Behind the improvised stalls, the vendors, aproned women and becapped men, transform into showmen. Customers are addressed as love, honey and sweetie, in intimate terms that cross all social barriers. They move and gesticulate as if infused with the ancestral legacy of the stallholder’s art and jokingly compare this and that fruit to this and that body part as if actors on a stage.
F
rom where I stand, I can see energetic housewives pulling tartan trolleys with protruding green stalks, an old man carrying a small bag of strawberries, a whole family doubled over from the weight of their baskets, a beggar eyeing the fruit rolling under the stalls and some huge blonde sandal-shod tourists enraptured by the authenticity of the scene. Under its mass of colourful awnings, the market is a mixing pot of men and women, rich and poor, old and young, locals and outsiders. At the heart of it all are the stallholders, who start to arrive around 2am in their vans full of fruit, veg and flowers, scything through the darkness of the valley that is home to Cascais market. At this point, a short explanation might be in order. The market, opened in 1952, has a covered structure where the fish, fruit and veg sellers work every day. But what interests us here is the so-called mercado saloio, or ‘rustic market’, which takes place on Wednesdays and Saturdays in the open air outside this structure. It’s name comes from the fact that most vendors and goods come from rural areas. End of explanation. So, as we were saying, the stallholders arrive before daylight in their vans. But not so long ago, it was a very different story: many would walk across the Sintra hills with their loaded donkeys during the night to be sure that their stall would be up by daybreak. Every week for years (for some so many in fact that they still remember when the market was near the beach), the market has begun at dawn and ended in the early afternoon. Come rain, come shine, every week it goes up and every week it comes down.
12 · cascais & Estoril con vida
Every week, the earth offers up its bounty in the heart of urban Cascais. Behind the improvised stalls, the vendors, aproned women and becapped men, transform into showmen. Customers are addressed as love, honey and sweetie, in intimate terms that cross all social barriers. They move and gesticulate as if infused with the ancestral legacy of the stallholder’s art and jokingly compare this and that fruit to this and that body part as if actors on a stage. Laughter, the exchange of coins, chit-chat, shouting, continual movement, the rustle of bags and the distant sound of traffic, as remote as the sound of voices when one dozes on the beach. There’s a musical quality to the market’s background murmur. And that’s just one of the many sensory experiences possible, and perhaps the least obvious. Because of their sheer quantity, it’s advisable to let each in one at a time. As the market sells individual fresh produce, everything has its own particular perfume, colour and form. Follow your nose and soak up the atmosphere or meander wide-eyed as if at an exhibition. And everything can be touched and handled and chosen and tried. Market days in Cascais engage the whole town, whose pulse and rhythm is changed by what seems to be a new form of street life, one that starts earlier and has more people, more colour, more cars, more noise and more movement. And then, like a party coming to an end, the noise dies down, the stalls are dismantled, the vans depart and the people disappear with their shopping. If it wasn’t for the plastic bags left behind and the typical rubbish of a market left for the council cleaners to tidy up, you would never guess what had just taken place.•