Join the Lisbon Festival in June 2015

The coming of summer after a wait that seems to have taken the best of us is certainly something to celebrate, so you are warmly invited to put on your casual clothes and dancing shoes and join the Lisbon Festival in June 2015.

Lisbon city might look like a melancholy and mysterious place from the outside – and it is – but that doesn’t mean the Portuguese don’t know how to party and have fun. Actually, they can show you this really soon, because the month of June begins with Festas da Lisboa, the merriest festival dedicated to the capital city of Portugal.

Street shows, dance and Fado music, outdoors and indoors cinema, collective barbecues and fairs with handicrafts and local produce, all these and more are going to feature in the Lisbon Festival. The party will move from venue to venue, but one special event is the St. Anthony Festival in the district Alfama, the oldest in the city. The party will last between the 12th and 14th of June.

Alfama is a neighbourhood filled with color and life, where you can best sample the Portuguese life surrounded by old buildings with red-tile roofs and narrow streets. St. Anthony is the patron saint of Lisbon.

During the St. Anthony Festival, the scent of… sardines will fill the air. This relates to the miraculous story of the 13th century Saint Anthony of Padua. It is said that, during one of his visits to Rimini, in Italy, the saint was so depressed that people would not listen to his sermons, that he went to the shores of the sea to preach to the fish. All of a sudden, rows of fish, from the smallest to the most sizeable, raised their scaly heads above the water. Today, traditional sardine dishes are served in honor of the saint.

And since you have surely decided to come to town for the festival, how about a Lisbon tour?