Lisbon, the city I came back to live in

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.