The bakery on Travessa do Barro

How a closed bakery became a pottery, and what we found in the walls.

Inês

A woman standing on the side of a building next to a traffic light

The first visit

The landlord showed us the building in the rain in February 2019. The sign still said Padaria do Barro in faded blue, and the windows had been papered over since 1998. Inside there was a tiled bread oven the size of a small car, three long wooden racks, and a smell we later realised was nearly seventy years of flour in the floorboards.

We said yes before we'd seen the back room.

What came with it

The racks were the first surprise. They were built for loaves, about a metre and a half long, slatted so air could move underneath. That's exactly what drying clay needs. We sanded them, oiled them, and they've held every batch since.

The oven was the second. We can't fire pottery in it, because a wood bread oven doesn't get close to stoneware temperatures, so it stores our glaze buckets now. It stays at a steady temperature all year, which glaze likes.

What we found in the walls

When we replaced the wiring we found a tin of receipts from 1964, a child's drawing of a loaf with a face, and an old ration card. They're in a frame by the wheel. Neighbours still stop at the door and tell us which bread they used to buy here. Mostly broa, the cornbread.

Making it work

The building isn't easy. The roof leaked through the first winter. The floor slopes about two centimetres from front to back, so every shelf has a wedge under one leg. In August the front room reaches 31 °C and the clay dries faster than we can trim it.

But the light through the front windows in the morning is the best light I've ever worked in, and the street outside is quiet enough to hear the wheel.