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Portugal

food / travel

Gùsto! How, What, Where Locals Eat (& Drink) In Lisbon

Lisbon, the capital city of Portugal, offers myriad delightful culinary experiences. Portuguese cuisine is known for its fresh ingredients, bold flavors and a rich mix of Mediterranean and Atlantic influences. From the sweet Pastéis de Nata to the savory Francesinha, local markets, neighborhood eateries or seafood restaurants will have everything you need to try!

A walk through this hilly city will definitely make your stomach growl, so take the time to stop and enjoy a savory port wine with some delicious petiscos, the Portuguese version of tapas!

Here are Worldcrunch’s recommendations to try the best of Portuguese cuisine.

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Twisting Open The Secrets Of Portugal's Cork Empire

In the hands of the same family since 1870, the world's largest producer of corks almost disappeared in the early 2000s. Today, this gem of Portuguese industry has not only reconquered its historic market, but has made cork the darling of many other sectors.

PORTO DE SANTA MARIA DA FEIRA — In the courtyard, mountains of bark await their turn before moving onto the conveyor belts. Scanned from every angle, they are distributed according to the thickness of their cork layer, before an artificial intelligence system scans them with cameras and tells robots where to drill, turning the bark into small cylinders. Nearby, a dozen human operators perform the same work by hand and eye. "Their expertise is unique, and we reserve it for our best customers," explains Carlos de Jesus, marketing director for cork company Amorim.

Once cut into perfect-looking corks, they undergo a final test. Conceiçao Loja, bending over bags ready for shipment, spots some with micro-defects. "Does it change the quality of the wine? No. But if you're a prestigious château, you expect everything to be perfect," proudly says the technician with 37 years' experience under her belt.

It's impossible to miss the factories along the 25 kilometers that separate Porto, Portugal from Santa Maria da Feira, Amorim's stronghold. Similar to the one we surveyed on this March morning, they're everywhere, churning out over 6 billion corks a year, which is half of the world's entire production. But wine and champagne houses, the company's long-standing customers, are not the only ones to benefit: from shoe soles to surfboards, insulation panels to rocket noses, stadium floors to ship decks, Amorim cork is everywhere.

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Case Of Fake Brazilian Doctor Sparks Outrage — But Is "Alternative Medicine" Any Safer?

Fear and anger spread in Brazil after a man posing as a doctor was found treating patients. But it raises the question of the dangers of those openly using “alternative medicine.” Who should be regulating these practices?

-OpEd-

SÂO PAULO — Earlier this spring, Thiago Celso Andrade Reges was arrested in the Brazilian state of Ceará for illegal practice of medicine, after having worked in several hospitals in the region.

He had previously gone to court in Brazil to get a validation of his Bolivian diploma, which turned out to be false. The Regional Council of Medicine of Ceará (Cremec) suspended his professional license and opened an internal investigation.

Easy question: why arrest someone who commits fraud by impersonating a doctor? I imagine the answer should not generate great disagreement among readers: it put people's health and lives at risk. Fake doctors don’t have adequate training, and they prescribe medicines and treatments, and issue diagnoses, which are not reliable. There is no reason to assume that their advice is based on a scientific background, or on the best knowledge available in the medical field.

But there's more to it than that. The case raises another intriguing question: would not the practice of “alternative medicine” be just as responsible for putting the lives and health of patients at risk as the practice of medicine without a degree?

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The Brazilian Singer Trying To Shake The Sexism Out Of Samba

The Brazilian singer Nega Jaci has performed a new version of the well-known samba “Mulheres,” by Martinho da Vila, adapted by two Brazilian women to remove the sexist tone of the original lyrics.

LISBON — It's Saturday night in Lisbon, Portugal, and on stage at the bar Samambaia, in the Graça neighborhood, the beating of the tambourine and the strumming of the guitar signal the beginning of a hit by the carioca samba singer Martinho da Vila, which lists the various women who passed through the life of a man.

But this Saturday, the original version re-emerged as a new, liberating and empowered reinterpretatio, sung by Brazilian artist Nega Jaci.

Instead of "I've had women of all colors," Nega Jaci sings “We are women of all colors,” from an updated version created by Brazilian artists Doralyce and Silvia Duffrayer in 2018 – an adaptation that rewrites some stanzas of the original lyrics and which, since then, has become an anthem of female resistance in the “patriarchal” universe of samba.

The rewritten version by the Brazilian duo removes references to “unbalanced and confused” women in the lyrics, replacing them with feminist heroes in Brazil, including Chica da Silva and Elza Soares. Jaci also included a tribute to former Carioca councilwoman Marielle Franco, murdered in 2018.

The new lyrics reposition the woman's role, from being responsible for the man's happiness, finally concluding, in a liberated and independent tone, that the woman is everything that she one day dreamed to be.

Samba lyrics tend to be super sexist and prejudiced, looking at women either as objects to serve men or as someone who needs to be taken care of, without giving due value to female power,” explains Jaci, who was born in Bahia, Brazil as Jacilene Santos Barbosa and has been living in Lisbon for eight years.

The feminist version of the well-known samba is unmissable in her set, and the moment when Jaci sings it in the presentation is preceded by a call to the women in the audience. It is for them that the performance is dedicated.

“I sing in honor of the women, but the men end up listening and reflecting on the theme in their own way,” she says.

This reflection has led other musicians to also look for a way to reposition themselves. Jaci recalls that not even Chico Buarque himself, universally loved among Brazilian musicians and apparently incontestable, is immune to the slippage of lyrics written in other times and contexts, but which now seem to no longer find space in a repertoire governed by political correctness.

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Society
Ana Narciso and Inês Leote

Marchas Populares, A Great Lisbon Tradition Is Missing Men

The Marchas Populares, Lisbon's summertime carnival parades, are a spectacle of dancing and music — but a shortage of money, free time and men who want to dance are endangering this midsummer tradition.

LISBON — With evictions in the city's “soul” neighborhoods and the aging of residents who have carried on traditions, it sometimes seems that a basic sense of community in Lisbon is fading away.

Nine years shy of their 100th year, Lisbon's traditional Popular Marches — nighttime carnival parades through the city's neighborhoods — are having a hard time finding participants to join the march, especially men.

Meanwhile, just across the river from Lisbon, in nearby municipalities Setúbal and Charneca da Caparica, the solution is to take marchers from one bank to the other.

For many of the participants in this traditional choreography, it no longer matters whether they dance for the neighborhood São Domingos de Benfica, Bica or Campo de Ourique. What they want is to keep going every year, and to save the future of this tradition, which for years has been struggling with a lack of men.

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Green
Ana da Cunha

How Miyawaki "Pop Up" Forests Spread Across The Urban Jungle Of Lisbon

Two years ago, forests planted according to a method invented by Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, began to spread across in urban spaces in the Portuguese capital. It's a way to bring real enclaves of nature to urban realities in record time.

LISBON — António Alexandre still remembers the the first lines that formed in front of the FCULresta forest, back in March 2021. Those were times of masks and disinfectant gel, with only one person entering at a time.

But many people were excited to visit the tiny forest, right in the center of Lisbon.

Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki created the concept, which involves native species planted in high density and allows the creation of new forests born in record time — just 20 or 30 years.

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This Happened

This Happened — February 5: Cristiano Ronaldo Is Born

On this day in 1985, football star Cristiano Ronaldo was born.
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Society
Ana da Cunha

Aging Cities Of The Future — How Urban Planning Can Factor In For Dementia

As the population ages, the likelihood of diseases such as dementia increases. That means we need to rethink how we design and build cities for the future. A look up close from Lisbon.

LISBON — For Maria Manuela Maia, there are routes in Lisbon that are hard to forget, like the one that connects her home to the parish. But there are others where memory fails her. “Manuela is more or less autonomous,” says Orlando, her husband. “But the problem is when you change streets. Then she no longer knows where our house is.”

That's when she gets lost. And when she meets other elderly, homeless or lonely people, she talks to them. "Need something? You can come to my house and I'll help,” she says, trying to help them. Her husband, Orlando, calms her down: “That gentleman doesn't need anything, don't worry, let's go. Let's walk,” he says, guiding her through the streets.

Maria Manuela and Orlando met more than 50 years ago when Orlando was serving with the troops in Angola. “I corresponded with 22 girls,” he says. Of these 22, I would only choose one: Maria Manuela.

After so many years, the battlefield is now a different one: Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia, which leads to a progressive deterioration of cognitive functions. One of them is memory.

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Future
Ana da Cunha

Out With The Car, In With The Urban "Super-Island"

Barcelona architect Ton Salvadó explains how a new way or organizing urban areas might lead to greener, more peaceful cities.

There's no pristine white sand and palm trees framing turquoise water on Ton Salvadó's "super-islands." When the Barcelona architect uses the term, what he's referring to instead are chunks of city, in nine-block groupings, whose interior streets are closed to cars, forming pedestrian "islands" where foot traffic is king.

The idea for super-islands first emerged when Salvadó became director of Barcelona's Urban Model, at a time when the city was embroiled by civic protests over the high price of housing. After some initial success, Salvadó, a Barcelona-native, might have the chance to revolutionize his city's pedestrian geography with 500 additional super-islands in the future.

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eyes on the U.S.
Alex Hurst

How Trump’s Legal Troubles Look In Places Where Presidents Get Prosecuted

-Analysis-

What do South Korea, Taiwan, Israel, Italy, France, Portugal, and Iceland all have in common? They’re all wealthy democracies that have charged and prosecuted former heads of state or heads of government for criminal acts committed while in office.

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Society
Maíra Streit

Single Parents In Portugal Turn "It Takes A Village" Into A Practical Reality

The death of a young child left alone at home while his single mother was out shocked a community. Now, single parents have banded together to offer support to each other. And they're succeeding in the face of overwhelming challenges.

SINTRA — The large and curious eyes of Gurnaaz Kaur reveal her desire to understand the world.

This four-year-old Indian girl doesn’t speak Portuguese yet. A few months have passed since she left her country on the family adventure across the European continent. She uses a few gestures to try to express herself and greets people with a “bom dia” (good morning), one of the few expressions he has learned.

Nahary Conniott, 8, is also looking for ways to interact. From Angola and on the autism spectrum disorder, she has already experienced difficult situations and was asked to leave the private school she attended. In the other schools in which the mother enrolled her, the refusal was always justified by the lack of vacancies.

Children with such different paths found the support they deserved in the Colo100Horas project. Started in 2021, it is a self-organized network of women who came together to help immigrants with their immense daily challenges in Sintra, in western Portugal.

The long list of problems meant they banded together to look for a solution: the strenuous routine of caring for children (still imposed in most homes as the responsibility of women), low salaries, the overcrowding of daycare centers, excessive work and the difficulty with shift schedules, which is common in jobs in the catering and cleaning industries.

A tragic case that occurred recently in the neighborhood that drew attention to the need for greater support for families: a six-year-old boy died after falling from the ninth floor of the building where he lived. He was at home with only his two little brothers, while his mother had left to go to the market, a few meters away.

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Society
Catarina Reis and Inês Leote

Pascoal: Born In Portugal, Citizen Of Nowhere

Born 32 years ago in Portugal to Angolan refugee parents, Pascoal has never been granted Portuguese nationality. Too many people like him live under the threat of being deported to a faraway country they’ve never known.

LISBON – When a team from the European Commission visited Cova da Moura, a suburb of Lisbon, in September, they challenged young musicians in the area to rap about what Europe meant to them. As a reward for their work, the Commission offered a trip to Brussels. But three of the musicians, Pascoal, Hélio, and Heidir, couldn’t even think about it: they didn’t have passports or any form of national ID.

Adriano Malalane, an attorney, says that in the case of Pascoal, “a residence permit is the most he can aim for.”

Pascoal’s birth certificate – the only ID document he has – proves that he was born in the heart of Lisbon. And yet, Portugal does not recognize him as a citizen, and so he lacks any form of national identification

The lack of sufficient ID documents has blocked him from everything from school trips, to sports, to work — or at least, made it very, very difficult.

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