An unusual tour

For a very long time, the scariest thing I had ever done on a Friday night was staying at home cleaning. It all changed last Friday...

I met my very good friend José at 8 p.m. and we agreed to go and have dinner in "Campo Alegre", a restaurant not far from our old university. Our meal was as tasty as you could wish for – that Angolan main course was so good that it took us a while to stop raving about it! – and the wine, a disconcerting red with "CA 416" on its label, a pleasant surprise. Not long after swallowing dessert, we were on our way to the... cemetery.

When we got to "Cemitério de Agramonte", the second biggest cemetery in Porto, we realised that circa 80 people had decided to take part in its guided tour, which started with a brief presentation of its history. At first, I thought that all this was going to be pretty morbid but the truth is that it was far from it. And by the end of the day – literally! – I had learned a lot about

-the history of the city and how the exhibitionism of its inhabitants, who wanted to be as noticed in death as they had been in life, is at the basis of the monumentality, which inspired the architecture of other cemeteries in the North of Portugal;
-art and symbols in Portuguese romanticist cemeteries, including features which set them apart from European ones (apparently, a flower named «saudade» can only be found in Portuguese cemeteries).

It was a truly enriching experience and it will surely make me start thinking about cemeteries in a different way. Be that as it may, my all-time favourite ones will always be those where trees and grass are so abundant that they are better called graveyards. And this because I’m convinced that nature is the world’s biggest provider of beauty; there’s really no need to build it from scratch...