Lisboa‪?‬

This book is a portrait of the author’s birthplace. The oldest of Western Europe’s capitals, Lisbon was once the sleepy symbol of Salazar’s dictatorship: four decades of paralysing mediocrity that immobilised the country’s inhabitants’ with the stale Catholic rituals. Divorced from modernity and immersed in a culture of isolation, epitomized in the fascist-heroic stance of a nation that stands «proudly alone», the conservative elite kept the masses cowered by feeding enthusiastic pride in the imaginary virtues of humbleness and poverty…

But on the 25th of April 1974, exhausted by close to 15 years of colonial wars, the army revolts and in the (nearly) bloodless Revolution of the Carnations, Lisbon is set free… Turbulent years ensued, with economic turmoil and the bewilderment of a people that had lost the habit of freedom.

Caught in the convulsions of history, generations of older Lisboners witnessed the disintegration of the submissive, but simultaneously comfortably predictable, city of their youth.

As the structures of the past decayed, the drug addicts arrived, then the parvenus, with ambitious disregard for the disconcerted generations that preceded them, and, of course, the emergent middle class, mostly made of public servants and bank clerks.

Waves of foreigners followed: first, poor migrants from Africa; then, closer to the end of the century, from China, India, Brazil, Moldova and the Ukraine… And once the fake metamorphosis of the metropolis was complete, the wealthy tourists from Northern Europe landed…

As the years went by, Lisbon, though sharing the exact same geographical territory as the new «vibrant» capital advertised in travel brochures, was reduced to blurry images echo in the consciousness of its elder citizens…

This strange book tracks the desolate footsteps of a Lisboner during his last walk in the city, chronicling with clinical detachment some of the transcendental lives of the many legions that crossed his path.