Porto’s summer bash - [Times Online - June 3, 2007]

[Mario Ferreira]

URL: http://travel.timesonline.co.uk/tol/lif ... 869908.ece

June 3, 2007

Porto’s summer bash

Chris West finds carnival, colour and chaos at Portugal’s Sao Joao, one of Europe's oldest street festivals

It’s getting dark now and Porto’s getting ready. A man in his party-best football shirt rolls up his garage door and pushes a small barbecue out onto the pavement with his foot. He sets an old bucket filled with ice and cans of local beer beside his chair. It’s not clear whether this is for his personal consumption or for sale.

In fact, most of what’s going on here isn’t explained. Sao Joao, held on St John’s eve (June 23), is one of Europe’s oldest street festivals.

There’s no signage, no apparent timetable to the evening’s events and no obvious crowd control of any kind.

Later on, we’ll become stuck in human gridlock, hundreds of thousands of people packed in so tight we’re unable to move three feet in any direction – even if we did know which direction we wanted to go. But right now, there’s a giddy air of expectation, geed up by the samba beats pouring out from the band that is warming up on top of their bus parked at the kerb.

Before the long night begins, we need to eat. A table in the swish surroundings of restaurant Dom Tonho offers a world of orderliness (if you’ve booked far enough in advance) and the chance to try the festival speciality of caldo verde, a starchy soup made from cabbage, potatoes and, lurking somewhere at the bottom, a chunk of smoked sausage. It’s a dish that is clearly made with love and, respecting that love, let’s say it is an acquired taste.

A glass or two of port helps the process of relaxing into the evening – even though the city is the centre of the port-wine trade, there’s very little port-pushing that goes on. Most visitors will take a trip to one of the warehouses across the river for a free tasting, but Sao Joao is definitely not a festival of alcohol-fuelled excess.

It’s something you feel grateful for when you’re being hit over the head with a hammer. Nobody knows, or perhaps can be bothered to find out, the origins of the festival, but hitting each other over the head with 6ft bundles of garlic was a big part of it. Presumably, in some midsummer pagan time, this was found to be beneficial because it meant you could a) drive out evil spirits and b) flirt. Modern life touches Porto gently, and now more people do their hitting with plastic hammers that go “peep!” than with garlic, which used to leave you – and them – whiffing.

The hammering goes on all night – it’s the most endearing part of the festival. How unfriendly can a crowd be, when everyone’s hitting each other over the head with a hammer that goes “peep!”?

Somewhere there’s a giant fixed sound stage, the focus of that evening’s televised coverage. There are more open-top buses with samba bands on top. Impromptu street parties spring up everywhere.

At midnight, everyone stops to watch the fireworks, launched from a string of barges anchored in the middle of the river. It’s a display that starts big and ends by ripping the air apart. Fifteen minutes into it and the whole of the river valley is cloudy with smoke. At the climax, the air thumps against your chest and there’s a communal sense of release as it finishes.

After the fireworks, things become more chaotic. There are more parties, more music coming from windows and garages, more samba bands, perhaps a little more beer and, impossibly, perhaps as they are released from their parties at home, even more people. Deciding where to go is not really an option. You can stand where you are already or get randomly moved along in the crowd.

Somewhere in the early hours, trying to head back to our hotel, we found ourselves gridlocked. Twenty yards away, we could see a side street deserted, but we couldn’t get to it. One teenage girl, at the end of a panic attack, was carried through the crowd and we took our chance and followed.

We had reached a dead end, a slipway into the river, but here we discovered a boy on the threshold of manhood, who will always be remembered as the Captain. His idea to overcome the chaos of the festival was to borrow his dad’s 9ft cabin-cruiser. But the true awe-inspiring genius of his idea was to leave it on the back of the trailer.

The Captain is no fool, and he knew that by midnight, he would be decidedly unseaworthy. When we found him, he was standing proudly on the rear deck of his ship, shirtless, trousers loose at his waist. After a couple of minutes, his girlfriend emerged from the cabin, listing to starboard. They held hands, proud on top of their boat on top of their trailer, only inches from the water, and watched as little fire lanterns soared into the sky.

Travel details: Kirker Holidays (020 7593 2288, http://www.kirkerholidays.co.uk) has three nights’ B&B at a three-star hotel over the festival weekend from £379pp, with flights from Heathrow and transfers. Or try Cities Direct (0870 442 1820, http://www.citiesdirect.co.uk ).