Sardines are a thing in Portugal, a culinary icon of the country. In Lisbon, you’ll see the fishes represented in tourist shops next to shot glasses, tiles, and a particular rooster. (More about the rooster in later posts.)
In fact, at the Lisbon airport, there is a sardine throne.
A SARDINE THRONE.
(Yes, I sat in it.)
But I wasn’t expecting the sardine store down the street from our hotel.
Floor to ceiling sardine cans. TWO FLOORS of walls consisting entirely of sardine cans. Pillars lined with sardine cans.
This shop is so dedicated to sardines that it sells nothing but actual sardines. Do they have sardine key chains? Stickers? Shot glasses? NO. Only actual fish in tins!
If you think that’s odd, the basement was filled with these tins below, numbered with every year of the last 100.
Good god, were these vintage sardines? Do they age like wine? CAN I EAT 80-YEAR-OLD FISH?
Thankfully, no. I only figured out the year-by-year cans when I saw the term “Batman” on one of them.
These are birthday gifts. Go ahead, buy your loved one a fact-tin of sardines labeled with their birth year.
As I was reeling from this discovery, I turned around and I saw something behind the unoccupied basement register. Is that… A BANK VAULT?
I gingerly approached the vault door, wondering if I was soon going to be seized for sardine theft. As I rounded the corner, I saw rows of gold bricks, gleaming in the honey-colored light. The full scope of this didn’t hit until I fully stepped into the room.
Gold sardine cans.
An entire vault of gold-colored sardine cans, lined up like bullion at Fort Knox.
I don’t know what else to say about this.
