Lisbon is a walking city that punishes bad route planning, because every wrong turn is uphill. The city is built across seven hills and the streets do not negotiate with them; they go straight up, in cobbles, at gradients that would be closed to pedestrians in most countries.
The three routes below are designed around that single constraint. Each one starts high and finishes low, each takes between ninety minutes and three hours at an unhurried pace, and each covers a district that most visitors see only the edge of. Together they add up to about a day and a half of walking and, more usefully, to an understanding of how the city fits together.
Before you start
Shoes. Lisbon's pavements are *calçada portuguesa* — small limestone blocks set by hand — and centuries of feet have polished them smooth. Wet, they are genuinely slippery. Smooth-soled shoes are a bad idea and there is no dignified way to learn this.
The transport card. A rechargeable Viva Viagem card covers the metro, buses, trams, the funiculars and the Santa Justa lift, and it is the cheapest way to avoid a climb when you have had enough of them. The three funiculars — Glória, Bica and Lavra — are part of the public network, not attractions, and using them as intended is entirely reasonable.
Timing. Mornings for the viewpoints, because the light comes from the east across the river and because the tour groups arrive late. Early evening for the neighbourhoods, when the streets refill.
Walk one: Alfama, top to bottom
Start: São Jorge castle. Finish: the river at Campo das Cebolas. Time: two hours slowly, three with stops.
Alfama is the oldest part of Lisbon and the reason it survived the 1755 earthquake is geology — it sits on rock rather than on the alluvial ground that liquefied below it. That is why its street plan is medieval and disorienting while the Baixa below is a rigid Enlightenment grid. It is the single most useful thing to know about the shape of the city.
Take a taxi or the 737 bus up to the castle, or walk up if you are feeling strong, and start from the top. The castle itself is worth the entry mainly for the walls and the view; the archaeological layers inside are more interesting than the fortifications.
From the castle gate, drop into the lanes and stop trying to navigate. Going downhill in Alfama you cannot get badly lost, because every route eventually reaches the river. The pleasure of this walk is entirely in the wrong turns — laundry across the alleys, tiled façades in a dozen patterns, a tiled fountain, a bar with four tables that is somebody's front room.
Three things to aim for on the way down. The Miradouro de Santa Luzia, a terrace with bougainvillea and blue-and-white tile panels showing the city before the earthquake. The Sé, the cathedral, which is Romanesque, fortress-like and dark, and looks like what it is — a building put up by people who had recently taken the city by force. And Rua de São Miguel and the streets around it, where the small fado houses are.
Fado is worth a paragraph. The tourist-facing dinner shows in Bairro Alto are expensive and variable. The small Alfama houses, where you eat simply and the singing starts around ten, are the better version. There will be a minimum spend rather than a ticket, and the rule is absolute silence while anyone is singing.
Walk two: Mouraria at lunchtime
Start: Martim Moniz. Finish: back down to Martim Moniz or Intendente. Time: ninety minutes plus however long lunch takes.
Directly north of the castle hill, Mouraria is where the Moorish population was permitted to remain after the Christian reconquest — hence the name — and it has been the arrival district ever since. It is now where Lisbon's immigrant kitchens are: Bangladeshi, Nepalese, Chinese, Mozambican, Guinean, Indian, and increasingly Brazilian.
It is also, and not coincidentally, where fado was born. The neighbourhood produced Maria Severa in the nineteenth century and Fernando Maurício in the twentieth, and there are plaques and murals to both. The house-front tributes are easy to miss unless you look up.
The walk itself is short. Start at Martim Moniz square, work uphill through Rua do Benformoso and the lanes off it, loop around the slope of the castle hill and come back down. Eat wherever the queue is at one in the afternoon. The Bangladeshi and Nepalese places along Benformoso do lunch plates for very little money, and there are Chinese restaurants with no signage at all operating out of upper floors, which are an institution and a slightly complicated one to find on a first visit.
Intendente, at the bottom of the hill, is the neighbouring square, which went from being the city's most notorious address to one of its most self-consciously fashionable in about fifteen years. The old tile shop on the square is worth going into even if you are buying nothing.
Walk three: Marvila and Beato
Start: Braço de Prata or Marvila station. Finish: wherever the last brewery is. Time: ninety minutes plus.
Take a train or bus east along the river to the old industrial waterfront — a couple of stops on the Azambuja line from Santa Apolónia. This is the walk with no hills at all, which after the first two will feel like a gift.
Marvila and Beato were warehouses, a military factory and a wine-storage district, and the buildings are what makes the area interesting now: enormous brick and concrete volumes that have filled with craft breweries, galleries, design studios and a bookshop in a former wine cellar that is one of the best rooms in Lisbon. The riverside path connects most of it.
This is not a sights walk. It is a neighbourhood-in-transition walk, largely local, best on a Saturday afternoon when the breweries are open and the galleries are not shut for installation. Check opening days before going — several of the good places open Thursday to Sunday only.
A note on tram 28
It covers a good part of walk one and it is genuinely unpleasant between about nine in the morning and seven in the evening — full, slow, and heavily worked by pickpockets who know exactly which stop the tourists board at.
If you want to ride it, do so at seven in the morning or after nine at night, boarding at Martim Moniz where it starts. Alternatively take tram 12, which follows part of the same loop with a fraction of the crowd, or tram 24 up to Campolide, which was reinstated recently and is almost entirely used by residents.
Where these walks leave you
Three neighbourhoods is enough to have seen the city rather than its postcard. If you have a fourth day, the two obvious additions are Belém, west along the river, for the monastery and the tower and the original custard tart bakery, and Príncipe Real and Bairro Alto, which is a hill walk with the best independent shops in the city on it.
The custard tarts deserve their reputation, incidentally. Eat them warm, dusted with cinnamon, standing at the counter, and do not carry them anywhere.
For the city as a whole, see the Lisbon destination guide.
