Pottery Mouth: Aveiro 2024, Part 3

Our jaunt to Aveiro was a quickie this time; just a couple of days respite from the heat. We may drift up and down the coast over the years, but it’s likely that our default “let’s get the hell out of Dodge” each summer will be here at the salt flats. A trip here can be gussied up with fine dining and guided tours, or it can be self-led street art hunts with street-side fare all day long. This particular trip we’ve been trying to navigate a middle path, with nice dinners but casual days, and it seems to have worked out just fine. Case in point, our final day had peak tourism plus simple grub.

One thing we did both days was have a midday meal at Bodegas Bar, located in Praça do Peixe. This is an unassuming place sharing the praça with several other cafes, bars, and restaurants that does a good job of offering “pub” food at good prices. I particularly recommend it for folks who are looking for something to eat in the late afternoon. You know, when you’ve got 3-4 hours until dinner, but don’t want a whole meal. Or it’s been 4 hours since lunch and you are feeling decidedly peckish. On both days we had a misto (the classic Portuguese grilled ham and cheese sandwich) and their picante (a grilled cheese and chorizo sandwich) with a glass of wine, bottle of water, and a Coke, all for less than 15eu. Of course, it barely needs mentioning, they were accompanied by batatas fritas (literally “fried potatos”, and often but not always french fries in some configuration). Their bread is outstanding — fresh made with a hearty, whole grain — or at least not ordinary white bread — and gorgeously grilled. Not too much cheese (or meat) and not overcooked. The chips were even particularly good. Overall this was a satisfying meal in several ways, and it was just the right size. Bonus, being in one of the central squares and next to the municipal fish market to boot, makes for great people-watching.

Our final nibbles out of the way, we packed into our car and headed out of Aveiro, but with one last, major stop along the way: Vista Alegre, which is… er… well it’s a lot of things. The simplest summary is that it is a pottery manufacturer with on-site outlet store. However, it’s a 200-year-old pottery manufacturer with a massive footprint thanks to its history as, essentially, a company town situation. Thanks to their bicentennial celebration there are some fantastic exhibits onsite that detail the history of the place; even taking them with a grain of salt since they are in-house productions, we found them wildly informative. The first picture has a map of the entire facility, and the hanging signs line up with various buildings to describe their purpose and some notable history for each. The second picture is a close-up of one of the signs. For each and every point-of-interest (not just this map display but others as well) they presented context from the points of view of the family that owned the factory, the workers, the families of workers, and specifically called out the female workers.

Vista Alegre has been hand-painting their work since the beginning, and as a result they’ve long had an interest in fostering creative outlets for their workers; not just painting, but also theatre and music. Don’t get us wrong, we get the problems with company towns (and they did the whole shtick, including paying in scrip that then got spent on services within the company ecosystem) but it’s still hard to be completely mad at a situation where there was a marching band and a community theater for the people who were interested, all paid for by the company.

Oh, and we mentioned they hand-paint their work? There’s a museum onsite featuring some of their work from the last two centuries. And afterwards, you can head into their outlet where, in a fit of romanticism brought on by all the beautiful work we had just seen, we almost bought an entire set of china. We caught our state of euphoria at the last second; we might still buy from them, but we want to assess our needs in the cold light of day, not at the end of a cleverly-constructed sales pitch (that’s how you end up with a condo in Boca Raton). Once done with touring Vista Alegre there was nothing left to do but scoot back home to our cozy nest in Braga.