My Favourite Magic Festival in the World
There are very few certainties in my life.
Wars, earthquakes, Covid, humanitarian emergencies. My plans have a habit of changing depending on what is happening somewhere in the world.
And yet, somehow, every year I find my way back to Lisbon.
Back to Lisboa Mágica. https://www.lisboamagica.pt
Calling it my favourite magic festival would be correct, but incomplete. Because after so many years, Lisboa Mágica is no longer simply a festival to me. It is family.
Every year, some of the best street magicians in the world travel from every corner of the globe to be part of the cast of Lisboa Mágica. Different countries, different cultures, different languages and completely different ways of understanding magic all meet in the same city.
That is part of what makes the festival so extraordinary. You can walk from one square to another and, within a few hours, watch artists whose styles could not be more different. Some make hundreds of people roar with laughter, others create something intimate in the middle of a crowded street. Everyone brings a piece of where they come from, and for a few days Lisbon becomes a meeting point for some of the finest street magic in the world.
And the best part is that we are not only performing alongside each other. We are watching each other, learning from each other, exchanging ideas and inevitably talking about magic long after the last show has finished.
There is something special about arriving in Lisbon and seeing those familiar faces again. Magicians are strange creatures. We spend most of the year scattered around the world, travelling from theatre to theatre, city to city, festival to festival. Some friends I may not have seen for a year, sometimes longer.
Then we meet again in Lisbon.
A hug. Beers in our favourite place. And somehow the conversation continues exactly where it stopped.
Perhaps friendship is not always measured by how often we see someone. Sometimes it is measured by how little time it takes to feel that they never left.
That is one of the things I love most about Lisboa Mágica.
For a few days, I am completely surrounded by magic.
Not only performances, but love for magic.
You watch an artist you have admired for years. You discover someone you have never seen before. You stand backstage discussing a trick. Someone shows you a move over dinner. You try something new in your show that afternoon, realise it does not work, change it, try it again the following day.
Sometimes an idea that has lived in your notebook for months suddenly becomes real because another performer says one sentence that makes you see it differently.
Magic festivals are not only places where we perform. They are places where magic evolves.
And Lisboa Mágica has always given me the freedom to experiment.
I have tested new routines there, changed old ones, failed, learned, rebuilt and occasionally discovered something that stayed in my repertoire for years.
There is something incredibly valuable about performing several times, in different places around the city, for completely different audiences. Every show teaches you something.
But the real magic of Lisboa Mágica begins long before any magician performs the first trick.
It begins with the people who make the festival possible.
The team behind Lisboa Mágica is extraordinary.
As performers, we arrive and everything seems effortless. Someone is waiting for us. The schedule works. The venues are ready. Transport appears when it should. Problems are solved. Someone always knows where you are supposed to be, even when you do not.
And because it works so well, it is easy to forget how much work is hidden behind it.
Months of preparation. Hundreds of details. Artists arriving from different countries, each with different needs, props, schedules and requests. Venues across a living city. Audiences. Technical requirements. Last-minute changes.
And somehow the team makes it all feel simple.
That is perhaps the greatest magic at Lisboa Mágica: making an enormously complicated festival look effortless.
At the centre of it all is Luís de Matos. https://www.instagram.com/luis_de_matos?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsi=ZDNlZDc0MzIxNw==
Luís was one of my favourite magicians long before I had the privilege of knowing him personally. He is someone whose work I watched, studied and admired.
Life occasionally does something beautiful: it allows someone you admire from a distance to become someone you know.
And sometimes, if you are lucky, that person becomes a friend.
Today I can call Luís a friend, and that means much more to me than being able to say that one of my favourite magicians is my friend.
Because what impresses me most now is not what audiences see.
It is what happens around it.
The attention to detail. The respect for artists. The generosity. The desire to make things properly rather than simply make them happen.
And that philosophy extends through his entire team.
They are the people waiting when you arrive. The people solving the problem you created five minutes before the show. The people checking whether you need something, moving equipment, coordinating venues, answering messages and somehow still smiling at the end of a very long day.
Over the years, many of them have stopped feeling like an organisation.
They have become friends. They have become family.
And then there is Lisbon itself.
I cannot imagine this festival anywhere else.
The city is not simply the background. It is part of the show.
Lisboa Mágica brings magic into the streets, squares and everyday life of Lisbon. You perform surrounded by a city that is already wonderfully theatrical: trams passing, people talking from balconies, cafés full of life, tourists stopping beside locals, children pulling their parents towards a crowd because something strange is happening in the middle of a square.
For a few days, magic belongs to the city. And I love being a small part of that.
Every year there is a moment when I realise how much has happened since the last time I was there.
Another year of travelling.
Another collection of airports.
Another set of stories.
Sometimes another war.
And then suddenly I am back with a deck of cards in my hand, surrounded by magicians, technicians, organisers and friends.
The same hugs.
The same dinners.
The same conversations that begin with magic and somehow end several hours later somewhere completely different.
A new trick. A new idea. A new joke. Something stupid that might become brilliant. Something brilliant that will probably turn out to be stupid.
That is magic.
And that is why, when the festival ends, leaving Lisbon always feels a little strange.
The props go back into their cases. Everyone begins checking flights. The hugs become goodbyes. Friends disappear towards different airports and different countries.
The city goes back to its normal rhythm.
And we scatter again.
I never know exactly where the following year will take me.
But I know that, if I can, I will return.
Because Lisboa Mágica is not simply a festival where I perform. It is one of the places that reminds me why I became a magician in the first place.
For the curiosity.
For the possibility of creating something that did not exist yesterday.
For the joy of watching someone else perform something beautiful and thinking, I wish I had thought of that.
For the friendships that somehow survive thousands of kilometres and months apart.
For Luís.
For his incredible team.
For the smiles of the audience.
For that strange family of people who spend their lives making impossible things happen.
No matter where in the world I have been during the year, Lisboa Mágica is where, for a few days, I come home.
