Rua dos Bacalhoeiros: The Street of the Salt Cod Merchants

Why is it significant?

Walk a little way along Rua dos Bacalhoeiros, a long, straight street of old shopfronts heading east toward the Alfama, and breathe in. Somewhere nearby, if you are lucky, you will catch it: the sharp, salty, unmistakable smell of dried cod.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk a little way along Rua dos Bacalhoeiros, a long, straight street of old shopfronts heading east toward the Alfama, and breathe in. Somewhere nearby, if you are lucky, you will catch it: the sharp, salty, unmistakable smell of dried cod.

Bacalhoeiros means salt cod merchants, and this was their street, close to the old riverbank where the ships unloaded. And here is the great paradox of Portuguese food: the national fish does not swim in Portuguese waters. Cod lives in the cold North Atlantic. Portuguese fishermen were already sailing to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland in the 1500s, and cod salted and dried on board kept for months, perfect for a seafaring nation, and for a Catholic one with so many days a year without meat.

Its hardest chapter came in the twentieth century. Under the Estado Novo dictatorship, cod became a matter of national policy, and every spring the White Fleet sailed for Newfoundland and Greenland. The men fished alone from tiny flat-bottomed dories, lowered from the mother ship at dawn, handlining for hours in fog and freezing water. Some never found their way back. A hospital ship, the Gil Eannes, sailed with the fleet to care for them. That way of fishing ended only in the 1970s.

Out of all that hardship came a cuisine. The Portuguese like to say there are three hundred and sixty-five ways to cook bacalhau, one for every day of the year, and some insist there are a thousand. Bacalhau à Brás, shredded with matchstick potatoes and egg, said to be named after a tavern keeper in the Bairro Alto. Pastéis de bacalhau, little fried cakes. And on Christmas Eve, simply boiled with cabbage, potatoes, eggs and plenty of olive oil.

At the far end, the palace whose façade bristles with diamond-pointed stones is the Casa dos Bicos, built in the 1520s for the son of Afonso de Albuquerque. Just beyond it lies Campo das Cebolas, the Onion Field, once a riverside market. Every name around here reads like a shopping list. Now turn back west toward the great riverside square, and look for the arcades in its north-east corner.