On your right, Carlos Alberto Square opens as a broad paved space of pale limestone and dark basalt, edged with planted areas and formal façades, with a memorial monument standing as its clearest fixed marker.
This square began as a meeting of roads before it became a meeting of memories. Long before the name Carlos Alberto arrived, this was the Largo dos Ferradores, the square of the farriers, where horses were prepared for long journeys leaving the Porta do Olival and splitting toward Braga by today’s Rua de Cedofeita, or toward Guimarães by Rua das Oliveiras. Inns gathered here too. Travellers rested, tack was tightened, bargains were struck, and Porto watched people depart.
That feeling of departure never quite left. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the place kept changing its trade: oxen, cloth, animals, grass, coal, firewood. Later, people called it the Feira das Caixas, the fair of boxes, because carpenters here made the trunks that emigrants carried to Brazil. There is something rather moving in that detail: before a family crossed an ocean, part of the journey began here, in a wooden case made for hopes too large to carry by hand.
Then came the man who gave the square its name. On the nineteenth of April, eighteen forty-nine, Carlos Alberto, king of Piedmont and Sardinia, arrived in Porto after defeat at the Battle of Novara and after giving up his throne. His first refuge stood here, in a nearby lodging house. He stayed only briefly. About three months later, he died in Porto. The city did not restore his crown, of course, but it did something quieter and, in its way, more generous: it gave him shelter, and then it kept his name. In a century when Porto also knew political punishment and public fear, this square offered another role for the city: sanctuary.
It remained a place where uncertain lives paused and negotiated their next chapter. For years, farm servants and domestic workers came here to meet future employers and agree the terms of work face to face. Later, new vehicles claimed the same ground. From the eighteen fifties until nineteen ten, the heavy horse-drawn Carros Ripert left from in front of the Havaneza tobacco shop for São Mamede de Infesta. And on the twelfth of August, eighteen seventy-four, Porto’s first carro americano, the forerunner of the tram, departed from here for Cadouços in Foz.
The square also learned how nations remember their wounds. In nineteen twenty-eight, Henrique Moreira’s monument to the dead of the Great War took its place here after an earlier statue had so displeased local taste that the city removed it. Then, in nineteen fifty-eight, the square filled with an immense crowd following General Humberto Delgado to his campaign headquarters above Café Luso. Here he declared, “My heart will remain in Porto.” Fifty years later, José Rodrigues fixed that moment in bronze, showing Delgado wrapped in the national flag.
Even in our own century, the square nearly changed its face again. A radical redesign was proposed, fiercely disputed, and abandoned. Porto kept the gardens and the limestone-and-basalt paving instead. Sensible, I think. Some places earn the right to change slowly.
Now we go to the palacete itself, where exile, nobility, and public reuse meet under one roof: the Palacete of the Viscounts of Balsemão, just a minute away. And if you wish to linger, the square is open at all hours.
