Livraria Bertrand

Why is it significant?

You are standing on Rua Garrett, the steep, elegant spine of Chiado, in front of a bookshop window that has been tempting people since before the United States existed.

Key Facts

Open the walk

You are standing on Rua Garrett, the steep, elegant spine of Chiado, in front of a bookshop window that has been tempting people since before the United States existed. Behind this glass, books have been sold for nearly three centuries, and in 2011 Guinness World Records named it the oldest operating bookshop on the planet.

The business was founded in 1732 by a Frenchman, Pedro Faure, and later passed into the hands of the Bertrand family, also French, whose name stayed above the door. But it was not always on this street. The first shop stood a little further up the hill, and on the morning of 1 November 1755 it was destroyed, along with most of downtown Lisbon, by the great earthquake, the tsunami and the fires that followed. The booksellers reopened here, on what was then called Rua das Portas de Santa Catarina, in 1773.

Think about who has walked through this door. The historian Alexandre Herculano, the novelist Eça de Queirós, and later a thin man in a hat and round glasses called Fernando Pessoa, who lived much of his life within a few hundred metres of this spot. Lisbon writers did not just buy books here... they argued, gossiped and checked whether anyone was reading theirs.

And the street itself carries a writer's name. Almeida Garrett, born in 1799, was the great Romantic of Portuguese letters, a poet, playwright, liberal soldier and exile, and the man who pushed for a national theatre in Lisbon. Chiado has always been the city's literary salon, the place where you came to be seen with a book under your arm. This walk follows that thread: bookshops, cafés, statues of poets, the presses of Bairro Alto, and a few miradouros where those writers came to stare at the river.

Before we meet Pessoa in bronze, we go to the place where he first saw the light. Head down Rua Serpa Pinto, the street dropping south from here, to a small square in front of an opera house.