Portugality: Part 2

Random apartment building organically incorporates growing things

While everything in Westport, CT appears to be prefab and polished, new and clean.. (and if it isn’t, it’s off to the dumpster for you), I was so excited to find in Lisbon a city that shares my aesthetic: beautiful decay. Repurposing and reusing (and that’s oftentimes “re” to the third power) seems to be the rules of the roads and the buildings in this city that rises up at near right angles from the ocean. The Casa dos Bicos – the House of Spikes currently peering through full-body scaffolding is just such a building with a (re)purpose. Built in the 16th century by the Viceroy of India, it remarkably survived the 1755 earthquake to go from palatial home to place where fishermen could salt their codfish to its present use as an event/exhibition space.

House of Spikes
Apologies to you for the really bad photo; apologies to me that I was on a tour bus

View from my hotel room
An abandoned building? Absolutely not —I discovered at 2am that it’s the site of the city’s most popular all-night club

Rough riding the polished-with-age cobblestone streets