Jardins do Bombarda is a cultural and community centre run by Largo Residências, a cultural and social solidarity cooperative. The organisation moved to the premises of the former psychiatry hospital Miguel Bombarda in Summer 2024, after spending a decade on Largo Intendente, and two years in the Quartel de Santa Bárbara, a former military barracks, always staying in the Arroios neighbourhood of Lisbon. In just a few months, the Jardins created an oasis in Central Lisbon, hosting cultural and social initiatives, community facilities, working spaces, performance venues as well as an artist-in-residency programme in the heart of Lisbon. In the context of the conference Terceiros Lugares LX24, Cooperative City’s Levente Polyák spoke with Largo co-founder Marta Silva about how the Jardins came to life and Largo’s trajectory across the neighbourhoods of Lisbon.
How did you start exploring these vast leftover spaces owned by public authorities?
In Lisbon, we are in a crisis of accessing spaces, both residential and cultural. We don’t have the means anymore to rent cultural venues from private organisations at market prices. In the same time we realised that there are a lot of empty government-owned buildings in the centre of the city. In 2021, we started negotiation with the government to occupy some of its unused properties, even temporarily, for cultural uses. We started with the military headquarters that we used for two years, in 2022 and 2023.
When we moved to the Quartel de Santa Bárbara from our building on Largo Intendente, it was a big change. The new venue was so big that it also changed the scale of our work. Instead of building only on Largo’s activities, we went on to create a larger ecosystem, hosting many other projects and initiatives related with cultural activities, social activism and generally with social and solidarity economy. We also opened our doors to the community, invited neighbours to come in, encouraged people to participate, to propose activities. We created the logic of a “third place,” also learning from practices abroad about how can we make the city more inclusive and more sustainable.
What did changing the scale of your work meant in terms of cooperating with other organisations?
When we negotiated to use the spaces of the Quartel, Largo was the only organisation there. And slowly we created an entire ecosystem of organisations, by inviting a variety of social and cultural initiatives to join us there. As we hosted all these projects, we created a kind of an assembly involving all the organisations on the site. We also established working groups to use our partners’ skills and interests to address our common challenges related to the space and the project in general: we had groups for programming, capacity building, external relations, narratives and communication and placemaking. In the Quartel, we had many buildings with a lot of space for everyone: we had to make the area more accessible, more comfortable and more fresh.
Our presence in Quartel was a temporary use: we knew that new social housing will be built there so our aim was to use the time we had before this transformation. When we received the news that works would begin in Quartel, we knew that we needed a new solution, not only for a new venue for Largo but also for the vast ecosystem of organisations we created there. The Hospital Miguel Bombarda, not far from the Quartel, was a good option for us.
What is the story of the Hospital Miguel Bombarda?
The Hospital Miguel Bombarda was the first psychiatric hospital in Portugal and it has been empty since 2011. This more than one decade left the buildings degraded. On the one hand, it is classified heritage that means important restrictions concerning any renovations and upgrade that would be necessary to use the buildings and the spaces in-between. On the other hand, there is a public housing project planned for the area but it is not yet approved, nor are defined the changes in urban planning needed to accommodate the new housing units. In order to use this period before approval and the future works, which might take several years, we proposed to bring here the ecosystem we developed in the Quartel.
What is the agreement that you have to use the gardens of the Hospital Bombarda?
It took us a lot of time to negotiate with the owner, a public property organisation. While the entire area is 44,000 m² including several buildings, at the moment we can only use 6000 m², mainly the gardens between the buildings. We have three buildings to host indoor activities but needed more: we did not only need spaces for Largo’s activities, but also for many of our partners. We are now a big group of projects working together to create something more than just the collection of individual activities. The challenge was to create something new, for cultural and social use, in the context of this old heritage complex. Therefore we had to do a lot of placemaking to build new temporary buildings that can accommodate all the organisations and residents of the new venue who came with us from Quartel. The created a model for wooden buildings hosting ateliers that could be built by the residents, together with people from more vulnerable social groups whom we could help with this work opportunity. They built not only the ateliers but also benches, stages, shades,
How did you address the specific legacy of the hospital?
It is a very peculiar context here. We have a lot of nature here, and as we are speaking, we can hear the birds singing. But of course, we also have neighbours and buildings here, and outside the walls, the whole city. We have a similar opportunity here as we had in our building in Intendente. There was a vulnerable neighbourhood with many social challenges and through employment and care, we built a social welfare net to address the area’s challenges.
Here we deal with the very strong psychological meaning of the Hospital Bombarda. Our work here is not only to change the use of an old hospital into a cultural and social centre. It is also to realize that we are in one of the first psychiatric hospitals in the country with a strong story and a very deep meaning. And for the majority of people, this hospital does not represent good things: it is connected to issues of mental health, it was a psychiatry where people were institutionalized. While our society today has a more communitarian approach to psychiatric treatments, the overall issue of mental health remains an important topic, not only for people who worked in this hospital or were treated here, but also for the broader society. This fact challenges us to not ignore the past of this place.
I had an interesting conversation with a group of patients that were moved to another psychiatric hospital from here. When they came back to Bombarda to make a programme in a radio organised by them, I tried to tell them how we’re trying to un-stigmatise the hospital, just as we tried to demilitarise Quartel Santa Bárbara. They were impressed that we are turning the oppressive space of the hospital into a place for freedom. That we turn this complex – that with its large walls, always felt like a prison, where families put their relatives to hide them from society – into a free place.
We keep collaborations with the people that were here and with people that are fighting to preserve the heritage of this space. There is an amazing group that is working on an inventory in the hospital, recollecting the art pieces that were exposed in the hospital’s Panopticon building when it was no longer a prison but a museum of art brut, outsider art. So there is a huge collection of art, pictures, movies, documents and instruments that is now being classified. People also fight for some of the buildings to be classified and not to be completely transformed, but also to give them a cultural use, not only as a museum to present the past but also to reopen it as a live, contemporary museum that can host cultural and mental health activities and bring back outsider art.
What are the activities that you have on the site right now?
We have here our permanent office where we organize everything. We have our restaurant and bar that are open every day. But the main garden is not only used by the restaurant: anyone can come in, relax and read a book or meet friends, without consuming. We also organise cultural activities outside in the main garden. Attached to the main garden, we also have a set of little houses where we host artists from abroad for shorter periods, as a form of an artist-in-residence programme. In one of these houses, we have the recently built community oven, and we also have a rehearsal room.
Then we have two different gardens on the sides, where we built the ateliers for the resident organisations projects, these function as working spaces. We have a romantic, hidden, secret garden, where private activities can be organised. And then we have a big outside stage and a small agora with tables for workshops.
The pearl of our garden is a former garage building that we converted into a performance hall with a rehearsal room. We call it Sala Valentim de Barros after the first Portuguese dancer with an international career. Because of his homosexuality, he was considered a criminal during the Fascist dictatorship and closed in the Miguel Bombarda hospital. He lived almost his entire life in the Panopticon, the hospital’s high security section. In the last years of his life, however, when homosexuality was no longer considered as a crime or a psychological disturbance, he brought dance and visual arts performances into to the hospital. Calling this hall where he also performed is not only an act of paying homage to him but also signals that we conceived the Jardins do Bombarda as an activist project that takes a position in current political struggles as well, for LGBTQ rights, for example.
How do all these stories come together in a coherent identity and narration for the Jardins do Bombarda?
We have created many connections with neighbours and collected stories, ideas and symbols that came from these encounters. With the working group focusing on narratives and communication, we decide together about what to do with these stories. We have a lot of resources for communication in our ecosystem: for example, our logo was created by a designer who already had a space in the Jardins. Most of the placemaking activities were not defined by us but by our partners.
We are now writing a book together about “taking the streets and breaking the silence” – about how to build democratic cultural spaces in the city. We have a dramaturg who writes fictional stories about these spaces, a photographer with pictures about all the projects involved in the Jardins and the Quartel, a researcher conducting a sociological analysis and an economist studying the impact of our ecosystem. These different brains and disciplines come together in a joint effort to tell the story of our initiatives.
What are the conditions of the economic feasibility of the Jardins?
We took a risk by investing here, and we need at least three year and a half of operation to recover our investments. In other words, in order to break even with our investments, we need to be here in the hospital premises at least until 2027. Our current contract does not guarantee it, especially as the buildings now are managed by a transitory owner; with time, they will pass to the Ministry of Housing with which we can hopefully make a more clear and long-term contract. The works will certainly not start within three years: the preparation of the development project takes a long time, especially as it involves changing the area’s zoning and land use plan.
What does moving from Largo Intendente to the Quartel Santa Bárbara and now to the Hospital Miguel Bombarda tell about the trajectory of Largo and the transformation of Lisbon?
It tells a lot. Our choices for locations have a lot to do with urban planning: on the other side of the Avenida Almirante Reis, Intendente and Mouraria neighbourhoods were disadvantaged neighbourhoods and many social problems. As those neighbourhoods consisted mainly of private properties, real estate speculation to turn empty buildings into hotels and short term rental apartments was very quick to transform the social composition of those areas.
On this side of the Avenida Almirante Reis, the issue is less social vulnerability. By all means, we already have individuals from vulnerable groups in our team and initiatives so we do not lose touch with the daily struggles of the local communities. The situation on this side, on Colina de Sant’Ana, is that it is filled with premises belonging to large public organisations like military areas and hospitals. Some are already empty, while others will become empty in the near future. Knowing this now gives us the opportunity to be more prepared and participate in the discussion about the future of these areas, unlike in Intendente, where gentrification and touristification was already under way.
When people ask about us why we invest in a temporary presence here, we can say that at least we try to step in the discussion before everything is defined. Because by the time Lisbon will open the new Central Hospital in Marvila, not only the Hospital Miguel Bombarda but also other hospitals – São José, San António dos Capuchos and Santa Marta – will be empty. So the entire Colina de Sant’Ana will be transformed and this transformation represents a big danger for the city. It is a much larger urban challenge than a single building. How can we do things differently than in Intendente and Mouraria? We have more knowledge, more partners, more power to negotiate and hopefully we can have an impact on this area.
