Lisbon
Shopping Avenida da Liberdade has been Lisbon’s chicest shopping street since 1879. Inspired by Paris’s Champs Élysées, this tree-lined boulevard boasts 1,200 yards of designer stores, theaters, and upscale eateries. More eclectic shopping experiences can be found in older neighborhoods like the Baixa, Chiado, or Príncipe Real. The Baixa has a street almost entirely devoted to tiny retro stores selling buttons and ribbons, as well as some of the best specialist wine and gourmet stores. Chiado’s treasures include the world’s oldest bookshop and a tiny boutique dedicated to exquisite handmade leather gloves. Príncipe Real is a fashionistas’ delight. For mall rats, the city is ringed by huge modern shopping centers: Amoreiras is the poshest and most architecturally distinctive.
Dining Lisbon’s food scene has been transformed. A generation of young chefs such as José Avillez and Henrique Sá Pessoa have refined and modernized Portuguese cuisine, winning the city of constellation of newly minted Michelin starts. The city’s historic ties means Lisbon has always had an exotic mix of restaurants serving cuisine from places like Brazil, Mozambique and Goa, but lately there’s been an explosion of international eating options meaning you can get excellent pizza, ceviche, mezze, or braised sea cucumber. Thankfully, traditional Portuguese food is still available either in hole-in-the-wall tascas (taverns) or decades-old temples to tradition, where white-suited waiters will supply you with city favorites like fava beans sautéed with peppery chouriço sausage and cilantro, or shredded salt-cod mixed with scrambled egg, fried potatoes, and black olives. Then, of course, you must track down the source of Lisbon’s most successful culinary export, the cinnamon-dusted custard tarts, known as pastéis de nata.
Nightlife & Entertainment Lisbon’s legendary nightlife includes riverside discotheques featuring Europe’s top DJs, rooftops where you can toast the sunset, and whimsical antique-filled cocktail bars. The Bairro Alto and Cais do Sodré districts hold the greatest concentration of nightspots. To get an authentic taste of Lisbon’s unique fado music, it’s best to go late when most tourists head for their hotels but true aficionados emerge. Cinema buffs will love that Portugal doesn’t dub, but shows subtitled films in their original language. The São Carlos opera house is a rococo treat; the Gulbenkian orchestra offers world-class classical music, and the Teatro Camões showcases avant-garde dance.
Lisbon Yesterday & Today
In his hit Lisboa Menina e Moça, fado legend Carlos do Carmo croons an erotic paean to his hometown, likening this “city-woman” to a lover who has seduced him by the purity of her light. Lisbon is a sensual city, easy to fall in love with. Seen from the river, the gentle curves of its hills are clad in a harmonious architectural mix where gothic towers and baroque church fronts blend with the Enlightenment rigor of its 18th-century downtown.
Sunlight from the expanse of slow-flowing river reflects onto limestone walls and paving stones giving Lisbon a “white city” nickname. Close up, you’ll find it’s full of colors. Centuries-old government ministries, mansions, or apartment blocks can be painted in burgundy, cornflower-blue, or lemon-yellow. Even the skyline’s most intrusive modern addition—the towers of the Amoreiras shopping mall—are a technicolor tribute to 1980s taste.
Be prepared for a sensory overload. Another favorite song claims “it smells good, it smells of Lisbon”: you can catch the scent of orange blossom, laundry freshly hung from wrought-laundry balconies, or cinnamon sprinkled on oven-hot pastries. Tastes and sounds will be a multicultural mix. Lisbon was the first global city; its cuisine is fused with cinnamon, cumin, and cilantro. Shots of thick black coffee are knocked back at countless neighborhood pastry shops. The soundtrack will include the cries of gulls, rattling of streetcars, and fado music mixed with rhythms from Brazil and Africa, the throb of Portuguese hip-hop from the suburbs. Feel the cool of marble bars in 19th-century cafes or the sun-warmed azulejo tiles on the walls of a baroque church.
Of course, you also get the horns of backed up traffic, the whiff of blocked drains and uncollected trash, and the babble of tourists from around the world. Lisbon is not a museum, but the capital of a modern European state with all the issues facing big cities around the world. Despite the changes, travelers will discover a place of great beauty: laidback, welcoming, and affordable.
The history of Lisbon can be told in four landmarks. Let’s start with Castelo de São Jorge (p. 98), the city’s cradle, whose crenelated ramparts are immediately visible on one of the highest of the city’s shills. Humans have lived here since at least the 8th century b.c. Celtic tribes and Phoenician, Greek, and Carthaginian traders all had defensive outposts before Roman colonizers erected a fort to defend their seaport of Olisippo. After them came a succession of Germanic tribes, including the Christian Visigoths who ruled from their capital in Toledo for almost 150 years, before they were defeated by Muslim armies who swept in from North Africa and captured Lisbon in 714. Under Arab rule, the city spread down the hillside in the current neighborhoods of Alfama and Mouraria, whose narrow winding lanes still recall the medinas of North African cities. Remains of the Moorish fortifications (Cerca Moura) can still be seen today, but most of the medieval walls you see were built after the 1147 capture of the city by Portugal’s first king, Afonso I Henriques, with the help of crusaders from northern Europe. The siege of Lisbon was a turning point in the Reconquista wars, confirming Afonso’s leadership and setting the Christian forces on course for victory, although it would be another 100 years before they captured the whole of the country. In 1255, King Afonso III, grandson of the country’s founder, transferred the capital from Coimbra to Lisbon, and the castle became a royal residence. It was named after St. George (São Jorge) only in the 14th century, after King João I married an English princess, the legendary dragon-slayer being England’s patron saint.
Next up, the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, a symbol of Portugal’s Age of Discoveries. The 15th-century monastery is the city’s best example of the flamboyant Manueline style of architecture, named for King Manuel I who oversaw Lisbon’s transformation from a medieval town on the margins of Europe to the capital of a global empire. The man who perhaps did most to bring about that change lies buried inside: Vasco da Gama, who prayed on this spot the night before he left on the first sea journey from Europe around Africa to India. The Discoveries made Portugal rich and powerful, as Asian spices, African ivory, and Brazilian gold flooded into Lisbon. Long viewed as a golden age, the era is now questioned by historians given Portugal’s role in launching the Atlantic slave trade and European colonialism. Foreign travelers at the time were amazed at the variety of produce and people in Lisbon. By the mid-16th-century, estimates suggest, over 10% of the city’s population was black, both slaves and free. A visiting Flemish painter produced cityscapes showing Africans carrying out menial tasks, but also mixed-race couples dancing together and a black horseman in colors of the knightly Order of Santiago.
Manuel’s reign also saw the expulsion of Portugal’s Jewish community who had thrived in Lisbon since Roman and Arab times. Under pressure from Spain, in 1496 he ordered all Jews to convert to Catholicism or leave. Those who chose to stay were persecuted by the Inquisition. For more than 250 years, it tormented converts suspected of clinging to the Jewish faith and executed almost 500 people in autos-de-fé in Lisbon. A monument near Rossio square marks the spot where the Inquisition carried out its deeds. In 2019, the city council approved plans for a memorial