It tries to be Antwerp’s Leysstraat and, easily shrugging off excess dimension and lack of golden finials, at least holds its own. It wants to be Prague’s Wenceslas Square but, despite similar overall effect and greater uniformity, runs out of steam, out of length, out of height. It sets out to rival the Champs-Elysees but finds itself desperately lacking in everything, from street furniture to street life. Hey, that’s all right: there is no such thing as copyright in historic architecture, no real rules against plagiarism, and no outrage over cultural or stylistic appropriation. Flanked by twin tall walls of elegant facades of exquisite detail – and crowned by a skyline of no fewer than two dozen domes, spires, turrets and towers, large and small – this public place is a photographer’s wet dream. And a must-see. This is Avenida dos Aliados, Porto’s main open space and half bloated avenue, half overstretched square, its lower segment known as praca da Liberdade.
It opens up suddenly and with no warning, expect to be blown away. But for the most dramatic, dumbfounding effect, approach it from one of its corners along its Southern edge nearest the center. Whether you get there by descending along rua Clerigos from an eponymous church at its Western end or down down rua da 31 de Janeiro from the colorful azulejo-covered Santo Ildefonso church at its Eastern end is ultimately unimportant, these are Western and Eastern segments of the same long street dating back from the 18th century. A street that seems suspended, like a rope, from the high points marked by these two magnificent churches at either end: you would need to descend to the street’s bottom in the middle where it sags under its own weight it. All along, the long, narrow perspective down then up the street entirely steals the show until you find yourself planted at the corner of the Intercontinental where it unexpectedly opens onto the expanse of praca da Liberdade, fka praca Don Pedro. And from there, to a grand, postcard-like perspective of Avenida dos Aliados to the North. The view, your back turned to the hotel, is simply jaw dropping, the unlikely juxtaposition of buildings of such grandeur and elegance with Porto‘s size – even the size of the city at its peak, when it was built – is striking. Just pausing here to take in the perspective can be a true experience, even if architecture as such somehow leaves you for the most part indifferent.
I would venture to say that Porto was absurdly lucky with its timing. Lucky that its centrally planned program of urban improvements, started after 1815 and 1848 elsewhere and just about finished by the time it was being launched here, took significantly longer. Lucky that its City Improvements Plan, drawn up only in 1881, prioritized initially on the now iconic Ponte de Dom Luis I by a disciple of Gustave Eiffel and on projects related to basic infrastructure, public health and sanitation. That its central zone street widening plans, including a central garden boulevard connecting the monument to Pedro IV and the Trinidade church, took until 1889 to lay out, and that the focus of the plan quickly drifted off to the development of other central avenues and the Sao Bento station to decongest the dense and topographically challenged city center. In a way, even lucky that the Revolution of 1910 intervened, bringing with it more pressing if less tangible matters that typically come when a centuries old Monarchy is replaced with a Republic. All said and done, the 1889 amelioraion plans for a new boulevard between two squares was only acted on in 1915. The timing – when the rest of Europe, entrenched and committed to a task of destruction, had no time for construction of any sort, certainly nothing new and grand – allowed Porto, despite its diminutive size and secondary status in a country well past its peak, to draw on an underused pool of top European talent desperately looking for commissions. In a perverse way, impeccable timing if the goal was to execute on a dramatically oversized, transformational urban project. With all due respect to Porto‘s long history of Italian, French, and British influence and investment, this intervention by the City Hall, with British help, managed to outdo all others.
Just go early, very early, before colorful tour buses show up on its near right corner, threatening to throw off the otherwise near perfectly monochromatic built environment – in grey and white, like most of the rest of this city – deep contrasts of early morning sun amplifying the Beaux Arts detail. The height of the blocks on either side of the avenue nearest the Intercontinental are respectfully one story lower, they are set back further along that block behind the sidewalks that are that much wider, as if out of deference to the old: the proportions of the Intercontinental and the subdued scale of nearby pre-Pombaline structures. The facades get taller and more saturated immediately behind. Then the height of the elevations, the nuance of the window bays, the angular complexity of the skyline, the depth of the stone carvings – all carefully measured, calibrated and orchestrated to work as one – gradually soften as one continues to navigate up the avenue’s gently sloping axis, away from the masterfully executed equestrian stature to king Pedro IV and towards the avenue’s wider, upper end.
The seemingly synchronized ensemble of buildings here spans a timeline of nearly two full centuries, starting with the 18th century Palacio das Cardosas – the oldest structure at the avenue’s lower end now claimed by the Intercontinental – and ending with the towering monolith of the City Hall planted at its far end – it looks appropriately straight-out-of-Flanders, albeit more Northern French than proper Flemish. The avenue feels deceptively old world, authentic in its outward veneer, articulated with meticulous attention to detail, and impeccably executed. But not so fast – a reluctant fact check quickly proves this to be fake news, an optical illusion, thoroughly counter-intuitive even to a trained eye of a wandering student of urban history – the ornate buildings lining its sides are all post WWI, and the City Hall, started in 1920, was completed only in 1955. Praca Don Pedro was there first; Avenida dos Aliados – a central garden, lined on both sides by twin tree-lined avenues, specified in the original 1889 plan and reaffirmed in 1915 – was its extension, by three long blocks, away from the old center and up the hill. So much for a sense of ‘history’ these facades so convincingly convey. Neoclassical, eclecticist, Beaux Art, they are already built in ‘pseudo’ styles, does such a flashback from a later era make them ‘pseudo’ all over again, and if so, do the negatives cancel out? It certainly seems that way: this is what the 1920’s could look like throughout the rest of the continent had Europe managed to find a way to walk back from the brink and avoid the collective suicide of August 1914 that ended the old world as we know it.
Sadly, in contrast to its worthy peers in Antwerp and Prague, this eye candy of a public place is almost entirely devoid of life – pedestrian, residential, social, recreational, at least outside of planned celebrations – outdoor terraces here are almost nonexistent, the street level windows host barely a cafe or two, and the spaces behind the ornate facades have been permanently taken over by various depository and lending institutions and an occasional faded hotel. Adding a deliberate insult to injury of gradual decay, the gardens lining its central strip were demolished over a decade ago – sanctioned as an architect-led public works project as if to make up for brutalist opportunity lost at its inception – to be paved over in anticipation of some vague ceremonies to come. A drastic departure from the 1889 embellishment plan by Carlos de Pezerat. No wonder the open space in between resembles an exceedingly well-proportioned parking lot that somehow won the lottery for the finest of architectural surroundings.
The dreadful void of the avenue’s vast central space nearly swallows the surrounding building envelope. Hidden by the shining statue of the king, a sea – a desert – of undifferentiated asphalt grey cobbles opens up immediately as one moves past the equestrian monument. The chilling emptiness of the central strip remains unfilled until one reaches the steps of the unabashedly oversized City Hall building that seems to completely seal off the upper end of the square, in fact it gets worse as one proceeds towards it. No fountains, carousels, flower beds or cafe pavilions here, no shaded outdoor terrace tables of Porto’s Largo Sao Domingos, no fresh juice quiosques of Lisbon’s praca Luis de Camoes, and no calcada patterns of Lisbon’s Liberdade, Rossio or Municipio: any of these would have done so much to ameliorate this space. Small modern statues along the way are dwarfed and fail to make a difference. And as a result, absolutely no reason to walk up or down the central strip other than to admire the king’s statue and the facades on either side as your attention will invariably drift back to the building envelope behind the tree lined sidewalks on either side of the wasted space. In this battle of articulated volumes with negative space, the avenue’s exquisite built environment it is so lucky to have somehow manages to hang on and even prevails. Avenida dos Aliados is a singular sight in all of Portugal – its architecture will not fail to impress, even at its current low point, if examined properly – is most highly recommended for a purposeful observation. Keep your head up high, stay focused on the roof ridge silhouettes and on the corner buildings, and once you reach the steps of the Camara Municipal, the City Hall, you will be rewarded with a panoramic view of the avenue now sloping down towards its narrow side, past the roof of the palatial Intercontinental and over the shallow red tile roofs of Porto’s old center, the Douro, and Villa Nova de Gaia beyond. Keep in mind that the square narrows as it slopes towards Don Pedro and the Palacio da Cardosas where you started, a visual effect that heightens concentration and saturation of detail, bringing forward the vanishing point just before the view spills into an open roofscape behind the central pediment of the Intercontinental.
Just don’t forget to step outside Avenida dos Aliados – a maze of anonymous alleys surrounding it hides Baixa on one flank and Mercado do Bolhao on the other, easily discovered from here. Behind the far end of the giant open space of the avenue is Igreja da Trinidade, a baroque gem thoroughly hidden by the imitation City Hall, unfortunately rarely mentioned, and therefore worth a look.
