The Pousadas of Portugal, Rooms With a View of History
Ξ March 25th, 2010 | → 0 Comments | ∇ A Day at a Time, PORTUGAL |
I have never been moved to write about lodgings. More comfortable in a Motel 6 than a Ritz-Carlton, I prefer the first because I find the immediacy of the staff, the freely given personal stories of their labor and daily working conditions, to be the royal road to understanding any community I happen to be visiting. The history of a region or town is best expressed by the locals. In more expensive lodgings, the word often comes down from on high for all employees to continually project the image carefully cultivated and repeated on glossy brochures.
But in Portugal I discovered a new and frank interlocutor: the hotels themselves. On my recently completed documentary location scout of historical wine regions in Portugal, I was introduced to the Pousadas de Portugal, a very unique network of renovated architectural and cultural treasures that had fallen into disrepair and would have eventually deteriorated into irretrievable ruin. Portugal, as the reader may know, is in difficult financial straits. While international attention, easily distracted, turns to noisier foci of economic troubles, Portugal has been struggling internally for years with budget shortfalls and unemployment. So it is with great admiration that I report the continuing success of the Pousada system.
Scattered the length of the country, the Pousadas offer the traveler a direct experience of Portugal’s many historical threads. Rebuilt from within the walls of castles, monasteries, convents, and even hospitals, here it is the walls themselves that speak. And this being Portugal, it is not surprising that what they say is frequently melancholic and full of longing. Take, for example, the Pousada de Santa Marinha in Guimarães to the north. Originally the twelfth-century Convent of Agostinhos, it sits high above the city. Down long contoured hallways, I came to a beautifully tiled balcony and a fountain. With vistas to the mountains and the bustle of commerce below, I could easily sense a simultaneous spiritual command a vista often provides with that of the profound isolation the convent was meant to insure. Indeed, in my room, a former nun’s cell, there was a small bench built beneath a heavily built double window which opened onto a beautiful park. What might generations of nuns thought at this very spot?
We also stayed at the newly opened Pousada de Viseu in Viseu, a hyper-modern re-visioning of the former São Teotónio Hospital. A strikingly renovated property originally built in 1842, this was an altogether different historical experience. From its open floor plan with grand unobstructed sight lines to the warm wood paneling and balconies found in each room, this pousada is a small miracle of the of the architect’s (Gonçalo Byrne’s) imagination. It plays upon the themes of medicine’s need for a patient’s visibility and the restorative power of vistas for those same patients. (While the convents used vistas to reveal a world spiritually renounced, this hospital uses the same to encourage the infirm to health so that they might return.) Many features of its former incarnation remain, among them fragments of the pharmacy and the extraordinary symbolic high-ceiling carvings found in many spaces on the ground floor. I was to learn from one of my companions that a relative of his once sought health here. The Pousada de Viseu is repurposing at its most brilliant.
Last but not least was the Pousada de D. João IV located in Vila Viçosa, in the Alentajo. This hotel is set in another convent, the Convent of Chagas de Cristo. Like the Pousada de Santa Marinha, it too works with the pre-existing architectural themes of individual contemplation, isolation, and communal spaces. Here the rooms vary greatly in size and orientation according to a ecclesiastical logic I still do not fully comprehend. What I well remember was the internal courtyard, the orange trees bursting with birdsong as sunlight touched them. Just behind me were smaller chambers between archways, each with preserved paintings depicting moments of piety and spiritual struggle.
Let me add that the prices throughout the Pousadas de Portugal network are very competitive. Internet is available for a small fee. If you want something quite unique in a hotel experience, give them a look.
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—–All photos are from the Pousadas de Portugal website.
