Portugal has tourism options for literature lovers – 01/31/2024 – Tourism

The most beautiful bookstore in the world is in Portugal. Despite the subjectivity fatally involved in this statement, the praise for Lello, in the city of Porto, rests on secure foundations.

Elections by The Guardian newspaper, Time magazine, and the Lonely Planet guide have already enshrined the beauty of space; and a massive vote on the One Thousand Libraries platform placed the bookstore at the top of its global podium in August last year.

No wonder the space attracts all types of lovers of letters. Spaniard Enrique Vila-Matas has already gushed over there in his El País column, and American filmmaker Woody Allen was also discreetly there.

He asked for books by Machado de Assis, a writer he had heard a lot about, according to manager Hugo Miguel Silva, who took the opportunity to take a photo with the 88-year-old director — but he doesn’t remember which of the Brazilian’s books he ended up taking.

Lello’s days aren’t just made up of stars. An estimated 4,000 people pass through the Portuguese bookstore every day, which doesn’t accommodate that many people — it’s normal for the queue at the door to be long.

So many visitors crowded the place just to take selfies without buying anything — understandably attracted by the Gothic style of the building built in 1906 and the imposing red carpeted staircase — that nine years ago Lello started charging entry. It costs eight euros to see the house from the inside, deductible from any book you bring.

It is a beautiful business card for a country that is increasingly exploring its abundant tourism options for those who love literature.

Anyone who knows Lisbon well, for example, will have already visited the Bertrand bookstore, advertised as the oldest in the world and located close to a famous statue of the thoughtful poet Fernando Pessoa. You may have also been to the charming Óbidos Festival; or known the Convent of Mafra that inspired the work of José Saramago.

What still remains as a region to be explored is the north of the country, which in addition to the young and thriving culture of the city of Porto, has routes inspired by some of the most fascinating authors in Portuguese history.

Less than a two-hour drive away, the Eça de Queiroz Foundation, in Santa Cruz do Douro, stands as a personal museum of the diplomat who wrote “As Cidades e as Serras” — in fact, a novel inspired by that country house.

Eça never lived there at Casa de Tormes: he received it as an inheritance and retired remotely while living in France, carrying out consular work in Paris. In fact, it is estimated that he only visited the welcoming Portuguese building four times, overlooking a green horizon of hills and small local communities.

It is a space, therefore, not of man, but of fiction. But the effect of the place on the cosmopolitan writer was such that it motivated one of the most beautiful literary reflections on the benefits of a peaceful life amid nature.

Eça’s descendants lived in that house for more than a century — the last great-granddaughter stopped living there in 2015 — and today it is possible for anyone to visit it by appointment. Not only that: you can eat, in the adjacent restaurant, the exact meal that the protagonist Jacinto feasts on when he arrives at home, chicken cooked in the local style with broad bean rice and local olive oil.

At the time the reporter visited the house, in September last year, Eça de Queiroz was in the public eye because of a discussion that had not yet been pacified — in order to mobilize a thousand engaged voices from radio hosts, waiters and drivers, a sign of the appreciation of the country for its literary history.

Six of the 22 heirs of the author of “Os Maias” and “O Primo Basílio” went to court against the government’s decision to transfer his mortal remains to the National Pantheon, alongside great figures in the history of Portugal. They state, among other arguments, that it is more important to let the writer rest in a region with which he has emotional ties.

In fact, it takes just a few minutes by car to get from Casa de Tormes to the cemetery that houses the writer. On the way, it was possible to see a banner spread across the street with the manifesto “Eça is from the nation, Santa Cruz do Douro is its pantheon”.

And with some difficulty — because the tomb is not adorned with great luxuries — the reporter arrived at the exact place where it reads: “Here rests among his loved ones José Maria Eça de Queiroz”. Among your own, after exploring the world for a long time — but for who knows how long.

A few hours’ drive away, another of the great Portuguese, Camilo Castelo Branco, sleeps. The preserved house in the Vila Nova de Famalicão region originally belonged to his mistress, who inherited it from her horned husband in 1863, after the author himself had served time for the crime of adultery.

Romantic adventures like these yielded landmark works such as “Amor de Perdição”, but they were accompanied by anguish and suffering — the writer, who celebrates his bicentenary next year, committed suicide in 1890.

Completely redone by the government in the mid-20th century and renovated to receive the public in 2022, the three-story house invites you to a tour that allows you to glimpse the desk where Castelo Branco wrote, the clock whose ticking he heard, the bed on which he slept —and did other things— and the leafy tree, in front of the entrance, which he noted as his greatest inheritance to his son.

A few steps from the house, a large Center for Camillian Studies, designed with an auditorium and exhibition space by the greatest living Portuguese architect, Álvaro Siza Vieira, completes the local reverence to the memory of the tortured novelist.

The literatures of Brazil and Portugal, although separated by an ocean, are close in language and exchange sensibilities. Despite this, anyone who can actually jump the sea to see how the Portuguese celebrate their greatest writers will certainly have good inspiration on how to treat ours.

The journalist traveled at the invitation of Visit Portugal.