The European country scattered with innunendos and double entrendres

The following is an extract from Lonely Planet’s new updated Portugal guidebook and has been republished with permission.

Listen close enough, and you’ll make out songs littered with cheeky innuendos. Look closer, and you’ll notice boats adorned with suggestive characters. Maybe you’ll ‘accidentally’ end up choosing something rude from the sweet counter. For a country with a deep conservative background, the Portuguese sure are playful with their double entendres.

No matter how hard you try, there are some jokes that are inevitably lost in translation. That’s what it feels like when you attempt to deconstruct a pimba song to a foreign friend. You can dance to this traditional upbeat music without understanding a word of it, but you wouldn’t be in on the joke, and sometimes that’s for the best.

Take ‘Garagem da Vizinha’ by Quim Barreiros, one of the most popular singers of this Portuguese music genre. While on the surface, this song is about parking the car in your neighbour’s garage, it doesn’t take the most imaginative of minds to undress this shallow metaphor. But what is it about pimba music that makes it so incredibly popular? Is it the fast tempo of the accordion, the awfully catchy melody, or perhaps those eyebrow-raising lyrics? These songs are enjoyed by everyone, after all. Danced to by old and young as they blare out at local festivities such as St Anthony’s day in Lisbon, the graduation ceremonies of Coimbra, during carnival and at weddings across the country.

They are fun and frivolous throwaway songs, and it doesn’t seem to matter whether you are in on the joke or not. But it certainly helps to give it context. It’s a genre that sprung from the fall of the dictatorship, a regime that strove to control and censor people in any way it could.

Using the ‘lápis azul’, meaning ‘blue pencil’, the government would cross out text and images deemed unfit for public consumption. Song lyrics were reviewed in detail, of course, as were other less obvious art forms. The constant surveillance gave rise to a traditional practice of sneaking in subliminal messages.

On a casual stroll along Aveiro’s waterfront, you might stop to admire the moliceiros, the city’s Venician gondolas. But on closer inspection, you’ll notice that the colourful bows and sterns are adorned with something a little more (out of the) blue. Docked alongside more ‘acceptably’ decorated boats, depicting famous figures, such as fado singer Amália or the poet Camões, and religious iconography, there will surely be one painting that would make a saint blush. Think phrases like: ‘Oh Alberto, is your chorizo good?’, or ‘What a beautiful fig’ scrolled across the boat. Some pan els have become more explicit in recent decades, featuring scantily dressed women.

But in the 20th century, wordplay was key to evading the eagle-eyed government. In Amarante, the manufacturing of a particular sweet was almost completely eradicated by the Estado Novo regime, too. The reason? Its not-so-subtle phallic-shaped pastries (doces fálicos). However delicious, they were considered just a little too risqué for the conservative folks in power. The tradition was kept alive, though, thanks to the townsfolk who baked these sugary penises in secret, prohibition style. Once the dictatorship fell, Amarante embraced its naughty creation wholeheartedly.

Visit this northern town during its summer festivities, and you’ll see the streets decorated with phallic-shaped bunting waggling in the wind and women selling equally bawdy sweets of all shapes and sizes.

The tradition returns in January when locals offer these treats to friends and family to help usher in a fertile and favourable new year. No one really knows the origins of this cheeky sweet. Some say it’s related to pagan rituals of the past, while others attribute it to the matchmaking skills of São Gonçalo, the town’s patron saint. It’s become such a popular symbol that bakers are now offering these suggestively shaped sweets year-round.

In Caldas da Rainha, alongside more traditional ceramics, like the cabbage-shaped bowls of Bordalo Pinheiro, which the town is synonymous with, one might find a smattering of 2ft penis bottles. This cultural heritage dates back to King Luis I (1838–89), who was so taken with these phalli that he took them back to entertain his court. Today there are only a few artists who dedicate themselves to crafting the so-called Falos de Caldas. The large penises have since had offshoots: smaller versions with bright designs, and some with funny – even scary – little faces are now popping up, continuing the long tradition.

And so it was, as a fitting farewell to the dictatorship and its control of freedom of expression, that a statue was commissioned to commemorate the Carnation Revolution 23 years later. In Parque Eduardo VII, atop a hill, looking down onto the capital, stands a marble obelisk some 6m tall called Monumento ao 25 de Abril. Stepping back, you might question what you are actually looking at. While artist João Cutileiro (1937–2021) often denied the apparent phallic connotation of his work, you can’t help but wonder if this erected statue serves as a middle finger, if nothing else, to the fallen dictatorship.

Portugal has always been, and still is, by and large a conservative country. Religion still plays a major role here, so these symbols may come as a surprise to an outsider. Indeed, they’re often looked down upon by people in the bigger cities who prefer to shy away from this crude side of Portuguese culture which has its roots in rural areas. Eating phallic sweets after mass, dancing to pimba after a procession: it’s a contradiction that is undoubtedly hard to grasp. It’s tongue-in-cheek humour that might be conceived as puerile and dated to the outsider gaze. Yet it gets dusted off and brought out every single year to kick off the country’s biggest festivities. It still has its place.

Maybe the reason why we still take simple pleasure in this provocative form of entertainment is that we were silenced for so long. The freedom to express yourself was suppressed by the overbearing reach of the Estado Novo, a regime that cast a shadow over the people. Upon throwing off the shackles of censorship, the Portuguese people chose to dance and make merry, rejoicing and sticking their tongues out at those that once forbade them from doing so.

Today we still enjoy a good trocadilho (pun), and we don’t take ourselves too seriously.

So the next time you’re at a party celebrating a patron saint in Portugal and you see people laughing and dancing, join them. Perhaps even ask them what that song is about.