When not to visit Lisbon

The bloggers who didn’t get on with Lisbon chose possibly the worst month to stay in the city, August. It’s too hot and there are too many people around, making getting into restaurants more difficult. When we lived in Portugal, we tried to avoid going to popular locations between mid-June and mid-September when the Portuguese took their summer holidays as they could be uncomfortably rammed. Ironically, there may be fewer locals in the city, which makes it seem even more touristy. And southern European cities at that time of year … phew! Either side of that summer period is better; the weather is warm without being too oppressive (mostly) and the streets aren’t as crowded.

Where to stay

Another massively crucial factor is choosing where to stay. The bloggers had followed the advice of a guidebook and stayed in Barrio Alto. Been there, got the exact same T-shirt. During our first visit to the city, we stayed on same street where the Elevador da Bica is located. Apart from the old funicular, it was a relatively quiet place during the day, sleepy even. By midnight, and way beyond, it was bouncing, people filling the street below the apartment. It was a great scene, but not if you wanted to get some sleep. Other accommodation, a mix of apartments and hotels, in Alfama, Mouraria, Chiado, Avenida de Liberdade, and even Baixa were all quiet. Basically, don’t choose an area with a lively after dark scene if a decent night’s shut eye is the objective.

Avoid Tram 28

Yes, it’s the done thing to take Tram 28. But the queues to get on one are invariably lengthy, and the experience is akin to being in one of the tins of sardines you’ll find in specialist canning shops around Lisbon. The tourist trams on Praça do Comercio may not seem as authentic, but they are a far more enjoyable experience. You get a seat, an old rickety tram is an old rickety tram after all, and the route is virtually the same. Clearly it costs more but, hey, you aren’t a Lisboeta trying to get to work as cheaply as possible.

Break from the crowds

In some cases that may be easier said than done, e.g. if you take Tram 28 or the tram/bus to Belém. But mostly it is possible. The photo below was taken in August at around 10am, hardly the crack of dawn, the year after the travel bloggers complained the city was too busy. Explore reasonably early and even the main tourist drags aren’t bloated. On the same visit, we enjoyed a crowd-free breakfast at the hugely popular Time Out Market for the same reason. Later in the day, simply move a couple of streets away from the main arteries. Lisbon is one of those cities where there is something interesting to see on almost every street yet, like most cities, tourists tend to stick to the same handful of routes. We don’t subscribe to the pre-pandemic view that many popular European cities were ruined because of too many tourists. We’ve written Slow Travel guides for plenty of them, and we’ve yet to find one where it wasn’t the case if you explored on foot, you invariably escaped the crowds, even when it comes to the likes of Venice.

Embrace the city for what it is

Cities have different personalities. For me, the story of the count and the prostitute typifies Lisbon’s. In some parts, its buildings are palatial. In others, they border on being run-down. But even in graffitied backstreets there’s a certain charm, such as in the parts of Alfama where old women still sell ginjinha from their doorways. In some ways these are the richest areas of the city, the truly authentic ones where, no, there aren’t big supermarkets, but there are small local grocery shops, cafes, bakeries and so on.

Similarly, the backstreets are home to many restaurants representing Portugal’s worldwide influence, with some superb gastronomy from its former colonies. And it is a safe city, relatively speaking. There is petty crime. Wherever there are tourists there is petty crime. And we’ve been offered more hash in Lisbon than in any other city we’ve visited. But a simple shake of the head and the peddlers move on. We’ve never felt unsafe wandering around at night, and we’ve walked many shadowy Lisbon streets at various times after dark.

Whether you like any city or not is down to personal preference. We love Lisbon. It is one of our favourite European cities. Yet, its down-to-earth personality, and possibly even its multi-culturalism, won’t suit all. But research thoroughly and plan sensibly, and you improve the odds of getting the best out of a place, wherever that place may be.

Two revealed nothing about Lisbon which couldn’t be gleaned from five minutes browsing Google, whereas the third captured the soul of the city, the friendliness of the residents, and came up with a couple of things we didn’t know.

Guess which of the above the ‘experts’ fell into?

We wouldn’t class ourselves as knowing Lisbon inside out, but numerous stays over a number of years, including putting together city guides, have left us with a decent knowledge of the place. Enough to be able to spot who churns out flim-flam material, and who produces something which has depth, is interesting, and is useful. It was exactly the same with Tenerife, a destination I can confidently say we do know extremely well.

I have a bee in my bonnet about writers who try to pass themselves off as experts, specialists in a destination, when they’ve spent less time in a location than the average traveller, or have never visited at all. It’s a deception which demeans travel writing, and sadly it is all too commonplace. Unfortunately, once stalwart names are increasingly guilty of it.

Phil Rosenthal, presenter of Somebody Feed Phil, is the sort of travel presenter we respect and enjoy watching. After telling us how little he knows, he throws himself into finding out about a destination, mainly via culinary tips shared by people who do know the destination – chefs, food writers, people who were born there, and people for whom it has become their adopted homes. The viewer learns as Phil does.

In Lisbon, Phil notched up the known and the less well known – pastéis de nata, sardines, tinned fish, prego, bacalhau – and visited tiny ethnic restaurants in narrow side streets, a ginja bar, the Time Out Market, and Michelin star eateries. His hosts showed him how Portugal’s explorer heritage influenced Lisbon’s gastronomy. It was personal and oozed detail. Where some travel articles talk vaguely of the Portuguese love of this thing called bacalhau (salt cod) Phil tried pastéis de bacalhau and bacalhau à brás.

Whether it is in an article or a TV show, it is the detail which often separates the curious traveller from the charlatan. Always the little details. For example, one of the articles I referred to at the start was a guide to when to visit Portugal. For April it advised – “spring arrives, bringing warmer temperatures and abundant sunshine in both the north and the south.”
In Portugal, like Spain, there’s a saying “em Abril, águas mil” Basically, you can expect a lot of rain in April. The entries for some other months also resulted in Carrie Mathison-type exclamations.

The other article came nicely wrapped in lovely descriptive text. But underneath the wrapping was a superficial offering. Enough meat to possibly satisfy anyone who didn’t know the city at all, but not anyone who did. And this is what these types of travel articles rely on – a lack of knowledge. In a way there’s nothing wrong with that. If a reader learns something they didn’t know, then the piece has done its job. It’s the deception, writers passing themselves off as experts when they aren’t, that niggles me. I know why it’s on the rise. Since online publications started earning money through affiliate links, people booking hotels, excursions, holidays etc. via their websites, the goal can be more to attract views rather than feed readers with unique content as a result of first-hand experience. Quality of advice, and ethics to a certain extent, are being eroded as a result. It’s not good for the credibility of the travel writing industry, and everyone in it will ultimately suffer as a result.

But what has Lisbon and the Isle of Bute got in common?

As well as the travel articles/programme about Lisbon, I saw an article in the National Geographic online which included the Isle of Bute in a list of top adventure trips. I love Bute, it’s a fabulous little island that doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. But one of the top ten places for adventure in the world? Come on.

In the space of fifty-five words, the length of the text dedicated to Bute, they managed to get two things wrong. Whoever wrote it didn’t have a clue about the island.

But hey, who’s going to spot that?

Overtourism isn’t new, it’s just taken some destinations time to stop seeing the dollar/euro signs ringing up on tills and start seeing the negative effects of what has often been partly their own doing – e.g. not regulating cruise ship numbers, or campaigns which have attracted the wrong sort of tourists. The first time I remember being shocked by the impact of the ‘wrong sort of tourist’ was in Barcelona during a blog trip to Catalonia in 2012.

Behaving badly in Barcelona
The transformation from the previous time I’d visited Barcelona was extreme. Las Ramblas late night was a stag and hen disaster zone. Waiting in line at an ATM I realised the swaying guy in front wasn’t withdrawing money, he was pissing against the wall. The group of bloggers I was with were mostly Spanish, American, and Canadian. The pissed up folk on Las Ramblas were mainly British. It was an embarrassment.
But, and this is a key point, the only place we’d experienced overtourism of this ilk was on Las Ramblas. We were taken to many other city centre locations where the visitor/local balance wasn’t weighted quite so much in the favour of drunken extranjeros.

Something we spotted shortly after moving to Tenerife was the herd habits of many tourists. A significant amount of people follow the same routes when meandering through towns and cities. In Puerto de la Cruz, the seafront promenade between the old town and the new could be jam-packed whilst one street back was crowd-free. Lots of great little tascas and interesting sights remained unseen by the majority of visitors because they were literally off the beaten trail. It was a piece of information which completely changed how we visited popular tourist destinations.

Drowning in Dubrovnik
I regularly read how Game of Thrones has been responsible for overtourism in the old town of Dubrovnik. I’m sure it has brought more visitors, but Dubrovnik had a serious overtourism problem long before GOT raised its tourism profile even higher. We had an exclusive sneak preview of a GOT tour just after the first series to feature Dubrovnik as Kings Landing was screened. GOT hadn’t become so huge at that point, we hadn’t even watched it and bluffed our way around as our tour guide, who’d been an extra in the series, pointed out key locations from the show.
The entrance to the old town, Pile Gate, was a manic war zone of tourists shipped in from cruise ships. It was a nightmare; moving through being almost impossible. A single organism which suffocated the beautiful, limestone-paved Stradun. However, dink up a narrow side alley and it felt like escaping a straight-jacket.

Huge tour groups are the scourge of many a city; touristic cream cheese disrupting the smooth flow through main arteries. However, they don’t clog up minor ones in the same way, which makes them easy to avoid. Once we know tour group routes we’re on the way to avoiding the worst impacts of overtourism.

A tour group antidote in Venice
Cities suffer from overtourism because they’re so popular. And they’re popular because they’re fabulous places to visit. Venice is a classic example. There is no alternative to Venice. It is stunningly unique and the most romantic city we’ve visited. We only got round to doing so in June last year as the ‘too busy’ tag had put us off for years. But it wasn’t that much different from every popular city we’ve visited. The main attractions were mobbed, and the routes between cruise ship and attractions were clogged. However, there is nowhere which isn’t beautiful in Venice and, again, just by veering off the main drag we strolled many delightful and quiet streets lining gorgeous canals. After dark, once the day-trippers had departed, the city wasn’t busy at all. We stayed in Venice twice, the first time was just off Piazza San Marco. The second was in Dorsoduro where the streets were equally charming… and totally devoid of tour groups.

Frantic Florence
It was similar with Florence. Where Ponte Vecchio and Piazza della Signoria were claustrophobic with people, Oltrarno on the south side of the river delivered the Merchant Ivory vision of Florence we’d hoped for.

Lively Lisbon
Lisbon suffers from overtourism of a different kind. I don’t tend to notice big tour groups in Lisbon as much as in the likes of Venice or Dubrovnik, they’re absorbed more by the city. But Lisbon’s popularity has exploded over the last few years among independent travellers. Airbnb and similar have capitalised on demand for a more ‘local’ experience, subsequently the personalities of some neighbourhoods have changed. There are pros and cons. Some areas which were seriously dilapidated have been invigorated. Others, which oozed local charm by the bucket-load, have had some of their character erased. Like every other popular city, visitors head to the same spots and tread the same routes. We’d never eat along Rua Augusta as it’s a tourist trap, yet its restaurants are packed daily even though there are far better places in the surrounding side streets. There are neighbourhoods where few tourists wander, between Chiado and Belém for example. As it’s another of those European cities where everywhere you meander is interesting, there are still plenty of crowd-free places to explore.

There’s no disputing these, and other cities like them, have a battle on their hands to balance the needs of the local population with that of a transient one. They are cities of joy, which is why so many want to enjoy them. Straying from the well trodden path helps reduce pressure on over-filled pavements, and spreads the love (i.e. money) as well as visitors around more.

That’s what I tell myself anyway, to ease a conscience which is guilty at wanting to visit already oversubscribed destinations.

Five past nine on a drizzly Monday morning in an airless office in Manchester and Nigel Keen puts his jacket over the back of his chair, sits down and switches on his PC. He grabs a sheaf of papers, looks at the first and starts typing numbers onto an Excel spreadsheet.

10+7+8+5+7+3+10=50

Following a night of honking antiquated car horns, tripping on his own over-sized shoes and pretending to throw tin buckets of water at a near hysterical audience at Lisbon’s Coliseu dos Recreios in 1908, sad-faced clown Eduardino retreats to a nearby hole-in-the-wall bar. It has a sticky wooden floor and an equally sticky wooden counter – the consequence of too many over-filled shot glasses – both useful adhesives that prevent a drunken clown from falling over. Whilst the bartender chats to his other customers, the increasingly inebriated Eduardino keeps himself amused by experimenting with the bar’s selection of liqueurs. One accidental mix tastes particularly quaffable. Even through his alcohol-fuelled stupor he realises he’s stumbled onto something quite special. The sweet and sour Eduardino ginjinha cherry liqueur is created.

Five past nine on a grey and moody Tuesday morning in an airless office in Manchester and Nigel Keen puts his jacket over the back of his chair, sits down and switches on his PC. He grabs a sheaf of papers, looks at the first and starts typing numbers onto an Excel spreadsheet.

10+7+8+5+7+3+10=50

In eighteen hundred and whatever, a grizzled miner with skin the same colour as his saddlebags breezes into a bar in the Golden Gate City and orders a shot of whisky and, to celebrate a prosperous day’s gold prospecting, a plate of oysters. He downs the whisky then slides the oysters into the empty glass before dowsing them with ketchup, horseradish, vinegar, Worcester sauce and Tabasco. This seafood cocktail could slip into obscurity at this point, but it doesn’t. A tuned-in bar owner spots another ingredient in the glass, business potential. He adds a variation of this seafood cocktail to his menu and the rest is history… sort of. Somewhere along the road oysters are swapped for prawns.

Five past nine on a chilly, dark Wednesday morning in an airless office in Manchester and Nigel Keen puts his jacket over the back of his chair, sits down and switches on his PC. He grabs a sheaf of papers, looks at the first and starts typing numbers onto an Excel spreadsheet.

10+7+8+5+7+3+10=50

“This is not how you make Ceasar salad,” travel blogger Rebecca Findlay-Hall scowls at a bemused waiter in an aspirational restaurant in the Big Smoke. “The lettuce should be romaine not radicchio, these are vinegary boquerones, not salty anchovies… and why are there sun-dried tomatoes on the plate?”
She’s already mentally filling preparing a raft of social media posts berating the restaurant for screwing up the classic Caesar salad. There’s a way classic recipes should be made and the chefs here clearly don’t know their trade.

Friday night and Nigel is finished calculating numbers for the week. He goes home, pours himself a glass of wine and opens his favourite recipe book. Its messy, stained pages look like something from Einstein’s blackboard – numbers and words are scrawled at various sizes and odd angles to fit the once white spaces beside the text. They are adjusted measurements and alternative ingredients; personal additions which stamp Nigel’s gastronomic footprint on the recipe. Nigel, like everyone who is passionate about cooking, from enthusiastic amateurs to innovative top chefs, enjoys experimenting. Trying out a recipe over and over, unlike doing a mathematical calculation, rarely results in exactly the same outcome.

A couple of hundred miles away, Rebecca pulls a plastic tub from a microwave and sits at her kitchen table, her eyes scanning her facebook page to see if there are any comments on her post about the restaurant’s crime against the Caesar salad. Rebecca hates it when restaurants mess with classic dishes, offering her bastardisations. Her views on how classic dishes should be made are as rigid as a mathematical formula.

When it comes to gastronomy, Rebecca is the accountant in this tale. She believes classic recipes should be followed to the letter of the law, there is no room for imagination or experimentation. Rebecca hasn’t twigged that if gastronomy was full of Rebeccas there would be no Caesar salads or prawn cocktails in the first place. The same dishes from one restaurant to the next would all taste exactly the same, never-changing products from a factory line… or maybe even a global fast food chain.

Some of the above is based on facts, or at least what is touted as being facts. The rest is emrelishment. Don’t bother searching Google for a definition of the word, I made it up. Why not? Over 1,000 new words are added to the Oxford English Dictionary ever year. Something language and food preparation have in common is that they are fluid. Both are in a constant state of evolution.

Unless you happen to be a Rebecca.

Not tram 28
We’ve abandoned numerous attempts to experience the tram route which is a ‘must’ in guidebooks. Praça Martim Moniz used to be the place to catch the 28 to avoid queues. Not now. Thanks to social media everyone knows that tip. Subsequently, the queue there is soul destroying. Additionally, the 28 is almost always packed to capacity. Not only are journeys uncomfortable, especially if you’re a wee octogenarian wummin, it’s a pickpocket’s paradise.

A more comfortable alternative was to travel the same route as the 28 in an equally rickety tram built in the early 20th century, but a red tourist one.

There are three major differences between jumping on a red tram in Lisbon and squeezing onto the iconic number 28 which shakes, rattles, and rolls its way around the streets of Portugal’s capital.
One is the cost. Two is on one you get a seat, on the other you experience what sardines in cans in Lisbon’s tinned fish shops feel like. Three is one tram is red, the other is yellow.

The red tourist tram – the cost and benefits
At €18pp the red tram is three times more expensive than the 28. But you are guaranteed a seat; have an audio guide to tell you all about the streets you pass through; and get free access to the Aerobus (connecting the city with the airport), Carris Lisbon Public Transports trams, as well as the Santa Justa Lift and funiculars. A ticket also entitles holders to discounted entry to some monuments and museums.
(The €18 price tag was booking online at Hop on, Hop off Bus Tours. It’s slightly more expensive to buy tickets in the city.)

Catching the red tram
In theory this is a doddle of a process – red trams leave from Praça do Comércio every 25/30 mins. The Hop on, Hop off website advises “No need to redeem! Just show your voucher to the driver or the boat captain at the stop you’re joining from.” But it also states – “We’d recommend you arrive 15 minutes before the tram departure you wish to be on – to allow time to validate your voucher.”

For obvious reasons it’s easy to find the red tram stop opposite Arco da Rua Augusta. However, at the stop was a stationary red tram, a green tram, and a pool of confused people waiting to board something. Andy and my mum joined the small queue whilst I went in search of someone who might be able to make sense of what happened next.

It took me a while to find the tram tour rep as he was lurking inside a small shelter with his back facing the world outside, head down concentrating on his phone. He was amiable when I collared him, but he could have done with being more proactive rather than reactive. The people around us were equally unsure of what they were supposed to do, or which tram they should jump on.
After a few questions I discovered a) the green tram was only for tour groups and b) the printed voucher I had in my hand had to be redeemed for a ticket at the company’s kiosk located 100m away at the corner of Praça do Comércio and Rua do Arsenal. I could have done with knowing that upfront as a red tram departed in the time it took me to swap voucher for ticket.

The red tourist tram – the experience
From then it was plain sailing. We jumped on the next red tram to arrive, took to our wooden seats, plugged in the audio guides, sat back, and enjoyed the rickety ride.
The tram trundled inland through Baixo to Praça Martim Moniz where we sat in traffic for an interminable period due to a build up of trams in the square. I admit to feeling a tad smug as we rattled past the long queue for the No28 and a convoy of yellow trams packed to the gunwales. From there our tram climbed through Mouraria and then Alfama, where there’s a hop on, hop off stop at Portas do Sol, before cutting back across Baixo Chiado and up through Bairro Alto to the Basílica da Estrela. At the Basílica it turned sharp south to skirt Lapa before veering east to run parallel to the Tagus before returning to Praça do Comércio an hour and a half after setting off.

It had been a slow voyage through Lisbon’s narrow streets, which was exactly what we hoped for. From our shaded vantage point within the charming old tram, we watched at leisure a gradually unfolding diorama of life in the city’s historic streets, with scenic highlights occasionally thrown in. The audio guide, although difficult to hear in some parts (old trams are very noisy), added colour and meat; there were a few nuggets we hadn’t known previously. A newfound respect for tram drivers was also gained as we watched ours negotiate badly parked delivery vans and clueless pedestrians. It was delightfully slow travel in all senses of the phrase and my mum loved it, as did we.

On a hot, sunny day in October it was an unusual way to enjoy some of the best of Lisbon without breaking sweat.

It’s effortless to hit a thumbs up on facebook, a retweet on Twitter and share posts which show others just how much we care about our planet. We can do it without expending any energy whatsoever. It’s easy to be an eco-warrior when you don’t need to leave the house and the only weapon you need is a keyboard or a smartphone.

If those words sound as though they’re laced with cynicism, it’s because they are. I’m cynical because too often I don’t see enough people walking the talk.

Take Lisbon around twelve months ago. Showing visiting friends around the city we constantly had to step over discarded E-scooters on already too narrow pavements. Occasionally we had to move into the street just to be able to get around mini mountains of scooters which had simply been abandoned. The place was a mess. There were riderless E-scooters everywhere. People, mostly visitors, were simply leaving them as soon as they’d had enough, it didn’t matter where that was. It was difficult enough for us to walk some streets, for people with pushchairs or wheelchair users it must have made negotiating Lisbon’s cobbled pavements virtually impossible.

The problem was twofold. The first was the city was flooded with E-scooters. Numerous companies saw the opportunity to make money and six months after they were introduced in September 2018 there were at least 4000 of them on the streets. The second, and main problem, was the way people were using (abusing) them.

As well as being a nuisance and an eyesore, there were worse consequences than them simply being an inconvenience. Irresponsible usage was leading to accidents. Unsurprisingly, residents complained about the impact on their city as authorities were faced with a rapidly growing problem they hadn’t seen coming.

By this point other cities around Europe had started to wake up to the problems which accompanied this supposedly ‘green’ mode of urban transport. Madrid initially banned them but allowed them back on the streets at a later date; a Parisian politician published angry Tweets about them; and Porto’s politicians talked about learning from the mistakes of the Portuguese capital by implementing tighter regulations.

To be fair to Lisbon, the authorities acted quickly, clamping down on scooter companies to ensure they took more responsibility for the management of the E-scooters they were renting out, and charging them for their removal by municipality services when they’d been abandoned for longer than a specific time period. This latter measure cost companies €17,000 between February and June this year.

The result is that scooters are still very much a part of Lisbon’s streets, but they’re no longer the unsightly and sometimes dangerous ‘litter’ they were at the end of last year. The last couple of times we visited Lisbon, the city looked a lot less cluttered than it did last December. Companies and, subsequently, users have ‘cleaned up’ their act.

The lesson here is that even with a product which is viewed as being environmentally friendly you can’t always trust people to behave responsibly; that’s the X-factor which has caught cities around the world by surprise. It’s not really the E-scooters themselves which were the problem in Lisbon’s case. It was those users who treated who scooters as a ‘holiday’ plaything and who didn’t respect the city as being a place where people live and work… or respect the environment for that matter.

In theory.

But something strange happens when light particles flow through those corneas; swirling, curving, and eventually taking form… all in far less than, well, the blink of an eye. The images which materialise should be the same as those being viewed by the person/s next to us, but that isn’t always the case. Here’s a thought-provoking line I just read.

The eyes look, but the brain sees.

Like a sculptor, each of our brains mould those light rays to create details that might be unique to us. Basically, we all see things differently. Which is why one person might consider some of Lisbon’s streets to be grungy, messy, ugly… “ramshackle and broken places” as one less than enamoured writer put it, unimpressed with the vision of dirty streets and crude street art the light particles created in their mind.

Where they see squalor and a depressed urban landscape in some raggedy streets and obscure alleys, I see a raw, gritty, honest beauty – a down to earth yin to the yang of the city’s grand architecture. This Jekyll and Hyde character partly makes Lisbon the compelling city it is. It is an essential aspect of its nature. This is, after all, the city of the count and the prostitute.

This IS Lisbon
If one work of urban art encapsulates Lisbon, it is the mural of the Escadinhas de São Cristóvão in the Mouraria district. The calçada steps are grubby and crude graffiti blends with more artistic images on the mouldy walls lining the stairs. And it all works because these gritty stairs are partly what Lisbon is all about. The mural, created by a group of local artists, illustrates the richness of these labyrinthine neighbourhoods. Saudade wasn’t born in the city’s more immaculate neighbourhoods with their elegant town houses. It was a product of these not so mean streets.

Funky funiculars
I have mixed feelings about the ‘customisation’ of Lisbon’s funiculars. It’s hard not to view the ‘artwork’ which masks the customary yellow surfaces as just vandalism, especially when compared and contrasted with the truly artistic, and sanctioned, street art which decorates part of the Ascensor da Glória route. But it is something you come to subliminally accept as part of the urban Lisbon landscape. The debased carriages create a mental image of what Sol Yurick’s New York superimposed on a classical European city might look like.

Remove the shackles
Sometimes you have to look beyond the superficial simplicity of scrawled graffiti. There is poetry and political expression everywhere. Even the most primitive illustration may give some insight into the city’s past and present.

Strange bedfellows
There’s a definite Alice Through the Looking Glass vibe about the gable end artwork which completely distracts from the seriousness of the scenes outside São Bento Palace, the seat of the Portuguese Parliament. It might look whimsical, almost as though the giant face is winking knowingly at pomp and circumstance. But in fact the face, by a Portuguese Banksy known as Drawing Jesus, is another comment on Lisbon’s personality – its features represent an amalgamation of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Soulful streets
Some of the street artwork is quite hauntingly beautiful. Saudade flows from this image on the fringes of the Alfama district. Its soft-focus lines lend it an almost ghostly appearance – possibly it’s a former fadista gazing mournfully along streets through which her melancholic songs were once respectfully carried aloft in the breeze.

Joyful streets
In a few neighbourhoods, local characters are immortalised in evocative black and white prints on walls. It’s a celebration of working life in the city, of the people who are and have been its beating heart. They act as a pictorial storyboard, telling tales of recent social history, turning the down-to-earth streets into a living museum, albeit one whose walls have peeling plaster.

Art in the maze
Rich pickings are to be found on the walls of the largos, travessas and becos of the Alfama district. These range from sophisticated imagery and abstract art to traditional tiles, many referencing fado. My favourites show depictions of the count and Maria Severa. These images feature on postcards in Lisbon’s tourist shops. There’s often a slight adjustment to this one on cards; the count tends to be wearing stilettos – fado castico (chaotic fado).

The sheer volume of graffiti on Lisbon’s streets might be too much for some, but this is no pristine theme park designed purely for the pleasure of a transient population. Buildings with walls of peeling plaster and gritty art are as much a part of the city as the elegantly exquisite architecture. Yin or yang, princes or prostitutes? Which you see depends on what happens when those light particles take shape in your mind.

We did discover quite a few interesting things about Santa Cruz. However, the most valuable lesson we learned was there are no shortcuts when it comes to getting to know a city, big town, or anywhere new. We didn’t do a very good job of that commission. What we wrote might have fooled anyone who didn’t know Santa Cruz, but anyone who did would have spotted immediately we were unfamiliar with the place.

Over the years we got to know Santa Cruz very well. As we did an interesting thing happened, the city shrank. Places which once seemed to take an eternity to get to suddenly were close at hand. By the time we wrote city routes for our Real Tenerife guides we were able to trim away all the fat; guiding others to favourite spots without any of the pointless wandering we had initially done.

Meeting up with a friend from Manchester for an afternoon and evening in Lisbon recently, the realisation dawned that in the last two years Lisbon had also shrivelled in size.

On our first visit in 2014, Portugal’s capital was a sprawling metropolis. We exhausted ourselves pounding its beautifully cobbled avenues and alleyways, ticking off the big attractions as well as smaller, quirkier ones which appealed to our particular travel preferences. On our next visit in 2017 we had a blueprint to follow and update, Inntravel’s Lisbon city guide. We also had access to invaluable insights courtesy of friends from Alentejo who had an apartment in Lisbon’s Mouraria district. Since then we’ve flirted with the city on numerous occasions, staying in various bairros, each with contrasting personalities. We don’t know the city well enough to consider ourselves experts, but we do have a pretty decent knowledge of it.

Thanks to tips from friends combined with our own legwork we now know things like where there are food markets which aren’t as rammed as Time Out; which avenues look resplendent when jacaranda trees are in bloom; where to watch the sunset in a grungy setting whilst local musicians jam (not everyone’s scene); areas to find designer clothes as well as the best mainstream shopping centres; the locations of labyrinthine bookstores, and which streets are liveliest during the Sardine Festival. We’ve also built up a list of favourite venues for lunch and dinner; restaurants where you don’t get served mediocre food at elevated prices.

Over that time Lisbon has become considerably smaller, subsequently getting around is a lot easier and faster than it once was. With limited time in which to show our friend a few tasty Lisbon snippets, knowing how to get from A to B concisely was invaluable.

Lisbon’s Metro system is a cheap and easy way to travel around the city, but we also use some metro stations to move around whilst keeping dry on the rare occasions it’s raining. For example, after pointing out the iconic statue of Fernando Pessoa outside Cafe A Brasileira in Bairro Alto, the steep escalators of the Baixa-Chiado Metro station descend to another river-level exit at Baixa. Lisbon’s cobbles are lovely, but on wet days steep streets can be lethal to negotiate.

In other parts of the city, public elevators in anonymous buildings transport locals, and those who know of their existence, to lofty hilltops (a tip from our Mourario friends), cutting out muscle crunching ascents. Tackling steep streets is unavoidable in Lisbon, but there are ways to keep these to a minimum.

Our friend had already enjoyed a couple of days exploring Lisbon, and had ticked off some of the city’s main attractions, so we decided to show him a few of the little things which interested us, starting with the sobering 1506 Memorial, a reminder of what intolerance can lead to. In this case it was the massacre of thousands of Jewish citizens. Nearby is the burnt church, the Igreja de São Domingos, where the acrid aroma of the fire which gutted it in 1959 still seems to linger. To counter the sombreness of these two, we popped into a hole in the wall ginjinha bar, downing a sweet and sticky shot of Lisbon’s famous cherry liqueur.

Popping through the easy-to-miss entrance to Casa do Alentejo is akin to falling down the rabbit hole. A humble doorway from the street gives no clue to the building’s palatial interior and Moorish styled courtyard. There’s a tavern on the ground floor whilst the first floor boasts a couple of grand restaurants. As we vociferously admired the artistry in one of them, we were shushed by a sextet of snoozing septuagenarians who apparently viewed the restaurant’s vestibule area as their makeshift bedroom.

When our friend admired a postcard featuring a flamboyant fado scene, we took him to see the real thing, accessed through a crumbling archway which most might ignore as it seems to lead to unattractively messy, graffiti-scrawled steps. And so our afternoon unfolded, wandering Lisbon’s fascinating streets purposefully, yet in leisurely fashion.

At night we ate at Chapitâ à Mesa, an eclectic place – art community/bar/cafe/restaurant/live music venue – where voodoo dolls of unpopular politicians welcome you before you descend to an eclectic series of dining areas that make me think of Cirque du Soleil. We ate great food accompanied by panoramic city views and, at one point, soulful sounds from an Angolan singer who was performing in the bar later. He was escorted by a brace of female clowns. That’s Chapitâ à Mesa.

We spent an easy, relaxing and immensely enjoyable afternoon and evening with our friend. We’d done and seen a lot, but it didn’t feel like we’d expended a lot of energy in the process. Cities are like great friends, the more you get to know them the more comfortable you feel in their company.

But, as we discovered all those years ago in Santa Cruz, there are no shortcuts to becoming best friends with a city.