123 stalls and 400 authors fill the Belém palace gardens from 17 September
The ninth Festa do Livro em Belém runs 17 to 20 September with 70 exhibitors and 346 imprints. It opens with a tribute to António Lobo Antunes and closes with a GNR concert. Entry is free.
For four days a year the garden behind the pink presidential palace in Belém stops being the thing you glimpse over a wall. The Festa do Livro takes it over from 17 to 20 September, in its ninth edition, and it still costs nothing to walk in.
The scale this year: 70 exhibitors, 346 imprints, 123 stalls and around 400 authors expected across the four days. It is run by the Presidency of the Republic with the Portuguese Publishers and Booksellers Association, as it has been throughout.
Opening hours, and why they matter
Thursday the 17th is the short day: 4pm to 9.30pm. From Friday to Sunday the gates open at 11am and close at the same time each night. Worth knowing before you plan a visit with children, because Thursday is much tighter than it looks on a listing.
Inside is what these editions have settled into — panel discussions, live interviews, launches from the autumn publishing season, readings, signing sessions, a children’s and young people’s area, open-air cinema, and a terrace with food and drink. It works as much like a park as a book fair, which explains the crowds by late Sunday afternoon.
How it starts and how it ends
The programme opens on the 17th with a tribute to the novelist António Lobo Antunes, followed by a concert from the fado singer Katia Guerreiro and Vitorino Salomé on the main stage. It closes on the 20th with the Portuguese rock band GNR, in a set billed as Últimas Danças de Verão — last dances of summer, which is a fair description of a Lisbon garden on 20 September.
Detailed programming is published by the Museum of the Presidency, and the edition was announced on the Presidency’s own site.
Prefer your festivals with brass bands and fireworks? Feiras Novas in Ponte de Lima is 200 years old this week. For everywhere else, here is what is on around Portugal this weekend.
Image: GualdimG / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
