In this section we will describe all kinds of interesting medical-literary places in Europe. The section has started on June 21, 2025 and will appear every two weeks, alternately with Scoop. Older posts can be found below. Comments, questions, tips, criticism, and praise can be sent to Arko Oderwald: website@litmed.nl
August 30, 2025
On the spot – Lisbon – Herman de Coninck
Location: R. Marquês Sá da Bandeira 74, 1050-165 Lisbon
Cost: free
How to get there: Metro Azul (blue line) station Praça de Espanha or São Sebastião.
Warning for the non-Dutch reader: As you know, this is originally a Dutch side, so now and then you will stumble upon some very Dutch, or, in this case, Flemish content. This episode of on the spot is about a famous Flemish poet. This may give some problems with the translation of his poems, but we hope you still enjoy it.
R. Marquês Sá da Bandeira is not exactly an appealing street in Lisbon. For a tourist, there seems to be nothing to see here. Hidden from view in the photo, to the left of the road is a long wall that forms the boundary with the Jardim da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, the beautiful garden of the Gulbenkian museum, so you might walk down this street to visit the garden or the museum.
What may catch your eye in the photo is the small table with chairs to the right of the green extension of the restaurant. They are standing right on top of a memorial stone. And it is this memorial stone that will prompt some people to walk down this street.
On May 22, 1997, Herman de Coninck (Mechelen, 1944) died here on the sidewalk of R. Marquês Sá da Bandeira in Lisbon of a massive heart attack. He was only 53 years old and on his way to a literary conference. Under the auspices of the Dutch Foundation for Literature, an event was held in Lisbon from Wednesday 21 to Sunday 25 May to promote ‘Literature Contemporanea da Flandres e dos Paises Baixos’
Other Dutch writers, such as Hugo Claus, Anna Enquist, and Connie Palmen, were present when De Coninck died here, on the sidewalk.
From left to right: Tessa de Loo, Magda van den Akker, Herman de Coninck, Gerrit Kouwenaar, Margriet de Moor, Adriaan van Dis, Anna Enquist, Connie Palmen, Hugo Claus, Mirjan van Hee, behind her Gerrit Komrij.
Rutger Kopland, a good friend and Dutch poet (and psychiatrist), who was not in Lisbon at the time, wrote
“Postcard of a Greek Island.”
Herman, I wanted to write you a card,
a silly postcard with a joke
about, well, you know what,
but I heard you had already died
before I could think of a joke.
I’m still alive, our conversation isn’t over,
but I’m living these last days bent over words
that I cross out, write down again—
What were we talking about, where
had we left off, without expecting death
you don’t write poetry, we
agreed heartily,
poetry was happiness, the happiness of finding a few words
that wanted to belong together for a short instant
and before death came to take us away,
a joke, a carefully concealed joke
about death, crossing it out and writing it down again,
that would be poetry.
So I will never see you again.
These days I live bended, for all that,
for that shy body, that melancholy head
with which you spoke, for all that
gets buried alive,
I mean, I live bent over that card,
you know, with a sea that is far too blue,
the sky that is far too blue:
Happy days in Greece.
De Coninck was a much-loved Flemish poet who wrote recognizably and crystal-clear about everyday things and about major themes such as love and death. That makes his poetry timeless. In literary jargon, he belonged to the “new realists,” but he would probably have laughed at that himself, as a poet of paradoxes, reversal, negation, and disappearance.
[…]
Perhaps I learned it from my mother.
‘Son, you know,’
she said when I got married.
It took me a long time,
volumes and wives
to say so little.
To unlearn the funny, then
the grumpy, and finally
come home in the few.
From love that was pliable onto the reliable
From: Fingerprints
His work was also (partly) translated into Portuguese.
Poetry
A painting needs a frame
like happiness needs fear of death
Wind rustles in the garden
and suddenly a page
turns. Like when I run my fingers through your hair
and it looks so different afterwards.
Finally, everything is the same
Look, says happiness, and shows us the present.
It is trembling slightly in his hands.
In addition to his extensive oeuvre of poems, after his death, Onder literatoren (Among Writers) was published, a collection of his interviews with other writers, such as Paul de Wispelaere, Rutger Kopland, Gerard Reve, and many others. These interviews were from his time as a journalist for the Flemish magazine Humo. He would later leave Humo and found the Vlaams Wereldtijdschrift (Flemish World Magazine).
A brick-thick book of letters was also published, entitled Een aangename postumiteit (A pleasant posthumity), which reads somewhat like a biography of the years 1965-1997. The following fax to his wife is also included in that book
To Kristien Hemmerechts
Wednesday night, half past one May 22, 1997
Poes,
It’s nice here and the people are nice—but I miss you. I don’t have anyone here to say “remember…” to.
Tonight we had a nice dinner in a new neighborhood, a kind of Lisbon South, on the Tagus River, under a gigantic (xxx) Christ statue across the river. An old harbor warehouse converted into a restaurant. Afterwards we had a drink in what seemed like a terribly dirty neighborhood, in a kind of ground-floor loft: beautiful
Tomorrow morning I have a short interview in English about my poetry for the newspaper. I’m curious to see how it turns out. On Sunday evening, Veerle Claus might be able to pick us up from Zaventem.
Sweetheart, I love you and I miss you. Kisses.
Herman
This is a fax written on Wednesday night, May 21/22, and sent from Lisbon at 10:06 a.m. (local time) on Thursday, May 22, shortly before his death.
The giant Christ statue Herman refers to here is not in Lisbon, but in Almada. Dictators cannot think big enough, and this statue, commissioned by the dictator Salazar, is no exception. Including the pedestal, it is 75 meters high, and the statue itself is 28 meters high. Big enough to keep an eye on Lisbon and to be clearly seen from Lisbon. Not original, by the way; the original is in Rio de Janeiro.
It is an interesting image, though, the 25 April bridge, commemorating the revolution that overthrew the dictatorship, in one image with Salazar’s legacy.
Back to Herman de Coninck. In 2017, a real biography was published, ‘Toen met een lijst van nu errond’ (Then with a list of today around it). However, the most poignant book about Herman de Coninck is and remains ‘Taal zonder mij’ (Language without me), written by his wife Kristien Hemmerechts, in which she searches for and analyzes the autobiographical traces in his poems.
So if you do visit the museum and the garden, take a moment to pause in front of this memorial tile and let the treasure of language that ended here sink in.
Aafke de Groot and Arko Oderwald
Sources:
Hugo Brems (ed.) Herman de Coninck. De gedichten I en II. De Arbeiderspers, 1998
Christien Hemmerechts. Taal zonder mij. Atlas, 1998
Thomas Eyskens and Piet Pyriens. Onder literatoren. De Arbeiderspers, 2022
Annick Schreuder (ed.) Een aangename postumiteit. De Arbeiderspers, 2004
Thomas Eyskens. Toen met een lijst van nu errond. De Arbeiderspers, October 2017
Rutger Kopland. Kaart van een Grieks eiland. From: Tot het ons loslaat, van Oorschot, 1997.
Here is the pdf
August 16, 2025
On the spot – Lisbon – António Lobo Antunes
Location: Hospital Miguel Bombarda
How to get there: Metro yellow line, Picoas station.
Cost: free
We have just stepped out of the metro at Picoas station on the yellow line. The meeting point is the kiosk. This is fitting, as the history of kiosks in Lisbon is partly intertwined with the history of the writer who is the focus of this article: António Lobo Antunes.
The Quiosques can now be found everywhere in Lisbon. There are about 70 of them scattered throughout the city. The first kiosk is said to have opened in 1869. They come in all colors and sizes, but they all have six sides and a dome that refers to the Moorish period in Lisbon, which lasted almost 700 years. Most are green, like the one in the photo above, the kiosk near the statue of Camões. You can get coffee, wine, and snacks—both savory and sweet. Around 1930, Salazar and the dictatorship came to power. Because the kiosks led to gatherings in the streets—even today there are often long lines—they were closed by order of Salazar. The dictatorship disappeared in 1974. In 2009, the Quiosques were revived, and with great success.
The fact that the dictatorship banned the kiosks was only a small blip in the history of the Portuguese dictatorship. Virtually no Portuguese writer was able to escape this dictatorship, not even António Lobo Antunes. Lobo Antunes is a doctor and was forced to work in Angola and Mozambique, two former colonies of Portugal. After his return to Portugal, he became a psychiatrist.
His novels often deal with the history of Portugal before and after the Carnation Revolution. Examples include Fado Alexandrino and Sermon to the Crocodiles. Later, he wrote in a more general sense about the human condition.
We are here at this kiosk
to take a look at the hospital where he was a psychiatrist and about which he wrote a novel. We are in a part of Lisbon with modern buildings, not very attractive.
We walk into R. Tomás Ribeiro. Soon we arrive at a park on Praça José Fontana. On the other side of the park is the Liceu Camões, founded in 1910/11, which was innovative in that it had a gymnasium. Mens sana in corpore sano. We follow R Gomes Freire and after R. Bernardim Ribeiro we walk at the bottom of a hill with a wall and a high fence on top of it. Above it is the Hospital Miguel Bombarda. Running away is not only forbidden there, but also virtually impossible. It was a psychiatric institution.
Miguel Bombarda was a psychiatrist and republican. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1851, he was killed by a patient in 1910, two days before a revolution he had fought hard for brought down the last Portuguese king.
This psychiatric hospital is named after him. Lobo Antunes came to work here. He describes this in one of his first novels.
In Knowledge of Hell from 1980, a psychiatrist travels alone from his vacation spot in the Algarve back to Lisbon. The next day, he has to return to work at the psychiatric institution. His wife has left him and taken their two daughters with her, but that does not prevent him from occasionally talking to one of his daughters in the back seat. When he once took her to the psychiatric institution, she refused to go inside because it was too scary.
As he drives, all kinds of memories come flooding back of the horrors of his (forced) time in Angola during the war, his failed marriage, and his work as a psychiatrist. The memories merge into a massive indictment, but also into frustration about his own inability to deal with it in a constructive way.
The institution admits people who are dangerous to themselves or others, but also people who are completely harmless. Almost all of them are treated in the same way: with neuroleptics injected into their buttocks to keep them calm.
The original Portuguese title contains the word inferno, and it is a pity that this word is missing from the Dutch title, because the novel describes hell. And for Antunes, that hell is mainly in the institution and not in the war in Angola. A quote from this novel:
And it was only in 1973, when I arrived at Hospital Miguel Bombarda to begin a long journey through hell, that I realized that night had indeed left the city, that it had withdrawn from squares and cemeteries and streets and parks and crept into the corners of the wards of that hospital, just like bats, in the ceiling lamps and the dilapidated medicine cabinets, in the electroconvulsive therapy machines, in the buckets of bandages, the boxes of syringes, until the patients return silently from the dining room and crawl into their threadbare beds, after which the nurse presses the light switch and that light spreads the disgusting felt of its wings, the disgusting, sticky felt of its wings over the men, who stare at it with uncontrollable revulsion from between the sheets. The night that was leaving the city lay on the bent face of the patient who had hanged himself behind the garages, whose broken sneakers swung slightly at the height of my chin, lay in the deaths I recorded when I was on duty and pressed the ice-cold diaphragm of my stethoscope against breasts that were motionless like boats that had finally moored, lay
in the distraught features of the living who were locked up between the walls and bars of the asylum, in the dust in the courtyards in summer, in the facades of the houses around. In 1973, I had returned from the war and knew everything about the wounded, about the cries of the wounded on the road, about explosions, gunshots, mines, about bellies torn to pieces by the explosion of an ambush, I knew about the wounded and murdered babies, knew about spilled blood and homesickness, but I had been spared hell.
This quote already shows the great evocative power of Lobo Antunes’ style. That style has since developed into a highly recognizable and unique poetic way of writing prose. If you like it, and that is by no means everyone, each new book of his is a feast. Polyphony, multiple voices alternating with each other and playing with time, is characteristic of his novels. It is said that the only reason he did not win the Nobel Prize for Literature is that his colleague José Saramago did. Saramago also has a very distinctive style.
Anyway, we are now standing at the bottom of the wall of the Miguel Bombarda hospital, in the center of Lisbon.
We are standing on the road below, roughly level with the round building. This building, dating from the late 19th century, was intended for dangerous patients, who were isolated here.
Similar buildings can be found elsewhere in Europe, such as the Narrenturm in Vienna and the round prisons based on Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon. The difference here is the absence of a central observation post, which was removed at some point. Later, a museum of psychiatric art was established here.
Time to go inside, you might say. We continue along R Gomes Freire, with the wall on our right. There is always a lot of veneration of saints in a Catholic country, and we pass a statue of Maria da Graça Santos.
Then we turn right onto R Cruz da Carreira, walk slowly uphill and finally arrive at the entrance to the hospital.
Founded in 1848, this hospital remained in operation for more than 300 patients until 2012. It is now closed, but there seems to be a heated debate about what to do with the huge site in the middle of Lisbon. A number of buildings have recognized historical value, such as the round building
I have been here several times now. The first time, I stood in front of a closed gate. The second, third, and fourth times, I had a Portuguese acquaintance call the construction company’s phone number in advance. Each time, I was allowed in, and each time, there was no one there to open the gate at the agreed time, or a security guard who knew nothing about it. None of those times was there any activity on the grounds.
Very disappointing. What could have happened to the museum? We don’t know. The museum is announced on Facebook, in a post from 2019, but underneath it is a comment from someone who I think also stood in front of the gate: “Does not exist, the guard just unceremoniously ejected me from the campus. Do not waste your time getting here.”
A little frustrated, we walk away from the entrance, down R. Dr Almeida Amaral. At the bottom of the road is a small park, the Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo Park, named after another saint, by the way. There is a vegetarian café where you can rest. If you want to continue walking, head to the nearby Campo dos Mártires da Pátria. Walk through the park and end up at the statue of Dr. Sousa Martins, the doctor from episode 1 of this series about Lisbon.
Here you will find a pdf of this episode
August 2d, 2025
On the spot: Lisbon – Jan Slauerhoff
Where: Praça do Comércio
Cost: free
Warning for the non-Dutch reader: As you know, this is originally a Dutch side, so now and then you will stumble upon some very Dutch content. This episode of on the spot is about a in the Netherlands famous poet. This may give some problems with the translation of his poems, but we hope you still enjoy it.
There are a few places in Europe with a large square directly on the water. In the past, this was the place where people arrived to be impressed. The square in Venice is world famous, those in Trieste and Lisbon less so. The Praça do Comércio in Lisbon is not really on the sea, although the Tagus River does look like a sea at this point.
The square was built after the great earthquake that struck Lisbon in 1755. The entire lower town of Lisbon was wiped out, partly by the tsunami that followed the earthquake and then a fire. More than a third of the population died. This event caused horror throughout Europe and feelings of resistance against this blind and destructive force of nature, and thus became one of the seeds of the Enlightenment.
Marquis de Pombal took on the task of rebuilding the city, which is why Lisbon now consists of narrow, winding streets in the upper part of the city and straight lines in the lower part. The people were eternally grateful to the marquis and honored him with a statue from which he could see what he had accomplished.
Diagonally to the right of the statue, you can see the gate of the Praça de Comércio against the Tagus River. This new square, built by the Marquis of Pombal, once housed many government buildings, but now it is mainly home to restaurants. Jan Slauerhoff sat here in 1928 to enjoy a rare moment in his life. For those who don’t know, Jan Slauerhoff was a Dutch ship’s doctor and an important poet in the first half of the 20th century. He lived from 1898 to 1936. He did not live to an old age, as he was struck down by tuberculosis early in his life. He reported the following from Lisbon:
‘Praca do Commercio. Wide, spacious; an equestrian statue in front of the distant palace and below it, like a tunnel, a twentieth-century street with a tramway. Cigarettes, coffee, sitting at the balustrade, looking out over the square; in an hour, all the misery, all the stifling nights in the narrow cage, from which the sleeping body is sometimes thrown, are forgotten, by the sun, the clear sky. The lotteryseller does not nag, but points out that I have my hat on backwards. Well, Dagobert did it with his pants and hoped for immortality. (Le bon roi Dagobert/ A mis sa culotte a l’envers.) I do not hope for that from my hat. But I feel so blessed at this hour. That is enough, after a long sea voyage.
This is how the square also appeared in a poem.
After long days ravaged by the storm
And sometimes having been thrown out of my cabin,
Still bewildered by the life of gentle Lisbon,
I find myself sitting on the sunny square.
Leaning in the corner of a balustrade,
I see, as if through a window
The battered ship lying small at the quay,
The yellow stream, the colorful shore.
Below, carts rattle, cranes groan,
Here it is quiet, while only guitars
Play an old fado slowly and sadly,
And it seems as if caravels are sailing up the Tagus again.
Slauerhoff liked Lisbon. First of all, his hero, the Portuguese poet Luis de Camões, came from here. Slauerhoff was a great admirer of him and had also visited Camões’ famous cave in Macau.
Camões’ life fascinated him so much that he wrote a novel about it: Het verboden rijk (The Forbidden Empire), which was published in Dutch in 1931. A sequel appeared in 1933: Het leven op aarde (Life on Earth).
Slauerhoff first visited Lisbon in 1928, on one of his voyages with the Gelria, the ship on which he was a ship’s doctor.
‘In the afternoon I walk through the prados
And in the evening I hear the fados
Accusing deep into the night:
‘A vida e immenso tristura’
Life is immensely sad, which was the other reason Slauerhoff felt at home in Lisbon. Sadness was his attitude towards life. This sadness is expressed in Portugal in the word Saudade, which is not so easy to understand. It expresses nostalgia for the future and the past at the same time, an ambivalent feeling that gives Portuguese life a typical and difficult to explain character. And saudade is very much present in Portugal’s song of life: fado.
Slauerhoff wrote several poems about fado and saudade, which are of course incomprehensible to a non-Dutch reader. But the now world-famous Portuguese singer Christina Branco discovered them, had them translated, and made a fado album with the translated lyrics: Canta Slauerhoff. What would Slauerhoff have thought of that?
Here is one of these poems, with a link to Christina Branco’s performance
Fado
Am I slow because I am sad
Find everything futile and mean;
On earth I know no greater need
Than some shade under a parasol?
Or am I sad because I am slow
Never venturing out into the wide world,
Knowing only Lisbon by the Tagus
And even there existing for no one
Preferring to wander aimlessly in dark alleys
Of the poor Mourarria?
There I meet many like myself
Who live without love, lust, or hope.
Fado is the blues of Portugal, that much is clear. There is a Fado Museum in Lisbon, at Largo do Chafariz de Dentro 1, in the Alfama district. There is also a lot of attention for the grande dame of fado, Amalia Rodrigues. Well worth a visit, admission is 5 euros.
You can also listen to live fado music in various places. For an entire evening of food and music, I can heartily recommend:
Fado ao Carmo
Rua da Condessa number 52, 1200-122 Lisbon.
There is no stage; the musicians stand and sit close to you, and sometimes guests also participate (who are, of course, talented). Be sure to reserve well in advance, as it is always full in this relatively small space. 50 euros all-inclusive (the last time I was there).
Check it out on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzmVLZ4AJNE
But for now, we’re still sitting with Jan Slauerhoff at Praça do Comercio, musing about Lisbon, that beautiful city on the Tagus River.
Lisboa
A city of gray-white buildings
And half-finished houses,
Of ruins that crumble without a trace
And columns that visibly decay.
And everywhere the rubble
Of the earthquake is still visible.
Why would anyone clear it away?
Beneath the earth, danger still lurks.
Palaces are crookedly cut off,
Others are missing a chunk of wall.
Lisbon exists in the past,
But it knows no peace, only expense.
Was it ever given to a city
To live on as a spirit,
Strange now and faithful to the past
After a rain of ashes on a feast day?
Here is a pdf of this entry
Earlier entries
July 19th, 2025
Lisbon: Fernando Pessoa (2)
Location: various locations
Duration: If you follow parts 1 and 2, the day will be almost full.
Here you can download the pdf
- Pessoa’s grave, initially
Location: Cemitério dos Prazeres
Address: Praça São João Bosco 568, 1350-297 Lisbon.
How to get there: Tram 28E, final stop (the famous yellow tram)
Opening hours: 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (October to April) and until 6:00 p.m. in May to September
Cost: free
After his death, Pessoa was buried at the Cemitério dos Prazeres alongside his family. It is a beautiful cemetery, but it is located close to the airport, so planes fly low overhead constantly.
Upon entering, you will notice the many cats, who apparently have a good life here.
If you walk all the way to the end of the cemetery, you will look out over a valley and, on the left, the large suspension bridge over the Tagus River, the 25 April Bridge.
A Catholic cemetery with many small houses and mausoleums. This creates entire streets of the dead.
The windows are striking, allowing you to look inside.
Next to the church is a room where dissections were performed and, to my surprise, the name of Dr. Sousa Martins, the holy doctor of Lisbon, appears again as one of the users. (see On the spot Lisbon 1)
José Saramago, the Portuguese winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, has the main character in his novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, an alter ego of Pessoa, the Brazilian doctor Ricardo Reis, visit the grave of his creator in this cemetery.
Saramago describes the visit as follows:
When Ricardo Reis arrived at the cemetery, the bell in the gate rang, clanging with the sound of cracked bronze, like a rural farmhouse in the languid quiet of the siesta. A handcart moved away with swaying funeral curtains, followed by a group of dark figures, women wrapped in black shawls and men in wedding suits, carrying white chrysanthemums in their arms, while whole bouquets of these flowers adorned the bier; even flowers do not all suffer the same fate. The handcart disappeared into the back of the cemetery and Ricardo Reis made his way to the administration office, the register of the dead, to ask where the grave of Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was, who had died on the thirtieth of the previous month and been buried on the second of the current month, laid to rest in this cemetery until the end of time, when God would awaken the poets from their temporary death. The clerk realizes that he has a cultured, distinguished person in front of him and explains everything diligently, giving him the street and the number, because this is just like a city, sir, and because he gets tangled up in his own directions, he comes out from behind the counter, steps outside and points, now very decisively, to that avenue, all the way down, at the corner turn right and then straight ahead, the grave is on the right about two-thirds of the way down the street, but watch out, because it’s a small stone, you could easily walk right past it.
(….)
Ricardo Reis walked past the grave he was looking for, there was no voice calling him, Psst, here it is, and yet there are still people who stubbornly claim that the dead talk. Woe to those dead if they didn’t have a plaque, a name in stone, a number, just like the doors of the living, just to be able to find them, it was worth learning to read. Imagine an illiterate person, one of the many we have, you should take him there and say, “Here it is.” Perhaps he would look at you suspiciously, wondering if you were trying to fool him, if through your mistake or malice he would end up praying for Montecchio when Capuletto lies there, for Mendes when it is Gonçalves.
The concession certificate, Family tomb of Dona Dionisia de Seabra Pessoa, is carved on the frontispiece, under the protruding eaves of this guardhouse where the sentry, a romantic figure, is sleeping. Below, at the level of the lower hinge of the door, another name, nothing more: Fernando Pessoa, with his date of birth and death, and the gilded curve of an urn that says, I lie here, and Ricardo Reis repeats aloud, not knowing that he has heard it, He lies here, at that moment it starts to rain again. He has come from so far away, from Rio de Janeiro, has sailed many days and nights across the waves of the sea, that journey now seems so close and so far away, and what is he doing here now, at dinner time, in this street, all alone with his umbrella raised between houses of the dead, in the distance the false sound of the bell can be heard, he had expected that when he arrived here and touched that iron gate, he would feel a shock deep in his soul, a tearing, an inner earthquake, large cities collapsing in silence because we are not there, with sagging portals and white towers, and in the end it is only a slight burning sensation in his eyes, so fleeting that he did not even have time to think about it and be moved by the thought.
This fantastic novel in honor of Pessoa shows how deserving Saramago was of the Nobel Prize. Ricardo Reis, Pessoa’s creation, who still sees him occasionally, but increasingly vaguely, is himself doomed now that his creator is no longer there. It is also a novel in which Lisbon plays an important role, at a time when the Second World War is about to break out. The Portuguese dictatorship is dissected in an inimitable way. A beautiful novel.
We will encounter Saramago again in another part of Lisbon.
What is a problem in our time is that Pessoa is no longer here. The family tomb where he once lay is still there, but like the famous Amalia Rodrigues, the fado singer, the famous writer has been reburied in Belém, which is also the last stop on our Pessoa journey.
After a stroll through the cemetery, we return to the entrance. Here, by the way, there are toilets if nature calls. One last tip is that Campo Ourique, as the start/end point of the tram, is the perfect place to grab a seat by the open window on a yellow tram and enjoy the entire ride to Praça Martim Moniz, right through Alfama and its steep and winding streets. The ride takes at least 45 minutes.
- Pessoa’s tomb, now
Location: Mosteiro dos Jeronimos
Address: Empire Square · 1400-206 Lisbon
How to get there: tram 15E
Open: Tuesday to Sunday 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. (last admission at 5:00 p.m.)
Cost: €18. Online booking recommended
From Praça Martim Moniz, it is only a short walk to Praça Figueira. This is where tram 15E starts. Unfortunately, it is not usually a yellow tram, but a modern tram heading towards Belem. The tram follows the banks of the Tagus River. If you are not in a hurry, you can get off at the Cais Rocha stop to visit the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga. This museum has a magnificent painting by Hieronymus Bosch.
The Temptation of Saint Anthony. There is a somewhat paler copy in Brussels. Definitely worth a visit, but you can also save this for the return trip.
Return to the tram stop. Get off at the final stop in Belem. There are a number of interesting things to see in Belem: a museum of modern art, definitely worth a visit, a botanical garden, a bakery, the only place, according to locals, where you can get authentic pastel de nata, a tower, formerly the departure point of the great Portuguese maritime company, a monument commemorating this
and the building we want to visit, the Mosteiro dos Jeronimos. The few times I’ve been there, there were long queues. It’s a good idea to buy tickets in advance.
Once inside, you are overwhelmed by the rich architecture. The monastery dates from the 16th century, the era of the great discoveries: along the Cape of Good Hope to India (Vasco da Gama), to America (Columbus), Portugal, a small country, flourished and was present all over the world.
And Fernando is buried in that monastery. You could almost say that this monastery is the Pantheon of Portugal, were it not for the limited number of famous people buried there. Moreover, Luis de Camões is only symbolically buried here.
I would have expected that for such a versatile person as Pessoa, who had 81 heteronyms, something less boring, something more modern, could have been thought up. Both in terms of how it looks and in terms of the surroundings. Unlike at Cemitério dos Prazeres, there is no one around to chat with.
I don’t envy Fernando.
July 5th, 2025
Lisbon: Fernando Pessoa (1)
Location: various locations
Duration: If you follow part 1 and part 2, your day will be almost full.
- Café A Brasileira
Address: Graça Plaza
How to get there: Baixa-Chiado metro station, exit Baixa
Close to the square where the most famous Portuguese poet, Luis de Camões, has a statue, Praça Luis Camões, next to the entrance to the metro, is the terrace of Café A Brasileira, a café that opened in 1905. Fernando Pessoa is sitting at a table on the terrace. He is being photographed incessantly by someone who sits down on the chair next to him, but he remains cool.
He sits there like his colleague and contemporary Hemingway in Havana at the bar in El Floridita. Relaxed, with a drink. Because Hemingway and Pessoa also had that in common: their great love of alcohol.
But otherwise, these contemporaries are as different as night and day, leaving it up to you to decide who is day and who is night. A small example is Hemingway’s friendship with a dictator (see the photo in the picture) and Pessoa’s dislike of Salazar, the Portuguese dictator.
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) is best known for his heteronyms, the many splintered versions of the writer, each with a different body of work. The best known are Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Bernardo Soares, and Ricardo Reis. For Pessoa, human beings are not one-dimensional, but made up of multiple layers. Freud’s “I am not the master in my own house” is expressed in his heteronymic work. And, funnily enough, heteronyms also wrote comments about each other. His best-known work is The Book of Disquiet. That book was only published after his death, more about that later.
Only a few photos of him are known, such as this blurry one:
Pessoa, perhaps on his way to the terrace of Café A Brasileira. He looks comfortable sitting here on the terrace of the café. His drinking contributed to his early death, as described by Antonio Tabucchi, an Italian Pessoa expert, in The Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa. It is a short novella, as far as I know not translated into English, in which Pessoa’s most important alter egos come to say goodbye during the last three days of his life. It is described as delirium.
“He lay in a modest room with an iron bed, a white wardrobe, and a small table. Pessoa lay down on the bed, turned on the lamp on the bedside table, rested his head on the pillow, and stroked his right side with his hand. Fortunately, the pain had eased somewhat. The nurse brought him a cup of water and a tablet and said, ‘Excuse me, but I have to give you an injection, doctor’s orders.
Pessoa asked for a dose of laudanum, a sleeping pill he was accustomed to taking when, in his capacity as Bernardo Soares, he was unable to sleep. The nurse brought him what he asked for and Pessoa drank it. “My name is Catarina,” said the nurse. “If you need anything, just call me and I’ll come right away.”
We are still on the terrace, sitting next to Pessoa. But others are eager to take our seats, so we leave Pessoa here on the terrace, because since his death he can be found in several places at once in Lisbon. So we’re on our way, but first we take a look inside what the sign on the facade says is the oldest bookshop in Lisbon, Livraria Bertrand, on R. Garrett, opened in 1732. It is even said to be the oldest bookshop in the world. It is everything a bookshop should be, but almost never is anymore. At the back is a café.
After the bookshop, we walk back a little, turn left into R. Serva Pinto and head for a square on the right with Pessoa’s birthplace, opposite the national theater. In front of that house is another statue of him.
- Pessoa’s birthplace
Address: Largo de Sao Carlos
Cost: Free
In this photo, the statue is not yet visible, but you can see the sign on the wall, just behind the lantern, indicating that Pessoa was born here. Nevertheless, the statue is well worth seeing. The way Pessoa is depicted shows that he was certainly not an open book.
If we compare Pessoa to Hemingway, Hemingway is a straightforward writer, while Pessoa writes in a labyrinthine, searching, ambiguous style. Here’s an example:
(Bernardo Soares) “I wish I were in the country, so that I could wish I were in the city. I love being in the city so much, but that way I would enjoy it twice as much.”
He is a truly remarkable writer, because he also wrote rather boring detective stories and a not very interesting travel guide to Lisbon. Originally written in English (Pessoa also translated books). The travel guide was published long after his death. But who am I to criticize someone who is considered by many to be one of the most important writers of the 20th century?
For the next step in Pessoa’s footsteps, we have to go to the house where he lived. That house is located in the Ourique district. The easiest way to get there is to take the yellow tram 28 to Campo Ourique from Praça Luis Camões. However, this tram is often very crowded, so hopefully you will be able to get on. Get off at Praça de Estrela. Perhaps take a look inside the church, and then walk a short distance.
- Pessoa’s house (now a museum)
Location: Casa Fernando Pessoa
Address: Rua Coelho da Rocha, 16-18 Campo de Ourique
How to get there: Tram: 25 and 28; Bus: 709, 713, 720, 738, and 774
Cost: 5 euros. Tickets also available online.
Opening hours: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Closed on Mondays.
Pessoa lived in what is still a normal street with residential houses. His house has been turned into a biographical museum.
The museum naturally houses the famous mysterious box containing 27,543 manuscripts, which was found after his death.
I don’t know if the box in the museum is the real one, I suspect not, but this box plays an important role in the reception of Pessoa. It took until the 1980s before the documents were deciphered. In 1982, the first edition of The Book of Disquiet was published. This was followed by new editions in 1986, 1990, and 1998. New editions of the latest version have been published, each time with further revisions.
This accumulation of changes has to do, on the one hand, with what was found in the box, but on the other hand also with the fact that the texts were in undated envelopes. What is the correct order? And what belongs in the book and what does not? The famous Book of Disquiet has therefore been regularly revised and only became semi-definitive around 2004.
The museum is tastefully decorated and provides a nice overview of Pessoa’s life and work. On the website (which is very slow), you can also take a virtual tour of the museum, but it is much better in person.
After your visit, enjoy a nice cup of espresso at a reasonable price in the café and then move on to the next stage. You can walk back to the tram, or continue on to the Cemitério dos Prazeres. It’s only about two tram stops away, so it’s not too far.
In two weeks, we will continue our Pessoa journey.
Arko Oderwald
Here you can find a pdf.
Older entries
June 21, 2025
Lisbon: Doctor José Tomás de Sousa Martins
Location: Campo dos Mártires da Pátria, Lisbon
How to get there: bus 730.
Cost: free
There are many famous doctors in our history. Some doctors have had diseases named after them. Think of Gilles de la Tourette, Cushing, Alzheimer, Parkinson, Dupuytren. Or doctors associated with a specific medical procedure, such as the Babinski reflex, or a particular symptom, such as Cullen or Trousseau. Oh yes, there are also doctors who have become famous as writers: Chekhov, Maugham, Lobo Antunes, Williams, to name but a few.
There is a (Dutch) wikisage page with famous doctors. It is a colorful and rather random collection of doctors, many of whom fall under the above examples. What is striking is that none of these doctors became famous for their great clinical abilities, including dealing with patients in a decent manner. What we do know is that some doctors were removed from the list precisely because of their lack of the latter. For example, Friedrich Wegener (Wegener’s disease) and Hans Reiter (Reiter’s disease) were removed from the list because of their Nazi sympathies. The diseases were renamed.
But there are famous doctors who are famous for the way they treated their patients. For that, we have to go to Campo dos Mártires da Pátria in Lisbon. There stands the statue of Dr. José Tomás de Sousa Martins.
He lived from 1843 to 1897. He has a Wikipedia page in English. There we read:
He was a doctor and professor at the Medical-Surgical School of Lisbon, the predecessor of the Faculty of Medical Sciences of the NOVA University in Lisbon. He studied pharmacy and medicine and worked in Lisbon, mainly for the poor. He was particularly interested in the fight against tuberculosis. His career and his choice to work mainly for the poor people of Lisbon created an image of a saint, which is still noticeable today.
Tuberculosis, which was untreatable at the time, became his life’s work. He ensured that a sanatorium was built in north-eastern Portugal, the Sanatório Dr. Sousa Martins. Sadly, Sousa Martins himself contracted tuberculosis. It was so severe that he took his own life on August 18, 1897.
And now we are standing in front of his statue, which was erected in 1904.
The statue stands near the medical faculty where he was a professor.
He is, of course, depicted as a philanthropist, seen here on a card with a wish.
However, that is not what repeatedly catches the eye. Around the statue are stones, often made of marble, inscribed with wishes and expressions of gratitude. There are dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of wishes and expressions of gratitude from patients, one on top of the other.
They are ex-votos, a familiar phenomenon in many religions. But that is not the most remarkable thing about them. At the time of writing, this good doctor died 128 years ago… And there are also many expressions of gratitude that are less than a year old. Doctor Sousa Martins has become a saint. On the anniversary of his birth and death, his grave and this statue are visited by hundreds of people, ensuring a permanent supply of ex-votos for eternity. I wonder if anyone keeps them in any kind of order… Apparently not.
As far as I know, Dr. Sousa Martins has not yet made his way into fiction. Perhaps Axel Munthe’s The Doctor of San Michele is the novel that comes closest to the holy doctor. Or dr. Samuel Pozzi, the first gynecologist, described by Julian Barnes in The man in the red coat. And then there is the doctor from a story by Richard Selzer. His fellow villagers consider him a saint, but he is an impostor… Imposter is the name of the story. Doctor Sousa Martins was certainly no impostor, but a saint? That is a bit far-fetched.
Now that you are here, it is worth walking into R. Julio de Andrade, following the road and visiting the Jardim do Torel.
Lisbon has a number of places with beautiful views, called Miradores. The Jardim do Torel is a beautifully landscaped park with views over the lower town.
It’s also a nice place to rest for a while. Leave the park the same way you entered and continue along R. Julio de Andrade. Take the first left and then right and you will arrive at one of Lisbon’s three cable cars, the Elevador do Lavra, which will take you down to the lower town.
