Travel photo essay: Feira dos Passaros.

“God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages.”

— Jacques Deval

I hadn’t been looking for a market. Indeed, on such a lazy Sunday morning in Porto, Portugal, I hadn’t been looking for anything much at all–but isn’t that when the great finds always happen?

From the bus on my way into town a few days earlier, I’d seen a banner hanging outside a large, columned building announcing the Center for Portuguese Photography. More importantly, just underneath the center’s name read two key words: “Free entry.”

I’m on something of a museum strike at the moment, but figured I could make an exception for such a place. Saturday was spent biking along the coast and touring the port caves, but finally on Sunday, while wandering the city’s empty streets with no particular end in mind, I had time on my hands and decided to check out the photography center.

It was closed when I got there (big surprise, right?), but what I did find was a decent-sized market set up in the square in front of the center. It took my ears all of two seconds to realize this was no typical market–an extraordinary amount of chirps, twirps and tweets filling the air had me racing to put two and two together. A bird market? I’d never seen such a thing before.

But there, in the shade of each stall that’d been constructed in the square, cage after cage hung from the spokes of tents and umbrellas and sat stacked like building blocks on tables–some were even set on the ground, if no space was found. It was the most unusual of sights, so many birds twittering about in their cages, so many colors flashing in the corner of my eye. There were parrots and parakeets, cockatoos and, of course, canaries–rows of them perched in lines like schoolchildren in their cages.

I kept my eye out for someone to try and talk to. A woman approached me and stood for a while in the same tent I was in. I decided to try my luck. “Cada Domingo? Esto mercado?” I asked, hoping she’d be able to do something with my poor Spanish. “Si, si,” she said, “It’s a bird market. It is here every Sunday morning.”

I thought harder, trying to come up with the right questions to ask, to get at the answers I wanted. “Do, uh, many people in Porto own birds?”

“Oh, yes, my father–he has thirty.”

Well, then.

“And you?”

“Only one.”

“Are you here to get another one?” I asked, hoping I might be able to tag along for the process. Would there be bartering involved, perhaps? Which would she choose?

“Oh, no, I live in an apartment. It is very small. My father has much space.” I should certainly hope so. She went on: “We come to get more food–it is cheaper here.”

I let her carry on with her shopping and spent a few more minutes going up and down the aisles of the market, marvelling at such a tradition. I later learned it’s known as Feira Dos Passaros–“Fair of Birds,” in Portuguese–and a rough translation of a Portuguese website (thanks to you, Google Translate) describes it like this:

“In Portugal in Porto on Sunday morning is to show a very peculiar time.”

A peculiar time, indeed.

But all the rebel in me really wanted to do was open a few cages and let the creatures free…