Bairro Alto: Graffiti in Lisbon

Bairro Alto is the hippy part of Lisbon. Tiny winding streets paved with haphazard cobbles weave past minuscule bars where truck drivers sit and chat with the most famous fashion designers and musicians in the country. It's a completely unique part of the city where you can wander, lost but happy, up and down the steep streets, stopping for a coffee and a chat with the proprietor of a random cafe that sits in between a dusty shop selling canned sardines in paper bags to elderly ladies with hankies on their heads and an edgy design shop spilling techno music into the streets. It's a wonderful clash of cultures, a place where everyone can feel that they belong. Years ago it was the part of the city where the anarchists would meet to discuss the revolution being planned in '75. From being a slum, it's gone to being one of the most fashionable nightspots in the country but trendy as it gets, those crumbling and tiled walls will always call to graffiti artists. Murals sprawl drunkenly across all buildings, from the most ramshackle decrepit old houses to the most modern and gleaming shopfronts. In other cities graffiti can have an organised and themed feel but in Lisbon it feels as if every sixteen year old art student has gone through a rite of passage where they get drunk for the first time in the streets of Bairro Alto and are handed a can of spraypaint and pointed at the nearest vertical surface, whatever it may be.