Ribeira das Naus: Spices, Sugar and the Royal Shipyard

Why is it significant?

Walk down onto the wide stone steps of Ribeira das Naus, where the riverbank slopes gently into the Tagus and people sit with their shoes off watching the boats. The water here is salty, almost sea, and the river is so wide that on a hazy day the far shore looks like another country.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk down onto the wide stone steps of Ribeira das Naus, where the riverbank slopes gently into the Tagus and people sit with their shoes off watching the boats. The water here is salty, almost sea, and the river is so wide that on a hazy day the far shore looks like another country.

This was the royal shipyard, the Ribeira das Naus, the Shore of the Ships. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the caravels and the great naus of the India fleets were built and fitted out right here, beside the royal palace that stood where the big square is now. Inside that palace a royal office, the Casa da Índia, handled what came back: pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger. For a few decades Lisbon was one of the great spice markets of Europe.

Taste a Portuguese dessert and you taste that history. Cinnamon on rice pudding, cinnamon on the custard tart. Sugar came first from Madeira, then from Brazil, and the convents of Portugal turned sugar and egg yolks into an astonishing range of sweets. The traditional explanation is that egg whites were used to starch clothes and clear wine, leaving mountains of yolks that had to go somewhere.

That sweetness had a terrible price. The sugar plantations of Madeira, São Tomé and Brazil were worked by enslaved Africans, and Portuguese ships carried millions of people across the Atlantic over more than three centuries. The sugar in Europe's cakes was grown by people in chains, and Lisbon has only recently begun to speak about that openly.

Food travelled the other way too. The story goes that Portuguese missionaries and merchants in sixteenth-century Japan ate battered fried vegetables on fast days, the ancestor of Lisbon's peixinhos da horta, the little fish of the garden, which are really green beans, and that the Japanese turned the idea into tempura, from the Latin word for the fasting seasons. Now walk west along the river and step up into Rua do Arsenal, a street of old grocers where the cod is stacked at the door.