Zebreiros Station, Watercolor of a Ghost Building
2023-06-30
Here in Porto, the sea water is really cold, like properly cold. So we always prefer the river beaches around here instead. The Douro has some great ones, and Zebreiros is one we keep coming back to.
But even at a beach like that, I’m not much of a sunbather. Sometimes I end up bringing a sketchbook to draw the surroundings instead. That day the sun was especially strong, with barely any shade near the entrance.
So I walked down to the far end of the beach. There’s more shade there, and a few good spots to sit and draw something… I kept looking at the sand and the water as I walked, just hoping to find a quiet corner.
And lucky for me, Zebreiros has exactly one of my favorite things to draw. Abandoned buildings, especially the modernist ones, they fascinate me. I love the geometric shapes, the empty windows, that strange kind of silence only a building like that can hold.
The Zebreiros Station
This huge building at the end of the beach used to be a station that pumped water from the Douro. It carried the water up the hill, to be distributed around the Porto area. The building is actually well preserved, but completely abandoned.
From what I was told, there was some kind of flaw in the water filtration design. That made it unusable pretty much from the start. In the end, it became another one of Porto’s ghost buildings, the kind I love stumbling on.
It’s not the first time I’ve found a building like this around here, Porto is full of them, tucked between the riverbanks and the older neighborhoods. Those abandoned buildings are exactly what draws me in, always a good reason to sit down and draw. So here’s the record, one more problem… let me just say, one more watercolor of a ghost building on the Douro, one of my favorites so far.