8 September 2025, in Lisbon, Portugal.
Facing the sea…
The iconic statue of Cristo Rei in Lisbon is unusual, different in one important respect from all the other statues. Standing tall over the Tagus River, his arms outstretched as if in blessing and protection, it dates – I discover – only from 1959. Seeing it only from a distance, I’d made the assumption that, gazing over the Capital City of an Empire, the statue must be ancient, and – presumably – the inspiration for similar statues throughout the Empire, notably the famous statue of Cristo Redentor in Rio de Janeiro, homage there to Portugal’s shaping of Brazil as a colony. Certainly it looks similar. But I was wrong, and it’s the other way round. The Rio statue is the original, and Lisbon’s statue is an echo of it, designed and built in thanksgiving for the protection of Lisbon in WW2 by a thankful nation, in fulfilment of a promise made by the Portuguese bishops, and – in the 50s – as an expression of the gratitude of the Portuguese people for the post-war wealth, material and cultural, generated by its daughter city. So, not Romanesque in inspiration, but Art Deco, refracted by the experience of the forties and the artistic zeitgeist of the fifties.
What is an unusual about the statue is that it faces the city. Almost all of the statues in Lisbon look out to sea. It’s a thoroughgoing theme of the city’s iconography that everything expresses thanksgiving for, and homage to, the Portuguese Age of Discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries. It is true down by the seafront in Baixa, and it is supremely true in Belém to the West of the city, where the Padrão dos Descobrimentos (the Monument to the Discoveries) which I saw this afternoon, is located. There, thirty three figures gaze energetically out to sea, among them Henry the Navigator and other rulers, explorers, missionaries and scientists, all of them facing West, looking away from Lisbon towards New Worlds. Cristo Rei alone gazes back at the city and the land.
The ambivalent relationship of a seafaring nation with the sea and the New Worlds beyond it was the opening theme of Mateus, the handsome guitarist who introduced the Fado performance I attended later in the afternoon close to the city’s Cathedral in the Alfama area of Lisbon. “If you go to sea,” he said, “you spend your life excited by the adventure but always wondering whether you’ll see your home and loved ones again. This uncertainty is what has created Fado.” There is – unsurprisingly in a nation where this is so fundamental an experience over centuries – a word for this particular form of existential torment: ‘saudade’, the tense mixture of longing, fear, yearning and hope that expresses the torment of the human soul lived in relation, literally and metaphorically, to the sea, and that finds expression in the haunting music of Fado. Prior to this visit, my only acquaintance with the form was through the singer Mariza who, I remember, was once showcased on Radio 3 and who, for a season, I listened to enthusiastically; now, all I want to listen to is Fado. It is a beautiful and haunting genre of music, so much so you could almost wish to study Portuguese – horrendously difficult to learn – so as to be able to go deeper. Almost!
There isn’t a lot of space for the expression of ‘saudade’ or any sort of ambivalence if you’re preparing to set sail in small boats on a great ocean. You have to put on a brave and optimistic face. Rulers, explorers, scientists and artists have all ‘parked’ their uncertainties and suppressed their existential torment, knowing that bravery is essential in conquest, that single-minded positivity is what is rewarded, and assuming therefore that courage alone is what can be shown or voiced. The acknowledgement of internal anguish is a private and privileged activity either for quieter and less-demanding seasons, or for late at night beneath the stars with a guitar in hand. It is not stuff for the daytime and the public eye.
But in the face of all this bravery, and towards a people rushing impulsively – if a little fearfully – to the seas and to New Worlds, but indeed towards all who are confronted by the turbulence and uncertainty of life, Cristo Rei turns his face and stretches his arms of mercy in consolation, calming deepest human fears as once, just off another shore, he calmed that storm too.