"Portugal is the country next to Spain"

These words of wisdom were spotted by my friend Amy on a tourist shop tee-shirt in Sintra, a village outside of Lisbon. We were on the penultimate day of our Easter holiday to Portugal, and over the previous week we’d traveled the country up and down in our tiny rental Citroën C2, from the green rolling countryside in the south to the steep winding streets of Porto in the north.

It hadn’t taken us long to realize that, despite sharing a peninsula with Spain, Portugal was radically different from its neighbor. Every day brought new discoveries: “Look at the trees!” (along the highways, on a mountainside in Sintra, in Lisbon’s parks and plazas), “But they speak English!” (even in the rural gas station along the isolated coastal road), “They share the sidewalk!” (on narrow, crowded city streets). Without realizing it, we’d begun to see Portugal as what it was when compared to Spain; that is, our valorizations of all that we saw and experienced were based not on what Portugal was in and of itself, but how it measured up to our past six months in Spain.

Of course, not everything was a clear-cut comparison. The crumbling plaster and faded paint of old-town Porto was to Jinse the image of a decadent empire in ruins, the wandering ground of 19th century dandies with impeccable suits and hats jauntily tipped over wild, melancholy eyes—a description that reminded me of a word I’d stumbled across while doing my thesis research: ucronia, a conception of time in which the present landscape of the city stands as a monument not just of what is, but what could have been if the past had been different. Elaborate mosaic facades veiled in soot and splintered shutters bowed over cobblestone streets murmuring their nostalgia for something that almost was but was never fully realized.


I couldn’t find the right word in English to describe it. The best I could come up with was descuidada, a Spanish word that’s understood as untidy or neglected but literally means not cared for, as if something that was once precious was left to deteriorate, forgotten by its custodians. At night, when the old-town was near deserted, the few people we stumbled across gave the impression of lonely ghosts fated to forever wander the streets, whispering ancient secrets to the wind.

The historical center of Lisbon was a livelier place than the corresponding district in Porto, evidenced by the commentary of one guidebook that it’s known as the SoHo of the capital. Still, the air of nostalgia was not entirely absent, recalling the words of a Spanish friend who had described Lisbon to us as being like an old woman whose advanced age, wrinkled skin, and curved spine haven’t quite managed to erase the memory of her long ago beauty. The past was present unlike in any place I’d ever been before.

And there it was, another comparison. I wondered whether it was inevitable, that travel always be a weight and balance of similarity and difference, of identity not as essence but as comparison to the other. And so I posed the question: was Portugal really the protagonist of this story, or was it Spain?

The friend to whom I owe the description of Lisbon was one of the few Spanish people I talked to in the days before our trip who had actually been to Portugal. Many of our Spanish acquaintances with whom we shared our travel plans expressed surprise that we would go to the little country next door: Spain has beaches, Spain has cities, Spain has hills, and Spain has Spanish; Portugal is just the “end of the world,” that far western part of the peninsula falling into the Atlantic. Why bother?

The tee-shirt glimpsed in Sintra—black writing on a red background, typical Spanish colors—was in its own way reaffirming the value of visiting Portugal, poking fun at that common Spanish perception otherwise. In the midst of tourist trap cafes and Chinese-made knick-knacks, it was a wry metacommentary on that strange catch-22 of traveling, putting forth the question: will Portugal ever be not that country next to Spain, but simply Portugal, a country identifiable by what it is and not by its relationship to its bigger neighbor?