Lisbon, My Home for a Year

* The narrow maze of streets of the Alfama
* The views over the city from Castelo Sao Jorge
* The wealth of cheap eats in Bairro Alto, Baixa and Alfama

Quick Tips:

Best Way To Get Around:

Driving, and more particularly parking, in Lisbon is a nightmare. Cars are a status symbol, so anyone who can will have one, however small. Parking, therefore, is nigh impossible, and a sub-culture of drug addicts ‘minding’ street parking has sprung up. If you are picking up a hire car from Lisbon, you are best picking it up at the last possible moment, and from the airport if you are heading north.

See my entry Trams & Funiculars, about the local ways of getting around town.

I started off intending to write about my favourite restaurant in Bairro Alto, until I remembered I don’t think it had a name. Nor can I explain how to find it, as I regularly wandered around this maze of streets with visiting friends apologising for not exactly remembering where it was. And indeed, wandering aimlessly was how I found this restaurant/hole in the wall and, with hindsight, how to find some of Lisbon’s best value restaurants.

For good home cooking, and value for money cheap eats, I found that some of the best restaurants look like a cross between school rooms with basic chairs and tables, and hospital rooms with clinical white tiled walls. Rather than looking for restaurant signs, look for a A4 sized whiteboard with the title ‘Prato do Dia’ (Dish of the Day) on, and a room full of working Portuguese rather than tourists. If you don’t think you can tell Portuguese and foreign diners apart, the Portuguese will be drinking wine from carafes, the foreigners from wine bottles!

The dish of the day will be the best value for money. Invariably, this will be pork or fish, with chips, rice, seasonal vegetables , and salad. For the full experience go for a ¼ litre of red wine, and end the meal with a ‘bica’, the Lisbon name for an express coffee.

In the absence of any names, some of the better restaurants I ate at were; on the right of Elevador da Gloria (see my entry on ‘Lisbon’s Funiculars’ for directions), on some of the streets between Rua do Commercio and Rua do Arsenal around Praca do Commercio (but not the main Rua Augusta), and along to tram route through Alfama to Graca.

Lisbon is quite an old-fashioned city in many respects, and still hangs onto some of its quirkier forms of transport, namely its trams and elevadores (mini funiculars).

The No.5 Tram is my favourite tram route, as well as being my transport to the city centre. This tram runs between Lapa in west and Graca in the east. The best bit, in my opinion is the run down from Estrela/Lapa, through Bairro Alto, Baixa, and past the Cathedral and up through Alfama. In summer, peak tourist season, the stretch between Baixa and Graca is incredibly busy and you often have to wait one or two trams before squeezing on. My advice is to walk one or two stops back up the line to get on in relative ease.

Ideally, the run should be done on one of the old wooden trams, which sadly are being phased out by swish shiny ones, as the ride is like a runaway boneshaking rollercoaster up and down Lisbon’s hills with the bell clanking aggressively at anything human or mechanical that looks like straying into its path. The zig-zag route past the Cathedral and castle is amazing, as the tram hurtles along narrow lanes almost touching the sides.

The most well known elevador is the Elevador de Santa Justa in Baixa, an anorexic wrought iron skeleton of a tower, with a lift that takes you up from Baixa to Chiado and the ruins of Carmo Cathedral. From the top there is a great view over Baixa.

My favourites are the less well-known elevadors. Away from the city centre these are working lifts, carrying heavily laden ladies, hunched under their shopping, and labouring old men. These routes are incredibly short, but the hills are also incredibly steep if you do decide to walk. Elevador da Bica cuts straight up the hill between Rua da Sao Paulo and Rua do Loreto. If you follow the No.5 Tram route heading west out of Chiado the top of the elevador is on your left not long after you start heading down Rua do Loreto This yellow and white mini funicular, climbing a very steep hill, is predominantly used by grumpy flat capped old men, and wizen old ladies laden with shopping from the Mercado da Ribeira. The bottom of Elevador Gloria is just north of the tourist office on Praca do Restadores. It is another mini funicular, rewarding you with great views over Lisbon from the viewpoint just up the hill from the top stop.

All elevadores use a standard bus/tram ticket, one ticket up one ticket down, which you can buy on board with the exception of Santa Justa which has a ticket office at both entrances. Exact change is more or less obligatory.

I, myself, led a fairly quiet social life in Lisbon due to the fact that being in my late 20’s, all my Portuguese friends tended to be married, preferring intimate nights in without me. Befriending the younger German girl that took over my role in Lisbon, I returned for a holiday mid-August to find my old flat had become the hub of social planning.

Nights out in Lisbon seem to start around midnight! Staying with my German friend we seemed to be rung between 11pm-1am asking if we had any plans for the night. From there a ‘typical’ night out could take several routes.

Route One would see us drive (a car is a status symbol in Lisbon whatever the size)to Bairro Alto, invariably taking 20 minutes to find a parking space, before visiting a random selection of bars. The Portuguese barely drink, so the next 3-4 hours would be spent sharing one drink between 3 or 4 people just talking. Around 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning we’d start looking for a club. This characteristic of night’s out in Lisbon always amazed me as we’d always get stuck in a traffic jam with similarly minded clubbers. I can remember being stuck in a traffic jam for close to an hour, and my friend’s old banger overheating in the 30C night time temperatures requiring us to push it across a one-lane flyover heading out to Doca de Santo Amaro, Lisbon’s trendy revitalised old docks.

Route Two seemed popular with male friends, as this involved driving their soft tops down to Cascais or Estoril at 2am. The first time, I was thrilled by this idea on a hot summer’s night. On getting in the back seat, however, I was advised to put on the baseball cap and cover myself with the beach towel. Essentially driving down the strip is great for the couple in the front streets, but those of you in the back seats emerge like you’ve been dragged through a bush backwards.

The clubs themselves have distinct characters. In Doca de Santo Amaro we tended to go to Kings & Queens,, a gay friendly club, with scantily dressed dancers to please all tastes and loud and lively dancing. At Kapital, a four story club with roof terrace dance floor on Avenida 24 Julho and apparently Europe’s largest according to my Portuguese friends, posing and people watching seems the order of the day.

Either route, we’d invariably get home around 6-7am just in time for the first freshly baked bread of the day from a local bakers. With such marathon sessions as this, its not surprising that many young Lisboetas are adamant that heading to the beach at 4pm is the thing to do.

Okay, so Lisbon has no beaches, but there are several within easy reach without a car and a couple more that merit a day trip. With a car there are many more, but be sure to head off early or late in the day at weekends in summer otherwise you will join most of Lisbon in traffic jams, most particularly on the Tagus Bridge.

Cascais (pronounced k-eye-sh, k-eye-sh)is the easiest beach to reach from Lisbon. Hop on the bright yellow Cascais train at Cais do Sodre station and trundle out to Cascais, the last stop, and then walk southwest to the waterfront. In my view, the beach is a narrow overcrowded strip full of foreigners, but you can still catch a few hours of rays here if you head out of Lisbon at lunchtime.

My favourite ‘local’ beach is Praia do Guincho, a wild if somewhat popular beach north of Cascais. I have to say that everytime I visited the wind would pick up in the early afternoon, so much so that the large granules of sand would sting my face, and I would invariably end up going home early. My Portuguese friends acknowledged this was a feature of this beach, and I have since learned that the 1991 World Surfing Championships were held here! To get to Guincho, catch the train to Cascais then hop on a bus, although you’ll have to check with the tourist information, as I can’t remember which.

For the beaches a little further afield see my other Lisbon entries onCosta Caparica & Tróia, and Villa Nova de Milfontes in my Southern Portugal journal.

Costa Caparica (pronounced kappa-reek-ah)is the best beach close to Lisbon. It’s a fabulously long wide white beach stretching as far as the eye can see from the town of Costa da Caparica. There is a little railway that runs part of the way down the start of the beach so you can rest your feet, and then walk still further away from people once you get to the end of the line. Supposedly each of the 20 or so stops attracts a different crowd of people. I’ve never really noticed a difference, apart from the nudist stretch around stop 17, with naked bodies hiding in the dunes. Starting from the town, the beach is at its busiest and also doubling as a fishing boat park, further along the dunes start and the beach gets quieter, and at the end of the railway line only halfway down the whole stretch of sand the beach is almost deserted. I’ve spent many a Sunday, from May through to October, stretched out all day just enjoying the sounds of nature.

Because it is a fabulous beach, so close to Lisbon, the place is incredibly busy in mid summer, although from the end of the mini railway line you’ll always be almost on your own. From late morning on summer weekends the bridge over the Tejo is tailed back with Lisboetas heading out to get their beach fix.

There is an express bus from the centre of Lisbon (you’ll have to check with the tourist office, as although I can picture it I can’t remember where it is for the life of me!) from June to September, which is a painless way to get to the beach mid-week (apart from August). During busy August, summer weekend, and out of season, it is equally enjoyable to take the bright orange ferry from Praca do Commercio to Cacilhas watching the Lisbon’s skyline and then pick up a local bus from the bus station just outside Cacihas ferry terminal.

If Costa da Caparica is not wild enough for you, the place to head to is Tróia, a long finger-like peninsula across the River Sado from Setúbal (pronounced stu-bal), and getting there is half the fun.

I imagine there is probably an express bus to Setúbal from the centre of Lisbon, but if you really want a sense of getting away from it all, the first leg of the journey should be on the little orange ferry from Praca do Commercio to Cacilhas, watching Lisbon’s terracotta roofed hills fade from sight. From Cacilhas, pick up a bus to Setúbal. I invariably ended up on the local bus zigzaging across the main dual carriageway south to sleepy little villages on either side. Once in Setúbal, head to the old port just down from the centre of town (not the new industrial docks!) where you catch a pontoon car ferry out to the northernmost tip of the Tróia. Once on Tróia, you can either walk round the beach to your right, or cut through the holiday apartment estate – its not scenic but its quicker than walking around the beach and the tip of the peninsula.

Away from the apartment blocks, and on the beach proper, its hard to know what to describe. Quite simply there is nothing, no trees, no dunes, no buildings, no people just a flat expanse of sand. If you shone tropical sunlight on it, as opposed to the different Mediterranean sun, it would look the sand bar islands you see featured in the Caribbean, Great Barrier Reef, or South Pacific. In some respects, its actually quite a lonely place to be on your own (as a lone female). Suitably for an uncommercialized wilderness beach, you will need to bring your own food and water.