Sounds of My Bairro
The wondrous noises of my neighborhood in Lisbon
As someone who works at home, I see silence as golden. Since I moved to Lisbon, its value has increased to that of platinum. Or possibly palladium. Have you ever seen palladium? Me neither; nor have I seen any silence since moving here.
Obviously, all major cities will have their sources of noise, and these will vary greatly from one neighborhood to the next. I think that we were simply a bit unlucky—or, let’s face it, unwise—when we rented an apartment in the dead center of Campo de Ourique, a charming bourgeois bairro (or neighborhood) on the western edge of downtown Lisbon.
I have to say that in most respects, I love this neighborhood. It is chock-a-block with restaurants in all price ranges, cafés (29 at last count), vegetable vendors, supermarkets, a big fancy indoor market, and all the other things one needs (or doesn’t really): banks, schools, swimming pool, Chinese knickknack shops, upcycled clothing shops, chocolate praline shops, super-expensive hipster baby clothing shops, etc. The main square, the Jardim da Parada, matches my dream of the archetypal local square, with giant trees, benches, men playing cards, and a kiosk selling drinks. There is even a café called Meu Café, or “My Café”. And a pool with turtles. Turtles! (There will be much discussion of turtles in future posts.)
So, apart from the price of housing here, and the lack of parking, the main downside to the neighborhood is the level of noise. I would like to take you through a catalog of the sounds I hear from my desk at home.
Let’s start with the things that one can generally expect to hear in any city:
neighbors having a conversation out in the hall
neighbors having a meal out in the back yard
the people upstairs, walking around with shoes (Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Scandinavia anymore!)
people nearby playing music
families walking along the sidewalk
drunken youths staggering down the street at night
traffic, including cars, buses, and the distant hum of the highway
the crash of shattering glass from the glass-recycling igloo on the corner
the even bigger crash of shattering glass when the truck comes to empty the igloo
the other recycling/garbage collection trucks, which tend to come at two in the morning (one of them is damaged or rusted, and sounds like a dying whale when the back rises)
the occasional police or ambulance siren (though these are surprisingly rare)
I heard all of these sounds in my apartment in Stockholm (except: shoes). This is normal urban fare. So let us move on to some more interesting and characteristically Portuguese sources of noise:
construction work on the building across the street, or on the other building across the street, or on the apartment downstairs (Lisbon is awash with gentrification)
cars honking at other cars that are double-parked, or parked insanely, or at delivery trucks that block the street completely
car alarms, triggered by passing buses on narrow streets
Lisbon’s iconic, bright yellow electric trams, unchanged for a century, screeching and squealing by1
hysterical laughter (mostly French and American) from the wine bar on the corner
the guy who rides around the neighborhood all day blasting music from the boom box strapped to his bike, with no clear motive
someone learning to play the bagpipes (I swear to God)
the melodic trilling of the itinerant knife sharpener’s whistle (an ancient Iberian tradition that fascinates me)
brief, public explosions of outrage at minor offenses (the Portuguese love to complain vivaciously)
At this point, I need to pause to tell you a story. A few months ago, I heard someone screaming bloody murder a couple of blocks away. Pure, full-on screaming. As did most of the neighborhood, I went to see what was going on. It turned out that a man (presumably needing a drug fix) had robbed a nearby pharmacy at knifepoint and then fled with the cash. At which point the pharmacist, a little middle-aged woman, took off after the thief, screaming her lungs out for people to stop him. The thief, for his part, got so flustered that he made a very poor decision: he ran home to his apartment, which was just down the street. Everybody saw where he went, and everybody told the police about it, and everybody stood around watching and joyfully exchanging impressions while the police went to the man’s home, arrested him, and took him away. A few months later, I met the American woman who had moved into that apartment.
But such occurrences are extraordinary in our bairro. Let’s go back to my house and talk about the downstairs neighbors. You more often hear people complain about their upstairs neighbors, but the bane of our existence here has been the family that lives downstairs. They make so much noise that it travels up through our floor, up my legs, and into my brain, where it is as welcome as an invasion of cane toads.
This is a family of two adults with four children, and two dogs. They are Portuguese, and pleasant enough in conversation, though we generally try to avoid them, as we would hate to accidentally murder them. The woman is named Maria, and is actually quite sweet. We never found out her husband’s name, so we call him Spermio, as he is very manly and has successfully fathered four children (thus far!). Spermio is as noisy as Maria is demure, and he has taught his children to be loudly, boisterously rambunctious. The two boys, both under five, wake up at seven every morning and run screaming into their living room, which, tragically, is under our main bedroom. They throw things, kick the furniture, and beat up their sister until she cries, and then they have breakfast. Sleeping late in our apartment is not an option.
Besides his shouting at the children and his thundering down the stairs, we hear Spermio on those evenings when he decides to most inexpertly grill steaks, or sardines, on a charcoal grill on the balcony, which is directly under our balcony (in Sweden, this would be illegal, but we’re in Portugal now, Toto). The sizzling of the meat and the cursing at the giant flames is accompanied by huge clouds of smoke that travel up into our bedroom and through the apartment, until we manage to slam all the doors and windows shut. Then we are better able to hear their two dogs, a pair of Schnauzers that bark all day as hysterically as the children shout. (There are three other dogs in the building, too, all of which bark with great gusto.)
Oh, did I mention the school next door? Yes, a French-Portuguese elementary school, very fancy and very expensive, at which about 500 or so small children run around in the back yard screaming as though their pharmacy had just been robbed. This starts at about eight and ends at about five. The noise level is such that we can’t use the balcony during that time, because it’s impossible to carry on a conversation, or even think.
And yet the children are not the only source of noise from the school. Rather than having the teachers call them in from recess, the school has installed speakers, through which they blast a twelve-second tune, which would be charming enough if it were not at Nuclear Red Alert volume. It is so loud that it would be heard even by a student who had run down the street to Meu Café, entered the bathroom, and stuck his head in the toilet. This tune is played about once an hour, though at maddeningly strange times, such as 10:07.
The last thing about the school that is distressing is linked to an interesting fact about the climate in Lisbon. Because the changes between seasons are so slight, there is no one time of year at which the trees lose their leaves. As a consequence, trees go on dropping leaves all year long. While the falling leaves themselves do not create any noise pollution, they bring out the men with leaf-blowers, who are employed by the school to wander around whenever the school is blessedly silent, blowing leaves around with machines that sound like a rhinoceros in heat.
And now, finally, we come to the actual number-one source of noise in the neighborhood: airplanes. Because the Lisbon airport is essentially inside the city, and has only one long runway, there is a flight path that all 600 flights per day must take, and it goes right over our house.2 The planes fly overhead so low that we can read the text on the underside of the wings. We can practically wave to the passengers. And one flies over every three minutes.
The thing about airplanes is that they are hard to ignore. When a giant metallic bird seventy meters long comes screaming by with the sound of a thousand vacuum cleaners—at certain times of day even eclipsing the sun for an instant—it is very hard not to notice. The airplanes are loud enough that if we have guests over and the windows open, we have to suspend conversation for ten seconds every time one passes. Wherever you are in the neighborhood—on the street, in the square, in the cemetery—life skips a beat every three minutes when one of these giant whining machines goes over. I imagine that people who have lived here for years have grown accustomed to this, but after about a year, I still have not been able to.3
So, now that I’m looking for a new apartment, one of my top criteria is—you guessed it, proximity to hipster baby clothing shops. OK, that’s not it. It’s something else, and I am prepared to pay the price of palladium for it.
At the moment, I can’t hear these from my study, since they are about four blocks away, but in our last apartment I had a stop right under my window.
Technically, some of the flights use the other end of the runway, so not all 600 flights go over our house. But we do hear one every three minutes, on average.
Here’s a tip for anyone who is looking to move and is concerned about noise: noise-map.com shows the noise levels from airplanes and traffic, all over the world.
For anyone who, like my daughter, has memorized every line of The Blues Brothers, this immediately evokes the scene of Elwood’s tiny bedsit, where Jake asks “how often do the trains go by?” And the answer is, of course, “so often, you won’t even notice.”
Have you ever considered moving to Chicago?
Loved reading this Gregory. I had to laugh at the 2am garbage truck comment. We lived in Barrio Alto for 6 weeks last year and that was a very confusing middle of the night noise! For your noise list I would add the numerous squawking peacocks from the nearby botanic gardens.