Portugal: Lisbon doll hospital treats owners' blues too

The sign Doll Hospital, 1830 above a doorway in a traditional Portuguese tiled facade adds to the feeling of nostalgic melancholy in Lisbon's shabby centre, with its toy-like houses and creaky yellow trams.Inside, dozens of limbless dolls and torn teddy bears lie on the shelves awaiting repair, hand-written tags hanging from their remaining limbs. But the repair shop -- one of the oldest in Europe -- claims that it fixes more than broken toys. Instead, it seeks to cure toy owners' blues in a country that invented saudade -- the barely translatable Portuguese term used to describe deep longing for something or someone that is lost. Manuela Cutileiro, the owner of the shop, said that they not only work on the dolls but also with the feeling, and it has always been their job, she said to, ultimately, cure the saudades. The hospital started back in 1830 with an old lady who used to sit outside her dry herbs store on the busy Figueira Square, making and fixing simple cloth and clay dolls for local children. The herb shop was later transformed into a workshop as the doll-repair part grew. It now repairs toys from priceless porcelain heirloom dolls to modest teddies whose value is purely sentimental. Armed with a scalpel and dressed in a white doctor's coat, restorer Lurdes Cardoso repairs a decades-old doll, removing old cracked paint from its articulated arm. You have to have patience and a certain sensibility, including knowing where to stop, Cardoso says. The restoration is very delicate and we cannot spoil the historic look, she added. To underscore that effect, bits with original unspoiled paint are left exposed where possible and repainted parts are draped. Adding to the hospital look, restorers use other medical instruments like surgical clamps to hold the elastic bands inside the dolls' trunks during repairs. But unlike a real-life hospital, an assortment of spare legs, arms, and even heads is readily available, lying in wooden drawers with transparent windows. We recycle everything. People often bring us doll parts that they no longer use, said Cutileiro. She said prices range from 4 euros ($5.72) for basic repairs to modern dolls to a few hundred euros for total overhauls of antiques, but nothing like the thousands people pay in other places like France, the United States and Japan.