Alminhas da Ponte

Look at that dark relief on the wall and the candles almost always burning below it. It is not decoration: it is one of Porto's most painful memories, and local people have been tending it for more than two centuries.

1A bridge made of boats

Before the iron bridges, the city was linked to Vila Nova de Gaia by a floating bridge. The engineer Carlos Amarante designed it using around twenty boats lashed together, and it opened on 15 August 1806.

2The morning of 29 March 1809

Marshal Soult's French troops, in the second Napoleonic invasion of Portugal, entered Porto. Thousands of people ran to the river to reach the far bank. The bridge could not bear the weight of the crowd and collapsed. How many died has never been established: some historians speak of several hundred, while other accounts give more than four thousand.

The city did not raise a grand monument but a set of «alminhas»: a small shrine where people could pray for the souls the river took.

Alminhas are a very Portuguese devotion: wayside shrines to the souls in purgatory. The present bronze relief is the work of the sculptor José Joaquim Teixeira Lopes, father of the better-known António Teixeira Lopes, and dates from 1897.

3What to look for

• The scenes in the relief: the French horsemen, the crowd on the bridge, bodies in the water and, above, the divine figure in the clouds.
• The candles and flowers that local people keep replacing.
• The river right in front of you: picture the bridge of boats stretching across to Gaia.