The Festivities of Lisbon will be made up of memories: from Vasco Santana to Expo 98

Vasco Santana will be remembered "in revelry and sin." The Olharapos return to the Expo. The camp festivities are maintained throughout the city but this year they want to be more sustainable. This is the menu of the popular festivities of the capital.

            This is the time of the sardine dripping on bread, the glass of wine in hand, the dancing and the basil. The Lisbon Festivities, which start in a week, rhyme with music and fun, but this year they have a taste for memory.

The Lisbon tradition returns with the popular marches down Avenida da Liberdade on the night of 12 to 13 June. It will be Vasco Santana who will guide them this year, in a way to celebrate the 120 years of his birth. Along the avenue, all the marches will interpret the theme "Vasco é Saudade", winner of the Great March of Lisbon 2018 contest.

This year, "exceptionally", 23 marches are going to take place, after the groups of Alto do Pina, Santa Engrácia and Benfica have requested the participation, raising doubts about the new regulation of the Lisbon marches.

They are the most complex and riskiest activity that EGEAC [Company for Equipment Management and Cultural Animation] organizes throughout the year, "acknowledged the president of this municipal company, Joana Gomes Cardoso, in the presentation of the program of the parties, which took place this friday in the Arroios Market.

"If we think that a few years ago we were afraid that the popular marches would end, nowadays the context is the opposite. We have a lot of growth pains," she continued, referring to the problems that were raised this year.

But the party continues, with "a vast program that gathers and builds on the manifestation that is more traditional, popular, neighborhood heavy in the city," said the mayor, Fernando Medina.

For the third year, lisboners are challenged to recreate the Santo Antonio Thrones, in articulation with the Lisbon Museum. "The thrones are already all over the city and not just in the historical zones," noted Joana Gomes Cardoso. But the tradition will follow by the marriages of St. Anthony, in which 16 couples will tie the knot on the morning of June 12, in the Lisbon Cathedral.

The festivities also come to the Parque das Nações in the year that two decades pass on one of the great moments of "a turn in the cultural life of the city", the Expo 98. There are multimedia shows and the performance of Olharapos, just at the start of the holidays, in the Pala of the Pavilion of Portugal.

Bruno Portela's photographs, which depict the area before the urban intervention made more than 20 years ago, will be scattered throughout the streets. "You are not here" inaugurates on June 9 to make known to the new generations, and in 70 photos, an area that was nothing more than a warehouse of abandoned factories, where an oil company, a landfill and a slaughterhouse came to operate.

Various expressions

But the Lisbon Festivities are also "a space for the various expressions", said Joana Gomes Cardoso. From art to children, with the reopening of the Luís de Camões Theater, to the plastic arts, for those who accept the challenge of creating their own sardines, music and fado. In the Castle of São Jorge, there will be silence to hear the fado by the voices of Carlos do Carmo, Carminho, Camané, on June 14, 15 and 16, respectively.

Already on Saturday, the 2nd, music plays in Terreiro do Paço, with the concert of the Orquestra Geração, the project of social inclusion that educates young musicians of disadvantaged communities, with the Gulbenkian Orchestra, especially dedicated to lovers of the Star Wars saga .

If the Festivities are "an expression of Lisbon's neighborhood-ism", as Fernando Medina pointed out, they are also an opportunity to show "the many realities" that the city has. "There's space for everything in the Lisbon Festivities", emphasized the mayor. It is to promote this "meeting of cultures" that the Lisboa Mistura festival and the Diversity Festival will return with shows in Ribeira das Naus, starting on June 7.

The party program ends on June 30 in the Torre de Belém garden with a concert by Gilberto Gil, who celebrates the 40th anniversary of the album "Refavela" and will have guests like Mayra Andrade.

There is much parallel scheduling during this month of partying in Lisbon, that can be consulted in culturanarua.pt. 

Cups are “to refill”

Throughout the month, the camps will multiply through the city's neighborhoods, from Vila Berta, in Graça, to Lumiar. On the 23rd, Terreiro do Paço will once again host Arraial Pride, one of the biggest events for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) population, with a party from 4 pm to 4 am.

This year, the Lisbon City Hall, in partnership with the Central de Cervejas, wants to reduce the amount of plastic, and garbage, that are on the streets of the city at the end of a night out.

The message is engraved on the glasses, "É para repetir" (This is to refill), read on reusable cups that will be on sale and are intended to be an incentive to the recycling of traditional glasses.

"It will not be possible yet throughout the city, because the camps are huge and spread throughout the city, but in all organizations of concerts in organized spaces, this will be the method used," Fernando Medina told the journalists, at the end of the presentation of the festival schedule.

The mayor also recalled that during the month of June, the capital could receive "between one million and two million people in the center of the city" because of the St. Anthony festivities.