July 1st 2019

The Lisbon Metro is a system of coloured lines: amarela, azul, verde, vermelho, or red, blue, green and yellow. The simplicity of the network of fifty-five cool tiled stations is a weary travellers dream. I gradually come down into my body from out of my head and feel safe from the prying eyes of a yellow line predator.

Out on the street the temperature is 35 degrees centigrade, and thankfully dropping. The city is yellow and hot. I don the yellow sunhat nearly left in the loos at the airport in London when I rush to answer the last call for the flight. I wonder at The Torres das Amoreiras, also known as the Amoreiras Towers standing to attention over the city. I later discover the architect of these yellow fortresses of post-modernity have become a standing joke after sex tapes of him roughly buggering a succession of young girls in his Lisbon office were released onto the internet.

A gloriously enduring and joyous yellow feature of Lisbon is the electrified trams rattling along the networl of street lines. I wait in a dertermined, but friendly queue for ninety minutes to get on board Lisbon's famous Tram 28. This yellow tram has been trundling through Lisbon's narrow streets since the 1930s. I happily allow Tram 28 to take me where it will and rejoice in my seat by the open frame wooden window and welcome the sound resounding bell.

A revolutionary wind is blowing through the top floor windows overlloing Lisbon Castle in my hotel on the pretty tree filled square, Largo do Carmo. The square is where The Carnation Revolution took place in 1974, heraldeding the change from 48 years of an authoritarian state to a democracy with barely a shot fired. The people, despite being told to stay indoors, mingled peacefully with the troops, who along with the public put the red carnations in their rifles and demanded the resignation of the regime.  Today the spot is marked with a museum dedicated to the success of revolution in the shadow of the high gothic arches of the ruined, but still magnificent Carmo Convent.  

Renewables Revolution

An Atlantic wind blows through the hills and whistles noisily inside the bus's air conditioning system as i leave Lisbon. Outside the tinted windows, Nordex wind turbines are busily spinning megawatts of energy for the yellow city. Amongst the verdant native forests, patches of drooping genetically modified eucalyptus and pine stand out like sore dry thumbs dwarfed by the plantations of steel windmills that produce nearly a quarter of Portugal’s electricity.

The revolutionary spirit of freedom and self-empowerment lives on. No longer dependent on natural gas, 63% of the Portugal's total energy is provided by renewables; a carbon saving combination of on-shore and off-shore wind, wave and solar. In January 2020, Portugal achieved 100% renewable energy, a target other developed countries should be striving for.

The houses are yellow in the little village where I stay in Alfeizerao in the Potuguese region of Alcobaca. So are the wide-winged butterflies that flutter around the chamomile, and the yellow fruits are almost out of reach on the medlar tree. Fragrent lemon groves straddle the windy rise further up the road where the farmstead was abandoned long ago. The thin string binding its iron gates is insufficient to bar intruders. A barn owl flies out slowly, silently, and unexpectedly from the dilapidated roof disturbed by our human presence. As it glides away from the barn, it’s forty three inch pollinating wings brush the sentient trees laden with giant unpicked lemons the shape and size of shrunken rugby balls. Just one of these gathered yellow fruits garnishes our food for days.

Saudade

Inside the gothic monastery at Alcabaca,yellow veins flicker through the marble tombs of King Pedro I and Queen Ines de Castro. In 1355 Ines was beheaded on the orders of Pedro’s father Alfonso IV, who refused to sanction the marriage during his lifetime. Honoured only after death, Ines's disinterred corpse was robed and crowned, the hem of her dress and her decomposing hand kissed by the King’s courtiers. Her murderers were captured and their hearts ripped out, so they say, by Pedro himself.

As evening transitions into night, the incessant rhythm of Fado music and the intermittent, but persistent barking dogs quietens down. A bloodshot full moon rises and innumerable stars occupy a wide-open sky. A wistful quality fills the air. Inside my wooden beamed room the restless yellow shadows cast by wall lights burnish the surrounds. Horizontal, I am drawn into my soul where a yearning for the long ago past dwells within a deep desire for the unknowable future. In Portuguese language, this longing is known as saudade. It seems to me the mass mourning for the tragic loss of Queen Ines has imparted a tangible feeling of something infinite and eternal, a sense of nostalgia and belonging to Portugal's windy shores.

Painting by Frank Bowling.