-resistant timber-cage construction called gaiola pombalina, a flexible wooden frame inside the stone walls designed to sway without collapsing. One of the first modern urban plans in history, born from catastrophe. The Lisbon I walked through wasn’t the city that existed before the earthquake. It was the city that was engineered on top of the one that was lost.

I took the Tram 28 because you have to and because the experience earns the cliché. The yellow car climbed through Alfama — the oldest neighbourhood, one of the few to survive the earthquake because it sits on solid rock — grinding uphill through streets so narrow I could touch the buildings on both sides from the window. Alfama smells like grilled sardines and laundry detergent and the particular damp of stone that hasn’t fully dried since the Moors built the quarter a thousand years ago. Fado drifts out of closed doors in the evening — that Portuguese music of longing, of saudade, the word that has no translation because the feeling it describes exists only in Portuguese. Not sadness. Not nostalgia. Something between the two that hurts in a way you don’t want to stop.

I stood at the Miradouro da Graça at sunset and Lisbon spread below me in the light that makes this city impossible to photograph accurately — terracotta rooftops, the Tagus wide and silver, the 25 de Abril Bridge stretching to the far bank like a red thread connecting the city to the other side. The light in Lisbon is not like Nice. Nice’s light collaborates. Lisbon’s light forgives. It softens every cracked façade, every peeling wall, every azulejo tile that’s been hanging on since the 18th century. The city is beautiful because it’s worn, not despite it.

The Jerónimos Monastery in Belém stopped me the way the Sagrada Família had — not with size but with commitment. Manueline architecture, the style that only Portugal produced, a Gothic-Renaissance hybrid carved with maritime ropes, coral, anchors, and sea creatures because Portugal’s identity was the ocean and its buildings said so in stone. Vasco da Gama is buried here. He sailed from Belém in 1497 and reached India. The monastery was funded with the spice trade money that flowed back. Every carved stone in the building is, in a sense, paid for by pepper.

I ate a pastel de nata at the Pastéis de Belém bakery — the original, operating since 1837 using a recipe from the monks of the Jerónimos Monastery. The queue wrapped around the block. The custard tart was warm, the pastry shattered on the first bite, the filling was egg custard burnished almost black on top. I ate three. The recipe is a secret held by three people at any time. A pastry protected like a state document. Portugal takes its custard seriously enough to treat it as classified information, and after the first bite I understood why.

Coimbra was the city where Portugal thinks.

I arrived and the university sat above everything — literally. The Universidade de Coimbra occupies the hilltop like a citadel of knowledge, founded in 1290, one of the oldest continuously operating universities in the world. Students still wear black capes — the traje académico — and the tradition of burning ribbons at the end of the academic year, the Queima das Fitas, has been running for over a century. The campus doesn’t feel like an institution. It feels like a small country with its own rituals, its own hierarchy, and its own relationship with time.

The Joanine Library is why I came, and the Joanine Library is why I stayed longer than I planned.

Built in 1728, the library holds two hundred thousand books behind gilded Baroque shelving that rises to the ceiling in three connected rooms, each painted in a different colour — red, green, gold. The craftsmanship is overwhelming. Every surface is carved, gilded, or painted. The tables are jacaranda and ebony. The light comes through small windows that are kept shuttered to protect the books from sun damage. Standing in the centre of the first room, I felt like I’d walked into a jewellery box designed for knowledge instead of gems.

But the detail that changed how I think about this place is the bats.

Every night, a colony of bats flies through the reading rooms. They hunt the insects that would eat the pages — bookworms, moths, the small creatures that have been destroying libraries since libraries existed. The librarians cover the tables in leather sheets each evening to protect the furniture. In the morning, they clean up. The books have been protected this way for nearly three hundred years. No pesticides. No technology. Just an alliance between architecture and biology that works because nobody tried to improve it. The Joanine Library is the most beautiful argument for leaving a working system alone that I’ve ever seen.

I walked through the old town — Coimbra’s lower city along the Mondego River — and the student energy was everywhere. Bars, bookshops, fado — Coimbra has its own fado tradition, distinct from Lisbon’s, traditionally sung only by men, only by students, and only in academic capes. I heard it performed in a small courtyard at dusk, a single voice and a single Portuguese guitar, and the sound carried a weight that didn’t match the age of the singer. Coimbra’s fado isn’t about lost love. It’s about the knowledge that everything is temporary — the years at university, the friendships, the city itself — and singing about it before it’s gone.

The Sé Velha — the old cathedral — is a Romanesque fortress church from the 12th century, built during the Reconquista when Coimbra was a frontier city between Christian and Moorish territory. The building looks more like a castle than a cathedral. Narrow windows. Thick walls. Battlements. The faith it represents was militant because it had to be — this was the front line. I walked inside and the nave was dark, cool, and silent in a way that felt deliberate, as if the stone was still absorbing the noise of centuries it had stood through.

Porto was where everything started. Literally.

The Romans called the settlement at the mouth of the Douro Portus Cale — the warm port. Over centuries, the name spread outward. From a city to a county. From a county to a kingdom. From a kingdom to an empire. Portugal is one of the very few countries on earth named after a specific city. Porto didn’t just contribute to the nation. It named it. The country came from here, took the name with it, and never gave it back.

I crossed the Dom Luís I Bridge — the iron double-decker arch that spans the Douro gorge, designed by a student of Eiffel — and the view hit me in layers. Below, the Ribeira district, UNESCO-listed, painted buildings stacked along the waterline in colours that look accidental but aren’t. Across the river, Vila Nova de Gaia, where the port wine lodges sit in rows, their names painted on the rooftops in white letters visible from above. The Douro itself, wide and muscular, the river that carved the gorge and carried the wine barrels downstream from the vineyards for centuries.

I visited a lodge in Gaia and tasted port properly for the first time. Not the sweet red most people picture — a 20-year tawny that had oxidised slowly in barrel until it tasted like caramel, dried fig, and something woody that I couldn’t name but recognised from the Douro Valley itself. Port wine was invented by accident, like Madeira — English merchants added brandy to stabilise the wine during transport, and the fortification transformed the flavour into something new. Two Portuguese wines, both created by the demands of shipping, both outlasting the trade routes that invented them. Portugal’s greatest contributions to world wine were mistakes that turned out to be permanent.

I ate a francesinha in a restaurant near the Bolhão Market and the dish arrived like a challenge. A sandwich stacked with ham, linguiça, fresh sausage, and steak, covered in melted cheese, topped with a fried egg, and drowned in a beer and tomato sauce. It weighs as much as a small commitment. The francesinha was invented in the 1950s by a man who’d returned from France and wanted to create a Portuguese croque-monsieur. He overbuilt it so completely that the result has nothing to do with France and everything to do with Porto — excessive, generous, structurally aggressive, and absolutely impossible to eat elegantly.

The Livraria Lello — one of the most beautiful bookshops in the world, its Art Nouveau interior featuring a carved wooden staircase that spirals upward in red — was more crowded than any bookshop should be. But I bought a book, because a bookshop that charges admission and still sells books deserves the purchase. The rumour that it inspired Hogwarts is disputed. What isn’t disputed is that Porto built a bookshop beautiful enough for the rumour to be believable, and that’s its own achievement.

I sat on the Ribeira at dusk and watched the rabelo boats — the flat-bottomed boats that once carried port barrels down the Douro, now moored along the quay as floating history — and the city glowed on both sides of the river. Porto is not Lisbon. It doesn’t forgive with its light. It earns with its weight. The granite is grey. The mood is direct. The food is heavy. The wine is fortified. Porto is a city that decided what it was early and has spent seven centuries refusing to become anything else.

Three cities. One was destroyed in six minutes and rebuilt by a man who decided that grief was not a reason to stop. One protects its greatest books with bats because three hundred years ago someone trusted biology over technology. One named a country and kept the same granite stubbornness that made the name stick.

Portugal doesn’t shout across the water. It stands at the edge of the continent, facing the Atlantic, and speaks in a voice just loud enough for the people who are actually listening.

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