Photo: Ščenza
Lisbon, Portugal · Europe
Lisbon, the city I came back to live in
I came to Lisbon in 2008 for a long weekend, came back in 2011 for a month, and in 2019 stopped pretending and rented an apartment. Most of what is now said about the city — that it is hot, crowded, expensive, complicated — is true. None of it is the whole story. This is the rest of it.
By Ščenza
· updated · 6 min read
I write this from a small kitchen on the second floor of a building on the Calçada do Combro, in Bairro Alto, with the windows open onto the back of the building because the front gets the morning sun and the back gets a breeze. The air smells of grilled sardines from the bar three doors down and of the sea, faintly, from the Tagus eight blocks away. It is twenty-three degrees, in February. This is Lisbon.
Why I came back, and stayed
The first time, in 2008, I was passing through on the way to a wedding in the Algarve. I had a day. I spent most of it in the Mãe d’Água, the eighteenth-century cistern at the top of the city, where a Romanian janitor played a small accordion for himself and the sound came back off the water. I left thinking: there is something here I have not done with yet.
It took eleven more years. The city by then had changed — it has changed roughly every eighteen months since 2014 — but the shape of what drew me back was the same. A small city, walkable, draped over seven hills, with a working port, a complicated colonial history, a sentimental music form (fado) that the locals still treat as serious rather than nostalgic, and the cheapest excellent fish in Western Europe.
I rent a one-bedroom now. I have a coffee place. I know which tram to skip in summer. I am still, in some basic way, a foreigner. But I’m a foreigner who’s stopped photographing the trams.
Where to base yourself
Príncipe Real if you want a contemporary, leafy, slightly upscale neighbourhood with the best contemporary Portuguese cooking and a small botanical garden where the local grandfathers play chess in the afternoons.
Graça, north of Alfama, for a residential feel and one of the only Lisbon viewpoints (the Miradouro da Senhora do Monte) that hasn’t yet been ruined by buses.
Madragoa, west of Cais do Sodré, for a working-class neighbourhood that’s becoming a foodie one without losing the laundry on the lines.
Avoid the Baixa as a base unless your stay is two nights. It is the cruise-ship centre and the rents reflect that. Avoid the Bairro Alto on a Friday or Saturday night unless you sleep with earplugs in.
What to actually do
Walk down to the river at sunset. Start from the Miradouro de São Pedro de Alcântara at the top of Bairro Alto, drop through the city to the Cais das Colunas, and sit on the marble steps with the sun going down behind the 25 de Abril bridge. Bring a beer. Everyone does this. It does not feel commodified. It feels like the city ending its day.
Take the LIS train to Sintra in shoulder season. Not in July. Sintra in July is unbearable. In March or November, it’s a misty hill town with two impossibly beautiful palaces and a Disney-vivid one (Pena) that you should look at from outside and then not enter. The Quinta da Regaleira with its initiatory wells is the strange one. Go early; the local trains are frequent.
Go to a small fado house, not a famous one. The famous fado houses in Alfama do dinner shows that are perfectly fine but feel staged. The real ones are smaller, often a back room with no sign, and the fadistas are amateurs in the technical sense — they have other jobs. Ask at the Mesa de Frades (booking required) or hunt for the fado vadio sessions advertised by hand-stuck flyers in the Mouraria.
Spend a Sunday at the Feira da Ladra. The flea market at Campo de Santa Clara, twice a week (Tuesdays and Saturdays). It is the city’s collective attic — chipped ceramics, communist-era pamphlets, brass weighing scales, postcards in cramped Portuguese script. I have bought nothing useful and many beautiful things.
Eat a pastel de nata fresh out of the oven. The famous one is Pastéis de Belém, where the queue is real but moves. The local one, less famous but in my opinion better, is Manteigaria — there are several around the city now, but the one on Rua do Loreto in Chiado is original. Two euros. The pastry should crackle audibly when you bite it.
Where to eat
Portuguese cooking is humble. The good restaurants don’t try to be more than what they are: a charcoal grill, a competent kitchen, a fridge of fresh fish, a list of inexpensive wines from the Douro and the Alentejo.
Cervejaria Ramiro (Anjos) — Seafood by the kilogram, beer in glass mugs, paper tablecloths, no reservations after 7 p.m. Queue or come at noon.
Taberna da Rua das Flores (Chiado) — A chalkboard menu, twelve seats, the chef shouts when the next table is ready. The best contemporary tasca in the city.
A Cevicheria (Príncipe Real) — Kiko Martins’s small ceviche bar; a giant fibreglass octopus on the ceiling; a fifty-minute wait; worth it for the tuna ceviche and the salt-cod bolinhos.
Solar dos Presuntos — Old-school, white-tablecloth, suited waiters with thirty years on the floor. The bacalhau dishes are the show.
Time Out Market at Cais do Sodré is fine in a pinch but it is, structurally, a food court. The neighbourhood places are better at a similar price.
When to come
March, April, and October are the gold months. The summer (June–September) is now hot, crowded, and rent-inflated. February has the best light of the year if you don’t mind a chance of rain.
The week before Carnaval in February is a quiet miracle. So is the week between Christmas and New Year, when the city locals come home and the tourists are elsewhere.
Practical notes
- Visa: Schengen.
- Money: Card everywhere, except sometimes in the smaller tascas. Carry €30 in cash.
- Transport: The Metro is small but useful. The Viva Viagem card (one euro) loads journeys. The 28 tram is famous and now mostly a pickpocket performance — take it once for the experience, then walk.
- Pickpockets: Tram 28, the Rossio station, the Saint George’s Castle queue. Front pocket, no phone on the table.
- Language: Portuguese, not Spanish — they are different languages and Lisboetas are quick to remind you. Bom dia, obrigado/a, desculpe. The English is good but the gesture counts.
A final thought
Lisbon, more than almost any other city I’ve lived in, has the quality of being slightly old. Not ancient — Lisbon was largely rebuilt after the 1755 earthquake — but old in a tired, lived-in, lovable way. The buildings lean. The plaster cracks. The cats sleep on the sun-warmed walls. The grandmothers shout for groceries from upstairs windows. The fadistas sing about saudade, the untranslatable Portuguese word for a longing for what is gone, and the song goes on.
I’m aware that the city I love is in the middle of becoming a different city, and that the rents that allowed me to settle here will not allow others. This is the painful contradiction of every place I have written about with affection over the past twenty years. I write about it anyway, because the city itself was my teacher in this, and the lesson it teaches, the one Lisboetas have known for centuries: fica o que serve, vai o que não — what is useful stays, the rest goes. Including, eventually, us.
If you only have a few days
7 ideal things to do in Lisbon
Museu Nacional do Azulejo
Madre de Deus convent, Xabregas, east of Santa ApolóniaHalf a day; far enough out that it stays quiet
Five centuries of Portuguese tile inside a convent founded in 1509, and upstairs the thing that justifies the bus: a twenty-three-metre panel of roughly thirteen hundred tiles showing the Lisbon waterfront around 1700, half a century before the earthquake removed it. You stand in front of a panorama of a city that no longer exists and pick out the three or four buildings still standing. The convent church, gold-smothered and still consecrated, ambushes you on the way out.
Calouste Gulbenkian Museum
Avenida de Berna, Praça de EspanhaGarden first if it is hot; the collection needs three hours
Reopened in July 2026 after a long closure, and worth the wait. An Armenian oil magnate spent decades buying only what he personally liked — Egyptian, Islamic, Chinese, Rembrandt, Monet — and then a room of René Lalique jewellery that stops visitors mid-sentence. The modern collection sits across the park under Kengo Kuma's canopy. The garden between the two is shaded, full of turtles, and the best place in Lisbon to fall asleep on a bench in August.
Feira da Ladra
Campo de Santa Clara, behind São Vicente de ForaTuesdays and Saturdays, mornings
Trading in some form since the thirteenth century, the thieves' market now takes the square behind the monastery twice a week. Chipped ceramics, brass scales, colonial-era postcards, single shoes, dictatorship-era paperbacks, radios that will never work again. Early for the antiques, late for the sellers who no longer want to carry it home. In six years I have bought nothing useful here and would not undo a single purchase.
The cacilheiro across the Tagus to Cacilhas
Cais do Sodré to Cacilhas, ten minutes on the waterOver in the late afternoon, back after dark
Orange boats every twenty minutes or so, running from before dawn until nearly two in the morning, and the crossing gives you the only view that shows the whole city at once. Cacilhas is a working waterfront, not a tourist quarter; the seafood along the front has been better and cheaper than the equivalent on the Lisbon side for about a century, and Lisboetas have quietly acted on that fact the whole time. Come back on a late boat with the 25 de Abril bridge lit above you.
Mãe d'Água das Amoreiras, where the aqueduct ends
Amoreiras, at the top of the cityAnytime; combine it with the walk down to Príncipe Real
Eighteenth-century reservoir where the Águas Livres aqueduct finally delivered its water: a vaulted stone chamber over a pool of black still water, now used for exhibitions. Stand at the rail and clap once. The aqueduct itself strides the Alcântara valley on a pointed arch sixty-five metres high; you cannot walk the top, that closed in 1852, but you can stand underneath it in Campolide and feel correctly small. A man played an accordion in this room in 2008 and it is why I kept coming back.
Quinta da Regaleira, Sintra
Sintra, forty minutes by train from RossioMarch or November, earliest booked slot of the day
Built by a millionaire with an appetite for the Templars, alchemy and Portuguese nationalism: a garden of grottoes, tunnels and an inverted spiral well that you descend rather than climb. It is silly, and it is entirely committed to being silly, which is why it beats Pena palace up the road, where the queue is longer and the interior lets you down. Entry runs on timed slots now. Take the first one and be down the well before the coaches land.
Museu do Fado, then a fado vadio night in Mouraria
Largo do Chafariz de Dentro, AlfamaMuseum by day; the amateur sessions run midweek
Do the museum first. Two hours, the recordings, the guitars, and it is the difference between hearing a sad song and hearing a tradition with rules. Then look for the amateur sessions rather than a dinner show. Fado vadio is sung by people with day jobs, in small rooms in Mouraria and Alfama, advertised on handwritten paper taped inside a window, and the room goes silent the moment somebody starts. One of them will be poor. One of them, twenty minutes later, will not be.
From a Split boy’s notebook
The Split lens
What reminded me of home
The hillside-and-sea geography is uncannily familiar — Alfama is essentially Veli Varoš with more tile and a worse case of short-term rentals. The pastel de nata is not unlike our fritule. Both cities have a slightly melancholy seafront and a fado/klapa singing tradition that turns up unexpectedly in bars.
What Split could borrow
Lisbon kept the historic Tram 28 running through the old town as both a transport line and a tourism magnet. Split's old wooden tramway closed in 1948 — a small heritage tram from Ferije through Bačvice to the port would be the right tourism asset that locals would also use.
Who can take you
Tour operators & guides to try
A short, opinionated starter list — just my humble opinion. Verify before booking.
Devour Toursspecialistwww.devourtours.com →
Devour's Lisbon tasting walks — particularly the Mouraria and Campo de Ourique routes — get you past the *pastel de nata* clichés into the working ginjinha bars, the family-run charcuterie, and the small bakeries that supply the neighbourhood. Guides are local Lisboetas, not imported. The 3.5-hour format suits a long Lisbon afternoon. Watch: avoid their Bairro Alto walk on a weekend, when the area is already overcrowded.
Inside Lisbon Toursspecialistwww.insidelisbon.com →
Inside Lisbon is the small Lisbon-based walking outfit founded by a local journalist around 2010 — the half-day Lisbon Essentials walk, the wine-and-tapas evening, the Sintra day trip. Groups stay around 10. Guides are Lisboetas who'll tell you frankly which neighbourhoods have been hollowed out by short-term rentals and which still have working families. Caveat: not a fado specialist; for fado, book the smaller back-room fado houses directly rather than via any tour company.
