Ajuda
{
"UUID": "b687f1d2-60e8-491b-9db9-fd9d101e755b",
"Title": "Ajuda",
"ShortDescription": "A weekend walk around the parish of Ajuda",
"PublishedDate": "2026-05-25",
"LastUpdated": "2026-05-25",
"URL": "ajuda",
"WordCount": 3691,
"ReadingTimeMinutes": 15
}On the western-most side of Lisbon, on a limestone hill, nestled in between Belem and Alcantara is Ajuda, a devotional centre (owed to a 14th century Marian apparition) turned civil parish that saw its population more than quadruple after people sought higher ground in the aftermath of 1755’s infamous earthquake. It's also been my home for the last few years, and every so often I like to take a walk around as much of the neighbourhood as I can.
This Saturday, I started my walk in the Jardim Botânico da Ajuda, a roughly 35,000m2 park established in 1768 to support the royal court's scientific programs (making it Portugal's oldest botanical garden). The garden can easily be access from the Belem train station by riding the 729 bus straight up Calçada da Ajuda.
Walking past the admission booth and into the garden, you find yourself standing on a raised stone platform with stairs descending down in front of you, and on either sides a continuous ramp – to the left, leading down, similarly into the garden, and to the right leading slightly upwards to a platform with more plants that runs parallel to the garden itself. I opt to first walk upwards and view the garden from above.
The collection of plants today is much smaller than it was back in the 18th century when it had over 5,000 species, and I walk through the small planter boxes housing much of the present-day collection on the raised platform, weaving and dodging the booths that have been set up (as it turns out, I have come the day of an event being hosted in the garden and so there are little stations on foldout tables manned by volunteers set up around the garden). On the upper-terraces' railing there is an all-white peacock perched – the first time I have seen such a bird.
The garden itself was designed by Domenico Agostino Vandelli, an Italian naturalist who had been invited by King José I to educate the royal family and to aid in modernizing scientific study in Portugal. Although I have at the time of writing this not been to Italy, it is my understanding that this garden's design takes great influence from the Baroque gardens typical at the time from Vandelli's home country – most similar to my untrained eye, the two-level terraced layout, which I now descend from above into the hedges of lower garden area.
The hedges in the parterre of the garden area come up to only my knees next to the walkways, but each row of hedges, spaced by about one foot in between them, slowly ascend in height, giving the illusion of a small rising wave of shrubbery moving away from the path I stood on. In contrast to the upper terrace, which had been filled with the chatter of visitors and children playing, being fifteen feet below amongst the hedges was nearly dead silent with very few people – all I can hear is the fountains and the calls of peacocks.
Upon exiting the garden and stepping onto Calçada da Ajuda, an artery that slices down the middle of the parish, I am immediately enveloped in the noise of the parish; the busses, cars and people moving up and down the hill past the entrance to the grounds. Directly across the road is the 'Junta de Freguesia', the Parish council building where I had sat in on Portuguese lessons last summer.
I round the corner and duck quickly into a quieter suburban cobbled lane to get away from the noise of the main drag and walk southwards until I reach Anemia Specialty Coffee, a relatively new coffee shop, where I planned to have my first coffee of the day and sit in the sun in the bay window at the front of the small shop, overlooking the street. I ask the barista what bean he'd recommend to someone who enjoys their coffee bright and acidic, such as myself, and he makes a suggestion, a bean from a Danish roaster, but admits he hasn't yet it himself. I go for it anyways, and he makes extra so that he can give it a taste.
I wait for the last pour of water to finish filtering through V60 he has placed in front of me as I listen to Alcione, a Brazilian samba singer, playing over the speakers. The coffee itself is a bit acidic, but not as I would normally have my coffee – instead it's acidity makes me think of the kind of acidity one would taste if you could take a big mouthful of the red sand in Prince Edward Island (an idealized version of the red-sand-taste of course; I really do mean this in a good way, as unappetizing an image that may paint). The aftertaste developed into a vanilla ice cream flavour, which was pleasant.
I continue on down the road until it opens into a triangular village square, pass the Largo da Paz fountain and hang a right turn at the street corner just past Sossego, a restaurant I have yet to try personally but that I have been recommended – today it is open and seemed busy given it wasn't even noon when I passed.
The right turn I take lands me in front of Portugal's Olympic Committee office, but as it is closed on the weekend I continue down Traverssa da Memória until I hit the street corner with the butcher, Talho do Zé-Tó, turn north, and walk to Igreja da Memória, a limestone church commemorating the failed assassination attempt on Dom José I in 1758 that happened in this area. In the past I have made small donations and been allowed to access the top balcony, which grants you a look downhill over the southern half of Ajuda, then Belem, and then the Tagus River. The grounds around the church have sloped grass hills, on which the locals let their dogs run (many are out today), and park benches, some shaded by a dense swath of trees in the south-eastern corner of the lot (towards the Olympic Committee building).
Past the church is a small side street, Calçada da Memória, upon which you will see an old Fado venue to your right, if you approached from the south as I did. The building first caught my eye weeks ago while on another walk: it has gorgeous azulejos with a blue, green and yellow flowered pattern. A tattered banner hangs above the door that read "Pátio da Memória: Comida Caseira * Restaurante", but what interested me more was the tile work directly above the doorway: an eight-by-three tile painting of a scroll laid out horizontally with thin, tall, elegant lettering that spelled "SOLAR DO FADO", the prepositional phrase smaller than the other two words, with a mandolin painted behind it. By searching through old property registries and doing some further digging on local museum websites (unfortunately talking to long-time Ajuda residents at the laundromat had surfaced no new information about the place) I was able to find that this was, up until recently, a restaurant, but formerly the venue of Ajuda born-and-raised Fado singer Filipe Duarte, who opened it in the late 1980s. Today the building sits vacant, a layer of dirt built up on the tiles, windows boarded, and largely hidden from the road by the scaffolding covering the facade of the building next door.
Further north I walk the opposite side of the road to the statue of João Gonçalves Zarco. The sidewalk is shaded by the trees and to my left is a fence lined with plants that smell like lavender and cinnamon and the sweetest of spring flowers. Around the corner, towards the Continente grocery store the sweet smell disappears, giving way to the thick smell of tobacco and cigarette smoke wafting from the sidewalk patios of the small Portuguese coffee shops that line the street.
Despite just having walked uphill for a kilometre and a half I am now stood at the base of another hill, the path up this one cutting through the vividly green grassy fields of Moinhos de Santana park. While not technically Ajuda (the park sits right on the border and is technically Belém), exiting from the north will bring us back into Ajuda, and so I travel up through the park, winding my way through palm trees and fountains, until I find a route that swings out to the most western edge of the green space and loops around the back of the hill before dropping me off at a 'miradouro' at the very top of Moinhos de Santana, overlooking the parish. The top of the hill also sports two 18th century windmills, the namesake of the park: these were in the past used for the supplying of flour to Lisbon, and to my knowledge are some of the very few that have been kept in as good of shape as they are in. Behind the park is a Galp, and I stop to get a bottle of water before continuing my walk.
I'm now amongst the municipal housing blocks, known as Bairro Dois de Maio. The name, translating in English to "May 2nd Neighbourhood", is an apt reference to the date of May 2nd, 1974, when unhoused families began occupying unfinished constructions owned by the Salazar Foundation following the collapse of the Salazar's dictatorship just two weeks earlier (in the mid-1990s ownership of the neighbourhood was passed to the Lisbon City Council).
Bairro Dois de Maio has been the subject of a number of organized urban arts projects, and so equipped with the goal of wandering around and picking out some of the resulting murals, I start at the very top of the neighbourhood, at a piece commemorating 40 years since the 25th of April and move down the road a short distance to see the giant shoe. The area here smells like campfire and Portuguese (or Brazilian?) drill music rings out from one of the few windows on the side of the building the shoe is painted on: the shoe itself is standing upright, a full building mural, its toe towards the sky and its heel, in which there are many smaller shoes pooled, close to the ground.
I now cut into the neighbourhood itself by following a rounded street to find that they are far more alive than the main road on which I stood to admire the first two murals. The air is filled with loud conversations from locals hanging out in front of their buildings. A man drags a grill and a cooler down the street towards his friends behind me, but passes me as I stop to look at a large mural of a group gathered around a man with a phone. I walk past a group of men who are sat on a step street, shooting the shit and sharing a case of Sagres. Straight ahead, separated from me by a church, then a field, then a parking lot, I can see the Torre da Paroquial peeking out, covered in scaffolding today – but right now I'm more interested in orienting myself to look at the backs of the residential buildings that face out towards the street. Side by side are two murals: one, the linen ghost depicts... well, a linen ghost, towering overtop of the aforementioned tower the mural faces. Next to it is a mural of the people who reside in the Dois de Maio neighbourhood: it is a lively scene, depicting a multi-level exterior staircase populated with residents of all different ages. At the bottom, an older gentleman is sat; throughout the middle levels of the staircase are different groups of people conversing; at the top families look outward.
'Homenagem ao Marquês de Pombal' is the next mural I walk past. Another artwork that occupies the entire side of a building, the centerpiece of this one is two clasped hands surrounded by an inordinate number of red onions, piled around the bottom of the painting and filling all negative space towards the top as well, where a painted bust of the Marquês de Pombal himself sits to tie together the history, politics and local life of the neighbourhood. On the building behind it is the final mural I will see today; one of an elderly woman sitting contemplatively atop a collage background of newspaper article clippings. "170 PIDES NAS CELAS" reads one – PIDE were the police force belonging to Salazar's dictatorial regime. Another is written, "O Povo já não tem medo": The people are no longer afraid.
I stopped to look briefly but didn't dawdle at the Sala da Física and the Torre da Paroquial. The church bell tower was, as mentioned, covered in scaffolding so there wasn't much to look at except for in the group of friends who were riding their homemade go-karts in the large empty parking lot out front. My real target is the palace, but before visiting I stop at Jonubel, a small quintessential Portuguese pastelaria. Standard black thin-frame metal chairs parked at stone-patterned tables with mottled tops in the basement unit bakery. At the far end of the room, a long counter; on the wall behind it, bottles of liquor and an espresso machine and below the counter a glass case for displaying the pastries. I waited quietly for the owner to finish up his conversation with some construction workers who had stopped for lunch (I would later learn they were doing work on the palace, my next stop of the day) and then got myself a brioche croissant and an espresso. While I generally prefer my croissants to be light and flaky, there is something comforting about the doughy yellow bread and I will sometimes indulge, especially if at a proper pasteleria.
Across from Jonubel is the Ajuda Palace, which I access by walking through a dark archway that opens up into a sunny cloister, partially blocked off today by construction – the same workers, I had just learned over my espresso, who had stopped in at Jonubel for lunch. You could cut all the way through the courtyard to end up back on Calçada da Ajuda, right near where we started at the botanical garden, but after wandering for a bit I double back under the archway and into the building itself, where I pay fifteen euro to walk through what has been preserved and staged.
The space is a long hallway that passes through a series of rooms and wraps around the perimeter of the building. What caught my eye: one terminus of the first telephone network in Portugal, a line run between the palace and the royal theatre so that the family could listen to opera from home without needing to attend (an early form of on-demand entertainment, and I find it a bit funny and endearing to imagine the family gathering around the phone horn). A porcelain chandelier. A ceiling painting of a brilliant blue sky with crisp white clouds in the room near the throne, the kind of sky you only ever see in paintings. And in the Chinese room, a careful plaque explaining that the objects on display were gifts received from Japan – Chinese, at the time, being understood as a synonym for oriental in the broadest sense.
The palace was almost completely silent. At intervals along the hallway, museum attendants sat reading books or scrolling their phones with such absolute stillness that more than once I registered them only as furniture before they shifted in their seat or turned a page. The only other visitors I encountered were a Chinese couple who had stopped at the plaque in the Chinese room and were reading it, whispering together in hushed voices.
I exited from the same entrance I came and crossed the roundabout that separated the National Palace from Jonubel, heading east. The small side street I took curved around another construction site and I thought about how so many of my neighbours who had long lived in Ajuda and coworkers who knew the city better than I did would tell me how much the neighbourhood had been developed in recent years. This route I walk regularly to get coffee beans from Olisipo, and every time I round this bend the same elderly man asks me for a cigarette (I never have any for him). He was outside today again, sitting on the front steps of what is presumably the building he lives in but asked for nothing this time and so we exchanged "boa tardes" and I kept walking, down a set of stairs, across a crosswalk with the worst blindspot ever (surely someone has gotten hit here) and past a house that appears as if it was slowly being swallowed by a rock until I reached the coffee roastery.
Olisipo was closed today (they open infrequently for coffee service on weekends but otherwise sell beans on weekdays) but I had no need for fresh beans anyways – I was just walking. Passing by I thought about the beans from Myanmar they uses to roast and sell that left the taste of lavender, vanilla and the earthy sweetness of loose leaf tobacco in my mouth. This had been my favourite of theirs but it had been months since I'd seen them sell it.
South of the roastery towers a massive outcrop of limestone belonging to Antigos Fornos de Cal do Rio Seco ("Old Lime Kilns of the Dry River"), a cluster of lime kilns from the 18th century built into the hillside to support the reconstruction of Lisbon after the earthquake. Unfortunately the cavernous entry to the limestone wall is fully fenced off, not accessible to the public, but you can still walk around the front of the rock and see the kiln's stoke holes although the kiln chambers they would lead to have been cemented shut.
I had planned on continuing south to Trullino for lunch however owed to my somewhat late start to the day and its short Saturday hours it had already closed for the afternoon, so instead after my visit to the kilns turned to the west and cut through a small collection of streets where I was harassed by a growling and barking dog, off his leash for whatever reason, that followed me for a couple hundred metres as I walked down the street, before being called back inside by his owner way down the road. The neighbourhood was otherwise quiet, its tight roads lined with one-story houses painted pink and pale beige colours, but also dotted with empty fenced off lots and crumbling buildings. The doors of the buildings were either a rich brown wood or a deep green, all framed with thick white trims.
I emerged from the enclave near the Boa Hora bus station, right across the road from the Igreja Paroquial de Nossa Senhora da Ajuda a large yellow church with a three-archway entrance that remind me of the three draw arches I had just observed in the Rio Seco kilns. The church contains a historical organ from 1787, restored in the late 1980s, built by one of the greatest organ builders from Portugal, António Xavier Machado e Cerveira. The organ stands against the wall, its ornate gold embellishments curling around the silver pipes, who's mouths point down and out. I'm far from knowledgable about organs (organs in any sense of the word just lie outside my area of expertise, really) but you can read about the instrument on the church's website.
From the church I walked west downhill, back towards Calçada da Ajuda and arrive at Cafetaria Galo just down the road from the Junta de Freguesia. Today is actually my first time here – I'm not in the mood for another pastry, but I would like somewhere to wait out the last couple hours until the spot I've chosen for my dinner opens, and so I sit indoors, order an espresso, and read from my e-reader (although in such a traditional pasterleria I feel as if I should be reading a newspaper, or a dogeared paperback novel at least).
As soon as the clock approached 19:00 I left my seat and ambled up the road just 50 metres or so to Churrasqueira do Marquês, a local barbecue spot that has been in business since the fifth of May, 1973 (per the store's FaceBook). Whenever I go here for dinner I make sure to show up just as they open, as by the time thirty minutes into service hits the place is usually packed with a mixture of eat-in diners and patrons lining up at the counter to purchase raw cuts of meat and fish. Every time I've dined at Churrasqueira do Marquês I've been served by the same waiter, a man I've come to learn is named Fabio and who's favourite dessert is the baba de camelo, a chilled Portuguese dessert with a sweet and condensed milk base who's name literally translates to 'camel drool'. I do not believe Fabio knows my name, and he certainly does not know my favourite desert.
All I had eaten today was the brioche croissant, and so I opted for a bigger dinner of half a chicken, fries, rice, salad, and an imperial. The price of the meal is good too, although I could swear it had gone up by about 1,50 euros since I first visited the restaurant two years ago.
I finished eating, payed, and then began my walk home up the hill in the dark. Ajuda is not a neighbourhood that makes much of its evenings – especially when stepping off of Calçada da Ajuda. By 21:00 many of the small shops have their shutters down, but as I drifted through the side streets I could hear the sound of gentle dinner conversations from the front patio of the few restaurants still open off the main drag near Largo da Paz, then the distant sound of Portuguese television through an open window, then a dog's bark, and then eventually, nothing at all, as I pushed northwards towards the garden at which I started my day.