Page:Lisbon and Cintra, Inchbold, 1907.djvu/64

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Lisbon and Cintra

Senhor Fialho d' Almeida, "the appropriate heart of the new civic life as the other praça was of the bureaucratic."

In the vast new suburb of this new Lisbon stretching out to the north-east the Municipal Camara laid out a number of fine avenues, all lined with trees, but again failed to regulate architectural enterprise. Palatial residences stand almost cheek and jowl with small mean-looking tenements which have not the saving grace of age to sanction their intrusion in these spacious roads. The critic must bear in mind, however, that twenty years ago this whole district—a little town in itself—did not exist, that in the ardour of improving and extending the city overbuilding has necessarily occurred. Time will adjust the balance of proportion with future opportunity. From the Praça Saldanha, where the bare pedestal in the centre still lacks the statue of the great General of the Miguelite Campaign, the immense new avenue Ressano Garcia goes in direct line to the Campo Grande, while the old road, taking a wider course to the same point, passes by the Campo Pequeno (little), where the Bull Ring stands. This approach is through a poor district harking back to times when reviews were held on the small common, and English officers played cricket there such times as the fleet was in the Tagus.

A deserted mansion marks the entrance to the Campo Pequeno, the old courtyard showing through the high iron grille, and the deep, leafy gardens behind, suggesting a tragic page of past history in face of the picture of to-day represented in the immense Praça dos Touros. The Bull Ring is a handsome building in the Mudejar style of architecture, solid and imposing, and took the place of the old Circo dos Touros on the Campo Santa Anna, a wooden edifice noted as being the only public building erected in the short reign of Dom Miguel. The present Ring, dating

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