Lisbon: Exploring the LXFactory

Someone told us about LXFactory, and we decided to go and see what the fuss was about.

The place is in the Alcantara district, in what used to be the largest spinning mill in Portugal; 23.000 square meters of brick and iron, built in the nineteenth century, abandoned when the work went elsewhere, and then taken over some years ago by the kind of young entrepreneurs who look at an abandoned industrial ruin and see a food court.

This is not a criticism. The food court is excellent.

We found it by following the sound of people enjoying themselves down the Rua Rodrigues de Faria, and ended up in a courtyard full of mismatched chairs and tables, where someone was selling very good pizza from a kiosk and the 25 de Abril Bridge was visible at the end of the street, doing its best impression of the Golden Gate.

Inside the warehouses, which still have their original bones, the high ceilings, the iron columns, the general feeling of a place that once did serious work, there are now stalls selling ceramics and leather goods and things made of recycled materials, and young people looking at them with the focused attention of people who are genuinely considering a purchase rather than just wandering through.

The bookshop is called Ler Devagar, which means Read Slowly. It occupies an entire warehouse floor and has bookshelves that go up to where the roof starts to think about becoming the sky. We spent longer there than we had planned, which is the correct thing to do in a bookshop called Read Slowly.

On the roof terrace, someone was playing fado from a small speaker, and a group of skateboarders were practicing below, and the bridge was still there in the background, and it was one of those afternoons in Lisbon where the light does something particular to old brick that makes you want to stay until it stops.

We stayed until it stopped.