Chiado

Neighborhood · ChiadoLisbon,Portugal

Lisbon's shopping and café quarter, gutted by fire in 1988 and rebuilt behind its own surviving fronts so the join is hard to find.

Chiado is where Lisbon has shopped, read and sat down for two centuries: a bookshop trading since 1732, the cafés where the writers argued, the opera house, the department stores. It sits between the flat Baixa and the ridge above it, so almost nothing in it is level. At about four in the morning on 25 August 1988 a fire started in one of the stores and spread through eighteen buildings before it was stopped. Two people died and the middle of the quarter was gutted. What matters here is how the city rebuilt it. The work went to Álvaro Siza Vieira and ran through the 1990s: he kept the surviving street fronts and the eighteenth-century plan and put new buildings behind them. Standing on Rua Garrett now, you cannot easily tell which fronts are original and which are old walls with a 1990s building behind them. That was exactly the aim, and it worked.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Arrive by metro at the top, not on foot from the bottom — Baixa-Chiado has an exit at street level up here, which saves the steepest climb in the centre of the city.
Late afternoon is the crush — the streets are narrow, the cafés put chairs out, and the pavements from four o'clock onward are the busiest in the city centre.
The bronze figure outside A Brasileira is the standard photograph — the seated statue of Fernando Pessoa on Rua Garrett has a small queue beside it all day, and people use it mainly as a place to meet.

Things to do

1
Walk Rua Garrett looking for the joins
Go the length of the street and try to tell the surviving buildings from the reconstructed ones. Look at how deep the windows sit, where the roofline meets the front, how the stonework at ground level is finished. Most people cannot tell, which is precisely what the rebuilding set out to achieve.
2
Go through the bookshop room by room
Walk into the Bertrand and keep walking. Each room opens into the next through a doorway cut in the wall, and the further back you go the quieter it gets, until you come out in the café at the end. The walk is the measure of how deep these blocks actually are.
3
Take a passage instead of the street
The quarter is threaded with ways around the climb: covered passages cut through the blocks, stairways between levels, and an iron lift at the Baixa edge. Pick one of the passages and follow it rather than the street. Several were added during the rebuilding, and they come out somewhere you did not expect.