Portugal Is Beautiful in Winter Too, but Leave Fido at Home! Portuguese Airports? Meh!

PORTUGAL? YES, YES, YES, BEAUTIFUL EVEN IN WINTER, BUT... LEAVE FIDO AT HOME! AIRPORTS OF LISBON AND PORTO? SPLENDID (ARCHITECTURALLY), BUT THE DISORGANISATION IS A BIT ALARMING!

PART 1 Usually I prepare my trips months in advance, reading and/or re-reading books and novels about the country I am going to visit, researching online, analysing the Touring Club and Lonely Planet guides - the latter graphically awful, in black and white and grey, with barely legible maps, but very useful and honest in its advice, without prejudice! - and the monographs of "Meridiani", the monthly travel and tourism magazine of Editoriale Domus, the same publisher as the famous "Quattroruote", to be clear. In short, the eve of everything, of every event, Leopardi-style, is almost more important to me than the event itself that I will live.

For Portugal, therefore, I read a great deal by that great writer of ours, Tabucchi (a DOCG pro-Portuguese, and a fine connoisseur as well as translator of all of Pessoa), to look for those atmospheres that I would later go and verify and savour on the spot in person, a great deal of the very great poet and writer Fernando Pessoa and of the Nobel laureate Saramago (whose "Journey to Portugal", more than a guidebook, was recently reprinted by Einaudi). Useful were the ideas taken from "Lisbon - What the Tourist Should See" by Pessoa, Passigli Editore, and "Travels, Other Travels", a recent work by Antonio Tabucchi for Einaudi.

But I made a very serious, unforgivable mistake: I did not search online, otherwise I would have realised that in Portugal animals, in my case a sweet and very good 3-year-old little dog, 6 kg, named Emma, ARE NOT AT ALL WELCOME! Especially in Lisbon, where people really are very distant in spirit and emotion (and in civility) from "living with a companion animal", intolerant or not at all, snobbish and irritating with animals. They look at you as if you were walking around with an alligator on a leash! In Porto they are a little more tolerant, much more sociable with humans and animals.

And yet our little dog was travelling with us by plane for the first time, and then in a rental car, with her nice European pet passport, her subcutaneous microchip, all her vaccinations done, inside her pink carrier, almost always in my arms or in the shoulder carrier like a human baby! Nothing doing: in Portugal - despite the recent European regulation that bans discrimination between humans with or without an accompanying animal and that allows entry (with all the right preventive measures) everywhere, barring civil exceptions - IT IS FORBIDDEN WITH THE ANIMAL: 1. to use public transport; 2. absolutely to enter restaurants, bars, pastry shops, monuments and cultural and religious sites or otherwise; 3. to enter commercial shops for shopping (the assistants, the staff prefer to lose the sale rather than let you in with the dog even in your arms!); 4.

to take lifts, the famous "Elevador" in Lisbon, where two employees of Carris, the municipal transport company, even argued with each other because the lift-girl was absolutely against it and her little marketing-manager boss was more tolerant, but the surly senhorina won; 5. very few hotels, guest houses or residencial are allowed, and with many unjustified operational limitations; 5. car rental... they accept dogs, but according to them you should keep the dog shut in the carrier at all times, for fear it might dirty the car! (TO BE CONTINUED)