The Story of a Square

On the way here I saw an antique photograph of the Toural Square, occupying the centre of an apparently abandoned shop display. The place where I am now, the destination of my half-leisurely stroll, is the Milenário Café. I’m now sitting at a table by one of its large windows overlooking the Toural, the main square of the town of Guimarães, in northern Portugal. Guimarães is known as the cradle of the country and is also, by the way, the current European Capital of Culture. Much has been changed in the previous look of the town in order to prepare it for that event. The Toural, as one of the most iconic sights of the town, was naturally at the centre of a whirlwind of construction works for quite a long time. It opened a couple of months ago amid the usual mixed feelings of the locals, with positive impressions only slightly beating the negative ones. Personally I liked it, but then I’m not a local, so my opinion doesn’t really matter much for the point I’m trying to make here.

People from Guimarães (the vimaranenses) like to think of their town and themselves as a peculiar case of identity, almost as if they were the representatives of a different people inhabiting a country within the country: quintessentially Portuguese, but not mainstream Portuguese. They combine in an attitude that resembles a sort of local nationalism an extreme pride in their town and an obstinate sense of uniqueness. While the former is amply justified by the sheer beauty of the town, the latter is largely an exaggeration. In fact, most cultural traits of Guimarães have, in one form or another, equivalents in most comparable Portuguese towns, at least the northerly ones.

The history of the Toural is a good example of that. Originally, and judging from its name, it must have been the place of cattle fairs. However, old photographs already show the typical Portuguese square of the nineteenth century: neat, with a love of detail and closed. The entrance to the inner part of it was paid, thus making the place an exclusive of the better-off classes. The majority of the people would just stay outside staring at the Sunday stroll of the bourgeoisie. Public space was then a perfect symbol of society, its carefully marked social divisions echoing the God-given order of things.

Then the iron fence disappeared, and with it the social prestige of the centre of the square. The benches were now available to everyone, as well as the shade thrown by the trees, but only retired elderly people sat there. The square was consciously becoming a place of memory, a symbol of what the town no longer was. Those were the days of democratisation, of economic growth, of high buildings, big roads and shopping centres. A modern monument then occupied the place where previously there had been a fifteenth-century water fountain, its electrically powered jets of water mocking its predecessor. The advent of the era of memory, culminating in the classification of the historic centre of Guimarães by the UNESCO, can hardly disguise that everywhere memory was being wilfully shunned. Real memory, and not the cheap imitation sold to tourists, was now abandoned on the fringes of society, the exclusive property of a new kind of socially excluded people, the elderly.

Now things seem to be changing again, and the Toural along with them. The fifteenth-century water fountain has returned, the electrically powered water jets have vanished along with most trees. The benches have been relegated to a discrete an uninviting corner of the square, as there wasn’t enough courage to get rid of them altogether. The black and white patterns of the traditional Portuguese cobblestone walkways were replaced by some inconsequent lines casually drawn on the floor. The square has lost many of the features that made it a cosy place where to stay, in fact, that made it a place at all. Now people pass through it, more or less hurriedly depending on whether they are locals or tourists. The new Toural gives the town a cosmopolitan outlook, the uneven façades of the buildings adding the necessary local taste to an urban landscape that is essentially and intentionally tasteless. A church, some nineteenth-century buildings, a granite building that vaguely resembles a rural manor-house, a remarkably homogenous series of white buildings that bring to memory the downtown of Lisbon, a fascist style building housing Portugal’s public bank and a trace of a medieval wall claiming that Portugal was born here: an historical and architectural composite framing an experience of vague out-of-placeness. I can’t think of a better metaphor for the times we’re living...