On Thursday, I went to the sardine museum. This was recommended by someone who’s lived here over six years. We met the weekend before while eating pizza and she shared a list with me, “Porto for Visitors,” which included over 110 things to do, many of them small businesses or things well off the beaten path. This museum was marked, “an absolute can’t-miss while in Porto.”

This level of sharing is new to me. When it comes to travel tips, I usually wait to get to know someone before sharing, or just give them a few morsels. Even with this new list, I hesitate to share it with others.

That’s because I am a Gatekeeper.

For those who don’t know, a Gatekeeper is someone who withholds or controls access to something. For example, if you go to a restaurant but refuse to reveal its name.

It sounds harsh, but I have my reasons. The main one is that, in many instances, I don’t feel it’s my place to share. This is a foreign country, and I am a guest. If this were New York, that’s another story; but outside of my city, I feel it’s on the locals to invite you into their favorite places (there are exceptions, of course).

But it goes further than that. Many times, a place is special because it has a certain essence. Often that’s historical, or it just has a ton of character. It’s an authentic representation of the place you’re visiting. When foreigners learn of it and start flocking, the place can lose its essence. A vibe contributes to a place just as much as the food, or the character of the people. And if enough of the wrong type of crowd starts going, that vibe can get tarnished.

There’s a lot of contradiction, I know. I could also be restricting business to a place that might badly need it. That business owner might want others to hear about it.

But all this is moot. Because here, things run differently, as evidenced by my new friend at the pizza shop. And my day at the sardine museum proved it.

The sardine museum, first of all, has been one of my favorite experiences thus far. It’s called Conservas Pinhais (and even garnered a visit from the New York Times). It’s in an old beautiful building right by the ocean, largely untouched from when it was first built over 100 years ago. You can hear the seagulls. Outside is covered by a seaside mist. And fortunately, it does not reek of fish.

The tour begins and, like many museum tours, you open with a movie. Now, in just about every tour, a museum movie is a super boring film about the origins of the place, the history, the founder, etc. Not here. This one is called “The Fisherman’s Daughter.” And it looks like something that could’ve placed at Sundance.

The story goes: A woman is raised in Portugal by her fisherman father. She loves the sea, and would beg her father to let her go on his trips. But no, it’s far too dangerous, he’d say. She’d wait eagerly for him to come home and hear all about his adventure. Later on, she grows up and moves to New York City, working as a project manager at a fish distribution facility. Perhaps it’s in my blood, she said, the Portuguese spirit of exploration. One day, she learns on the news of a storm happening off the coast of Portugal, so she’s a nervous wreck as she checks the weather every hour. She gets no word from her father. She starts to think the worst. Then it’s her birthday, and her doorbell rings. It’s none other than her father, surprising her. He joins as he brings fresh fish from Porto and shares it with all her friends.

I started crying. And I felt even better once I heard sniffles behind me, as well as throughout the room. “We need to provide tissues in the room,” the tour guide said, a bit bashfully. “This happens every time.”

The tour is incredibly thoughtful. It’s interactive and never goes dull. As we walk the factory, there’s a sense of pride in the people working. I found it interesting as well that the majority of the workers were over 50.

Everything at the museum is done by hand: snipping the fish, packing the cans, even folding the paper that goes around the can. Some of the sardines are packed with tomato sauce, for which only two people in the entire world know that recipe (they showed me the safe where they keep the recipe, too, which looked like something from the Italian Job).

As we finished, as part of the tour, we all get to eat our fish. Most of the people left shortly after, leaving just me, the server, and another couple. He starts telling us all these tiny hidden Portuguese villages to visit. I am kind of stunned. This is a country rampant in tourism and rapid growth and he’s spilling all the jewels. He even took time to write down his recommendations for both of us on small pieces of paper — tiny towns deep in the middle of the country, known for their pristine waterfalls. I gratefully said to him, “This is so kind of you. You don’t really know me, but you’ve shared all these wonderful things.”

“We want to share our country, it’s in our being,” he said. “Why would we want to keep all this to ourselves? When you have something beautiful, you want to share it. If I were in your country, you’d share it with me, wouldn’t you? We love our life here. And so we want others to experience it too.”

Something from that video stuck with me. The woman was sad when she returned to New York, saying, “Maybe it’s just that I have the Portuguese spirit of exploration in my bones.”

At one point, the Portuguese conquered the world. This was a tiny country that hangs off the side of Europe, cut off from the rest of the continent by Spain and the Pyrenees mountains. And yet, they explored and colonized an outsized stretch of the entire globe. They sailed on ships one third the size of the Spanish and yet they crossed oceans. As Bourdain called them, they were “the original navigators.”

These days — and this is from a very small and limited sample size — there seems to be a spirit of wistfulness. Nostalgia is another word. It rings in the music, the ceremonies, even the statues. It’s not quite the middle-aged father talking incessantly about his high school glory days, but there’s a similar yearning.

As I mentioned in previous posts, Portugal is not a rich country. It’s far from the force it was in the 1500s. And I wondered, is it because they are no longer exploring?

“Yes,” said one friend. “I think we have lost our way.”

I’m talking with two Portuguese folks who work at my co-working space, Barbara and Joao. We’re sharing coffee in the garden and talking about the state of Portugal, as well as its mentality on work itself. They both have differing opinions.

“I don’t think we’ve lost our way,” Joao said. “You see, we romanticize those days. We did that exploring out of necessity. We had nowhere else to go. And now, we still explore, but in other ways. So much of the younger generation leaves the country to study elsewhere and learn about different parts of the world. I mean, still, you see so much food around the world inspired by the Portuguese.”

“That said, we do have this underdog mentality,” he continued. “We feel like we’re this forgotten part of Europe, so we have to prove ourselves.”

“He’s right,” Barbara said. “We work super hard in this country, but we don’t work well. We constantly feel like we need to prove ourselves, so we work extra hard on every single little thing, but we don’t know how to prioritize. And so we’re inefficient.”

“The only culture just as inefficient are the Italians,” Joao said, laughing. “But at least they own it!”

“That’s pretty wild,” I said, “In New York, your work is your life. It’s your identity, but because the city’s so expensive, it also determines your lifestyle. If you have a bad job in New York, you’re miserable. But also, that means many people are unhappy even in high-paying jobs, because they need to have it, whether they like it or not.”

“It’s the same here,” Barbara said.

“Really?” I asked. “Because to us, it’s the opposite.”

“No. We really identify with our work,” she said. “That’s changing now with the younger generations. But before, your work was everything.”

“That’s crazy to hear, because we have this totally romantic view of any country in Europe. We feel like here, work is like your fourth priority, under family, friends, and food.”

“No, that’s just the French,” Joao said, laughing.

“Like I said, we work really hard, we just don’t work well,” he continued. “We’re a little too relaxed. For example, in 2008, I was looking for a job and living in Norway. The big crash happened, and the government and companies responded immediately. And ultimately, they fared out okay. But in Portugal, it took us so long to react to it, that very soon it was too late. And we really suffered for it.”

“But still, you can’t argue with what we did back then,” Joao added. “Even though I believe it was out of necessity. But no matter what, I believe we’ll always have that attitude.”

That Thursday was a national holiday. The good folks at the sardine factory let me know of a procession happening in a nearby town about an hour outside of Porto. It’d honor the patron saints of the fishermen, something I’ve been increasingly drawn to.

The whole town showed up. I took the metro from Porto and the train was completely filled. We crowded the sidewalks as the procession came. It was a beautiful experience, filled with reverence and outstanding attention to detail.

And should anyone ask, I’d be happy to tell them about it, or any other Portuguese delight that happens to come my way.

After all, how selfish would it be to hog all this beauty.