Azulejos

Our trip to Portugal this past October took us from Lisbon to the Alentejo to Coimbra to Porto. It took us to cafes and past farms and vineyards and into castles and museums and bakeries and past bridges and to lots and lots and lots and lots of monasteries and churches. It was a bit of a whirlwind tour that touched on some of the highlights of the country and barely scratched the surface in most places. It was an introduction.

If there was a single constant through our entire week in country, I would have to say it would be the ceramic tiles. Sound like a strange thing to highlight as a cohesive memory binding a week long vacation together in a gorgeous European country? Expecting castles or all those monasteries or sardines or hills or churches or art or Cristiano Ronaldo or salt cod or a Mediterranean climate or something else? It was none of those. It was ceramic tiles. It was the one thing we found everywhere we went in Portugal. And to be honest, there are some spectacular looking tiles over there. 

I know maybe what you are thinking: don't we have ceramic tiles in the United States? Well, yes we do. But not like they have in Portugal. If you have been there or if you go in the future, you will know what I'm talking about. It's pretty obvious. These things are everywhere. Just walk the streets. There are buildings everywhere that are tiled on the outside. Think you won't notice? You will. You can't escape it. It is literally inescapable. And if by some chance you don't pick up on it by walking down the street, it will hit you over the head in every church and convent and palace and monastery you visit. And you will visit a lot of these, especially those monasteries. There are a ton of them. I might have already mentioned that.

Azulejo covered buildings in Coimbra (top) and Lisbon (bottom).

Now in Portugal, of course, they don't call them tiles. They call them azulejos. And if you are wondering how to pronounce that word (we were...), it's a-zu-le-jos, not az-ul-e-jos (hopefully that non-dictionary guide makes sense; the "l" belongs to the "lejos" and not the "azul"). The word itself is derived from an Arabic word meaning "polished stone". And Arabic and Muslim lands is not just the origin of the word. It's the source of the tiles themselves.

Azulejos were introduced to the Iberian peninsula in the 13th century by the Moors, who conquered and held much of Portugal and parts of Spain beginning in the 10th century until they were driven out a few hundred years later. Coincidentally that was just about the time that azulejos started to become widely used on buildings in southern Spain. 

While tiles started to become a thing in Spain about the end of the Moorish occupation, it would take a little longer before the azulejos started being used in a common way in what is now Portugal, although the use of mosaics for sidewalks and public paved squares had already been popular for a couple of hundred years when they started decorating the walls of places with these things. Think 15th century and think simple geometric or naturalistic motifs in blue and white only. This is all the Moors had available to them so that's all they used to make these things back in the 1400s.

As Portugal embarked on their age of discovery in the 16th century, they started to import goods which would forever change their way of life. On the tile manufacturing front, trips back and forth to what is now Asia brought yellow dyes which added a third color to the two-tone azulejos that were already so popular. At the same time, the tile artisans started to supplement the regular and repeating patterning with narrative scenes or pictures, effectively creating large scale artworks through tiles.

Tiles (ca. 1680) from the Museu Nacional do Azulejos (top) and St. Michael's Chapel, Coimbra University (bottom).

Those new, large scale scenes seemed to become the next point of departure for azulejos artisans as we entered the 17th century. I can't tell you how many churches and monasteries and train stations we visited with detailed scenes upon scenes from history or the Bible constructed out of tiles 4" or smaller. These things must have been created off site somewhere as a giant sort of canvas and then put back together in situ. And they most always were just simple blue and white, taking a step back a couple of hundred years but in a totally different level of detail and precision.

If churches seem like an odd place to find these murals of azulejos, they shouldn't. For a while, the Catholic church was the main patron of azulejo artisans. Think about the number of paintings and sculptures in churches all around the world. There was a time that the only secure place to have a commissioned work of art was in a church or cathedral. Think Michelangelo in Rome. Think Goya in Madrid. Think azulejos in Portugal. And there is a whole of Catholicism in Portugal.

To get a great look at tiled buildings everywhere we went in Portugal, we walked the streets, we visited churches, we visited monasteries (have I mentioned there are a few of those in Portugal?), we visited castles, we visited palaces. But for a more in depth and formal learning experience, we stopped by the Museu Nacional do Azulejos in Lisbon. Yes, there is a whole museum dedicated to the history of tile work in Portugal.

The Museu is located in the old Madre de Deus convent on the east side of the city. The Museu features both original azulejo artwork in their original spaces and exhibits extracted from elsewhere in the country and moved and displayed in the halls of the convent. Arguably the star attraction in the museum is the main church space, which features blue and white tiled murals in the style that became popular in the 17th century, but there are other similarly impressive exhibits hanging elsewhere in the Museu accompanied by plentiful signage in Portuguese and English. 

Two of the more interesting exhibits in the Museu for me were a tile mold for making tiles with raised patterns and the scene (in tile form, of course) of Lisbon before the great earthquake of 1755 which ends the museum's visit sequence. We saw so few molded tiles in Portugal but we did find some on the walls of buildings in Porto and Sintra; these mini-sculptures are in some ways a lot more interesting than the flat painted tiles we found elsewhere. I also appreciated the scene of Lisbon pre-earthquake as an historical record. It was different and (to me) far more informative than the Biblical scenes we found all over the religious buildings we traipsed through during our time in Portugal.

Museu Nacional do Azulejos: the church, the great Lisbon panorama and the Chicken's Wedding.

I can't tell you how many pictures of tiles I ended up with on my phone after a week in Portugal but it was a lot. I wouldn't be surprised if they made up half of the total pictures that I took during the week. There were a lot because honestly I found these things super interesting. Maybe borderline obsessive. "Maybe" and "borderline" means not really, right?

I think for me, I was more fascinated by the earlier, simpler patterned blue, white and gold azulejos than the later blue and white large scale artworks. I know that part of this attraction was fueled by the Moorish connection. We worked hard to try to find any remnant of Moorish culture in the places we visited and were largely unable, probably because when the Christians drove out the Moors they destroyed most or all of what they had created. Maybe by the time the Moors were defeated the Portuguese didn't remember where the azulejos came from in the first place.

I also appreciated some of the earlier departures from the simple patterning into actual scenes of life real or imagined. There are some really impressive views into daily Portuguese life in some of these tiled works, along with some very fanciful scenes of ridiculousness like the Chicken's Wedding that we found in the Museu Nacional do Azulejos. Seriously, there's a chicken's wedding scene in multicolored tiles. Who thinks up this stuff in the middle (or maybe a little later) of the last millennium?

If you are thinking all that would likely mean that I was not a fan of the later and almost exclusively Biblical artworks created for the churches and monasteries, you would be correct. I just don't get the amount of effort that went into these things and I'm not a super fan of the subject matter either. They are so serious but some churches really got into these things, commissioning about as many works as would fill either the interior or exterior of their buildings. There's a church in Porto (the Chapel of Souls) that has gone full arm sleeve on us and covered pretty much every square inch of available exterior wall space with tiles.

The Chapel of Souls in Porto (top) and a molded or stamped tile in the Pena Palace in Sintra.

Azulejos are clearly a symbol of national pride for the Portuguese. There are so many old buildings with centuries-old tiles inside and outside that have endured over the centuries. But it also appears that there is an ongoing effort to resurrect this tradition in a more modern way, meaning not just copying the colors or motifs of centuries of several hundred years ago. I think we saw this beautifully in the main train station in Porto. 

Porto's train station features some older works of tiled art showing scenes from Portugal's history, including a massive battle scene on the west side (if I'm remembering correctly) of the main entrance hall. But next to these historical artworks are more modern tiles showing locomotives. They aren't necessarily using the colors or subject matter used in azulejos laid in the 15th through 17th centuries, (although honestly the top portion shown below is remarkably reminiscent of the 16th century azulejos) but they ARE tiles. And they do remind us of Portugal's history of this sort of wall treatment. I love it. Well done!

I know it's a strange thing to memorialize as a memory of Portugal but honestly, I'll always remember the azulejos.

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How We Did It

As I hope comes across in this post, it is not difficult to find azulejos in Portugal. We found them to be plentiful in Lisbon and Sintra and Coimbra and Porto, although perhaps a little more difficult to find in Évora.

Other than wandering around the streets of these cities and discovering, I thought it was worthwhile visiting the Museu Nacional do Azulejo in Lisbon. The Museu is located at Rua da Madre de Deus, 4 and is easily reachable by public transportation. We took either the 759 or 794 bus directly there from the Plaça do Comércio. The total bus ride is about 15 minutes or so. The Museu is open daily except Mondays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. although they do close for lunch every day for an hour starting at 1 p.m.

There are definitely tiled buildings worth visiting in Sintra, Coimbra and Porto in addition to Lisbon. Some are pictured in this post although quite frankly there were many more pictures left on the cutting room floor. Other than the Museu, I don't have a strong feeling either way about the value in seeking out these other buildings. There are literally tiled buildings pretty much everywhere.

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The Earthquake

On the morning of November 1, 1755, about 180 miles southwest of Lisbon, the Earth moved. Like big time. An earthquake with an estimated 8.4 magnitude on the Richter Scale. That number may not mean anything to some folks (including me) but for the sake of comparison with other historical earthquakes, an 8.4 would put the 1755 earthquake as a top 20 quake of all time according to the United States Geological Survey. Yes, the Earth shook that morning in a pretty significant way. And it was felt in Lisbon in a transformational way, and that's not a good thing for 1755.

Before we get into how and why an earthquake 180 miles from Lisbon affected the city that November morning, I think it is worth making a couple of points regarding the prior paragraph. First...it's estimated, right? The Richter Scale wasn't created until 1935, so the 1755 quake wasn't actually recorded on any instrument. I'm trusting science on this one and assuming someone making this evaluation knows what they are doing when they assigned the 8.4 number. Second, the USGS has only been recording earthquakes since the early 20th century, so there may have been other, larger earthquakes that would have knocked an 8.4 out of the top 20. Having said all that, it was undoubtedly pretty significant in size.

It crushed Lisbon. In so many ways.

Detail from the side of the tomb of King Ferdinand I.

In 1755, the population of Lisbon was around 200,000 people. An estimated 30,000 to 40,000 of those people perished as a result of the earthquake. That's up to 20% of the entire population of the city. That's a lot. In effectively one day. Think about if you were in a city hit by an earthquake and one out of every five people died as a result shortly thereafter.

The city made out worse than the people. 85% of the buildings in Lisbon were destroyed. If the initial quake didn't get them, the tsunami that followed about 40 minutes later might have. Or maybe it was the fires that spread unchecked throughout the city as a result of the initial tremors knocking over so many open flames in buildings all over the city.

I know what you are maybe thinking here. Why were there so many flames lit in the morning? Surely candles weren't needed for illumination at that time? Maybe not. But November 1 was All Saints' Day, and candles were lit all over the city in observance of that day. Which naturally led to all sorts of questions about why God was punishing the citizens of Lisbon on the very same day they were honoring all the saints. The notion of tectonic plates...maybe not so much accepted science in the middle of the eighteenth century. Divine retribution, yes. Seismology, no.

But destruction of lives, buildings and faith in the Catholic church wasn't all the earthquake wiped out. The Royal Library and other national archives were also lost, including historical records of the voyages of Vasco de Gama and other notable Portuguese explorers. The city of Lisbon didn't just lose people and buildings, it lost pretty much its entire historical record. It's actually amazing that natural disasters haven't wiped out libraries more often, I guess. But then again...8.4.

I said crushed, right? Not sure how it could have been much worse, short of total destruction of the city.

The reaction to the destruction caused by the earthquake was swift in Lisbon and southern Portugal. Reconstruction proceeded quickly on important public buildings that were left partially standing. What remained of entire sections of the city were razed, replanned and rebuilt. And for the first time in history, the destruction caused by the Earth moving was scientifically recorded. Not just what was destroyed, but how. But that's not what this post is about.

There are plenty of buildings in Lisbon that pre-date the 1755 earthquake. We visited the Castelo de São Jorge (from the 10th century) on the highest spot in the city; toured the Jerónimos Monastery (started in 1501); and learned about tiles in Portugal (it's a thing...) in the old Convento da Madre de Deus (from 1509). Looking at all three of those buildings today, you would never have known they were once shaken by an 8.4 magnitude earthquake. As you might expect. I mean what's the point of rebuilding quickly if things aren't back to normal pretty soon after you start.

We spend a lot of time tracking down history on our travels. The unique thing about chasing an earthquake from 250 plus years ago is that you are not likely to find much evidence of the thing actually having happened. Sure, you can see the aftereffects of an almost 2,000 year old volcanic eruption by visiting Herculaneum in Italy, but that's because the ensuing pyroclastic flow buried the entire town. But in a living, modern city, maybe not so much.

Except in Lisbon at the Convento do Carmo. Thanks in part to some procrastination and a quirk of Portuguese history.

The Convento do Carmo, Lisbon.

Like most damaged but not destroyed buildings in Lisbon in November 1755, reconstruction of the Convento do Carmo started right after the damage was assessed. The earthquake and subsequent fire shook down all the church's vaulting, leaving only the structural stone ribs in place, in addition to gutting the contents of the building. The building construction dated from the late 1300s and early 1400s (it was built quickly by gothic standards) on the site of an earlier convent building. By 1800, the roof was reconstructed above the apse and the chapels at the east end of the church.

After 1800, the restoration efforts stalled. The church was turned over to the military for use as a garrison in addition to being co-opted as a court of law and a sawmill, of all things. If there was any hope of the building ever being completely rebuilt, all that was extinguished in 1834 when the crown expelled the monastic orders from Portugal in what was effectively a gratuitous power and money grab. The relationship between the royal family and the Catholic church was a complicated one in Portugal. At most times, they colluded to keep the population repressed but every so often spats and disagreements led to things like the expulsion of the monastic orders. And in the case of the Convento, re-construction just stopped. Forever.

So in 2021, the Convento do Carmo sits in downtown Lisbon much the way it looked right after the 1755 earthquake as a beautiful ruin. It was one of the best places we visited in our few days in Lisbon on this trip.

Convento do Carmo: still ruined and reconstructed. 

For me, there's an obvious pull to the Convento do Carmo. There is nowhere else in Lisbon where you can get a sense first hand of how destructive the events of November 1, 1755 actually were. You can read all the stories and look at paintings and drawings of before and after conditions of the city on either side of the earthquake but there's only one spot in the city where you can lay eyes on what happened and that's at the Convento. 

It's absolutely amazing how something can still be standing this intact after 250 years the way this place is. It's a testament to the daring of the master stone masons who built gothic cathedrals all over Europe that with most of the building destroyed, the structure can remain erect. Admittedly, sometimes these men were too daring, but not in central Lisbon. And OK, there was a little stabilizing work done in the 1900s. I'd be cool with any of the buildings I've designed in my career still standing after this long. I'm not holding my breath.

It is worth every penny to be able to walk down the nave of the Convento church and look up and around. Gothic cathedrals have been some of my favorite buildings since I started studying architecture. I moved on past a lot of buildings from before the 1850s or so a long time ago, but not gothic cathedrals. It is so amazing to see the raw structure still standing after so much time. We never learned about this place in school. It is in many ways as impressive as any other gothic building I have ever set foot in. Especially on a gorgeous sunny day like the day we were there. The sky filled in the empty roof structure. 

There's another reason to visit the Convento. In 1864, the ruin was chosen to exhibit the collection of the Association of Portuguese Archaeologists, who had rescued and gathered objects at risk from destruction (mostly from the French and internal civil strife in the first half of the nineteenth century) throughout Portugal. The objects are still there. And there are a lot of them. 

In addition to visiting the ruin of the old Convento, you are also visiting the Carmo Archaeological Museum. It's a bit of an eclectic experience. There are objects from literally every period of Portuguese history, including some objects gathered (read: stolen) from the Americas dating to before the "discovery" of the New World by Christopher Columbus. 

The interior parts of the Museum actually have somewhat coherent collections. There are like types of exhibits (like the Pre-Columbian artifacts from what is now South America) gathered together in display cases telling a story. There are also some Moorish stone carvings which we appreciated; we searched high and low for some kind of Moorish experience in Portugal only to realize that most of it was just erased by the Christians who conquered them. It was actually harder to find evidence of the Moors in Portugal than it was finding evidence of the 1755 earthquake. Although ironically, we found the best of both in the exact same spot.

Moorish carvings and a fountain of unknown origin from the 17th or 18th century.

The outside portion of the Museum is a lot more random and (and I can't believe I'm saying this) a lot more fun. Objects are placed on the perimeter walls of the old ruined church with little regard for their age, function or relation to their neighbors. Fountains, coats of arms, tombstones, alms boxes, holy water fonts, crosses, sculptures, columns with or without capitals, capitals without columns, tombs, you name it. From everywhere. And anywhere. There's one (or more) of just about everything you could find made out of stone inside or around a church. Or other religious building for that matter.

It's an odd way of walking through a museum. So often, we are used to being led though exhibits that are connected together, usually with a narrative that connects stories or artifacts together. At the Convento, you just look at what interests you and then consult the descriptions of what is what. If you piece together the history then great. If not, then the experience is no less effective. Besides, I'm not sure it's really possible to connect the objects on display in the exterior portion of the Museum in any coherent way. 

I've been to other ruined castles and churches and other sorts of structures before. I am sure they are all over Europe and the world, laid to waste by armies or by bombing or just by time and nature overtaking what man put in place so long ago. I've also been to I don't know how museums built within the last 150 years or so displaying fragments of old buildings in them as exhibits. But I don't think I've been to a place quite like the Convento do Carmo before. The gravity of its own destruction both captured a specific time in history and leant weight to the objects it displayed, a destroyed building holding pieces from buildings destroyed way more completely than it was.

We visited the Convento do Carmo on a Sunday and found it closed. It's at the top of a pretty good hill (isn't everything in Lisbon?) and with a trip to Castelo São Jorge (which is at the top of an even bigger hill) scheduled the next day after a morning trip to Sintra, I almost gave up on a return trip to the Convento. I'm glad I didn't. Plus we still made it to the Castelo by hopping on the No. 28 tram. What better way to get there?

One last look at the Convento to the west into the setting sun.

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How We Did It

The Convento do Carmo / Carmo Archaeological Museum is located in central Lisbon on the historic Largo do Carmo square. Plug it into your favorite map app and walk along the dotted line (or whatever your app uses to show "the way") and presumably up some sort of hill until you get there. It's open from 10 am to 6 pm every day of the week except for Sundays, but also not on January 1, May 1 and December 25. Most museums in Lisbon are closed on Mondays, so if you are in the city on a Monday, the Convento is a great place to go.

If you approach the Convento from the east, like we did, and are using Google Maps, like I always do, the directions may be a little inscrutable. They take you past the Santa Justa Elevator and then actually show you walking right through a city block. There's no street or alley where Google Maps was taking us so we just walked around. That's not where Google Maps was taking us.

If you elect to use Google Maps and it shows you walking through something like it showed us, there's a small store across the street and just a bit to the right of the Santa Justa Elevator has has an elevator in the back of it. Take this elevator up to the roof, then walk up through what looked to be an outdoor (but totally empty) bar and get to the Convento much quicker and easier than walking around. Consider that my pro tip for this post.

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Pastéis

Sometimes we have to travel to find out what the fuss is all about. Maybe it's an historic site or a national park. It could be wildlife. Or a building. Or an experience. Sometimes it might be food. Or the people. Wherever you go in the world, there's always something that's the fuss. We went to Portugal for many reasons. But we figured while we were there, we may as well see what the fuss was all about with these pastel de nata things. 

Yes, we planned on a lot of dessert eating in Portugal.

I've written about food a whole lot on this blog. Over the past eight and a half years, food has been a part of some of my best travel memories. My love of food has shown up in comprehensive (from my perspective, at least) posts about everything I wanted to eat in a specific city or country or region. It's also shone in very focused studies of a specific type of food like gelato or a single street hot dog. For Portugal, the only food I'm going to write about is the pastel de nata.

That's not to say that we didn't have other great meals and snacks while we were in country. I highly recommend the ubiquitous salt cod croquettes and sardines; the tuna and sardine paste on any sort of bread; the black pork cheeks; and (very specifically, here) the nut tarts on the breakfast buffet of the Vitória Stone Hotel in Évora. But the pastel de nata is the thing.

We didn't want to go halfway on this one so we did a lot of in field research on this one. Like 12-1/2 (plus one additional bite) full size and one mini in-field research. It may have been overkill, but when else are we going to be in Portugal. I can't chance another 49 years between visits.

Pastéis de nata at Confeitaria do Balhão, Porto.

So, it's a custard tart, right? The ingredients that make up the pastel de nata are pretty simple: it's a puff pastry shell with a filling made from egg yolks, cream, sugar, flour and lemon zest. They are typically about three inches in diameter and about a half inch (or maybe a little bit more) high. The ideal pastel de nata has a crispy, crunchy crust and a filling that is smooth, not quite fully set and not overly sweet. They are sometimes (but not always, as we found out) served with cinnamon and powdered sugar to enhance the flavor and sweetness. And they are best warm, right out of the oven.

The origin of the pastry can be traced back to the monasteries and convents of Portugal. The story goes that egg whites used to be used to starch the nuns' habits, leaving the monks plenty of egg yolks to use up, which naturally led them to start using the yolks to make sweet treats for themselves and later to sell to raise money. I mean what else were they supposed to do with the yolks?

The source and timing of the origin of these pastries varies depending on which website on the internet that you read (I know, I know...always dangerous to read stuff on the internet and treat it as fact) but most seem to credit the Jerónimos Monastery in the Belém District of Lisbon with inventing these things sometime in the 18th century. Following the dissolution of the monasteries in Portugal in 1835, pastelerias (or whatever pastry shops were called in Portugal back then) started making the pastéis to replace what the monasteries could no longer crank out.

By the way, a singular pastry is called a pastel (pronounced pash-tel); more than one are pastéis (pronounced pash-taish). Quite frankly, one is not really enough. They typically are sold stacked with custard side together like a clamshell in sleeves of two or six. Go for the six. 

Jerónimos Monastery, Belém, Lisbon. Where it all (allegedly) started.

Finding a pastel de nata in Portugal is not a difficult task. They are almost literally everywhere, even on hotel breakfast buffets and in both airports we flew through. We certainly found it easier in Lisbon and Porto but pastelarias and confeiterias are plentiful in this country (the pastel de nata is not the only pastry available in Portugal by a long shot). You shouldn't have any issue finding them.

If there's one iconic place to get a pastel de nata, it's at Pastéis de Belém, which is on the block next to the Jerónimos Monastery. While there's some debate maybe about where and exactly when the original pastel de nata was invented, there seems to be little debate about where the first shop selling these things was established. It's here. In 1837. As evidence of how little debate there is about this fact, they don't even call the pastries pastel de nata. Here, they are pastel de Belém.

Based on everything we had read about Pastéis de Belém, we expected a long line here. We found none, perhaps because we got there before nine in the morning, and walked right in and ordered a few to go. They came in the characteristic six-sided cardboard sleeve with to-go packets of cinnamon and powdered sugar tucked into the flap that closes the sleeve. Time to find a park bench (also not a difficult task in Portugal) and eat.

In my opinion, if you are looking for a custard tart in Lisbon, you can't go wrong with Pastéis de Belém. The puff pastry was super crispy; the custard tasted about as custard-y as you could possibly want with the slightest hint of lemon; and it was warm with a smooth texture to the filling. Of all the pastéis we had while in Portugal, the crust of the pastéis we had here stands out as the most memorable. It probably attracts more tourists than any other place selling these things, but it delivers.

Our Pastéis de Belém experience in three pics. We tried these with and without cinnamon and sugar.

To be perfectly frank, Pastéis de Belém checked all of the boxes (crispy crust, warm, slightly runny filling, sweet but not too sweet with a hint of lemon) for an ideal pastel, probably because they are focused on making and selling these things as THE core of their business, rather than making a dozen or way more different types of pastries. Although they do actually make other things.

There were honestly very few places that did check all the boxes. All too often we found ourselves eating cold pastries or non-crispy shells or scrambled-eggy looking fillings when biting into a pastel from whatever spot we happened to be in. Very few had all three of these things, although the taste was mostly right pretty much everywhere we went (it's not all about the taste). Most other pastéis came with at least one deficiency. Some came close and some (like the mini ones from our Évora hotel breakfast buffet; yes, the same one with the amazing nut tarts) fell way short.

As amazing as the Pastéis de Belém are, they were not our favorite in Portugal. That honor goes to Manteigaria.

The interior of Manteigaria at Rua do Loreto 2 in Lisbon.

Maybe it was the novelty of our first bite that pushed Manteigaria to the top of our list. They were the first we tasted after all, in downtown Lisbon's stall at the Time Out Market Lisbon. They were warm with the correct, creamy texture and a crispy shell. Boxes checked, checked and checked. I took notes as I sampled each of the 13+ pastéis I bit into during our week plus in Portugal. I believe those from Manteigaria were one of the only two (along with Pastéis de Belém) that were made perfectly. I also remember them as less sweet, less eggy and with slightly more lemon than those in Belém. And those differences, to me, made all the difference.

To be perfectly fair to Pastéis de Belém (and after all we needed to do a lot of research here...) we went back to Manteigaria for a second tasting to make sure they were better, and we agreed our first impression that they were the best was correct. But honestly. there's not much in it. And these two places separated themselves easily from the competition in every other spot we visited. It is definitely worth seeking both of these places out in Lisbon (and Porto, in the case of Manteigaria). I could eat a couple (or three) of these things for breakfast right now as I'm finalizing this post. From Manteigaria, of course, if I had my druthers. 

Since I started writing this blog, we've had some amazing food in many corners of the globe, but I'm not sure we've ever had a cheaper and more fun quest for perfection in a food item anywhere in the world. These things are at worst just good and at best pure bliss to eat, with most of those that we ate tending to be toward the bliss end of the spectrum. They are incredibly cheap (if you pay more than €1,20 or so for a pastél anywhere other than an airport, you are overpaying significantly) and they can stand repeated and often eating, especially with all the hills in Lisbon and Porto. I'm confident I can work these things off super quickly. Or at least that's what I kept telling myself.

End of food blogging about Portugal for me. I don't know what else really needs to be said about the state of food in Portugal that can't be explained by a quest for the perfect pastel de nata.

"Pastel de nata, cream cake from Portugal". Breakfast buffet man-splaining in Évora.

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How We Did It

It is not difficult to find a pastel de nata in Portugal. There are pastry shops everywhere. Just walk into one, find something that looks like the pictures on this post and ask for one or more (and really consider more than one, please) by speaking rudimentary Portuguese, holding up fingers or just using English (it will likely work just fine). I hope what you find is as good as what we found. If not, keep eating them. There are quality pastéis out there. There's a good article from a couple of years ago on Eater.com (I don't know where we would be with food when traveling if it were not for Eater) that pointed us in the right direction, although we did not LOVE every place on this list.

If you are in Lisbon or Porto, I'd highly recommend a trip to Manteigaria. They have (I believe) five locations in Lisbon and one in Porto. We visited the locations on Rua do Loreto and in the Time Out Market in Lisbon and walked past the one in Porto on the way to sample an inferior pastel at another establishment. All the Manteigaria shops open at 8 a.m. and stay open until at least 8 p.m. with some locations open until midnight. The Rua do Loreto location is located at the northwest corner of the Praça Luis de Camões which has plentiful benches for pastéis eating.

If you make it to the Time Out Market in Lisbon, there are a lot more excellent eating choices to make than just Manteigaria. We had the best bacalao croquettes of the trip at Sea Me and a pretty good prego sandwich from Café de São Bento. I'm sure there is a lot more good food at the other stalls. Grab a table, browse and eat what strikes your fancy. 

Belém is a 30 minute or so bus or tram ride from downtown Lisbon. Both the Jerónimos Monastery and Pastéis de Belém are worth a visit. Pastéis de Belém is open from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily. The Monastery is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday (like a lot of sights in Lisbon it is closed on Mondays). Our visit to the Monastery took about 45 minutes and I think we really took our time. There is some pretty impressive stone and tile work in the place, but that's another story for another time.

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