We were lucky to see Lisbon during a “coastal event”, as our weather apps described the inclement system to us. Serpentine cobblestone streets glistened in the aftermath of an afternoon shower, the sun that much more appreciated for the damp and cold that threatened our plans. Wicked gusts whipped through the narrow, curving streets and pinch points like someone testing for leaks in the plumbing, a few catching us head-on as we headed uphill. All of this added to the character of our visit and further reminded us of San Francisco, a familiar city with its own set of hills and odd streets, cable cars and coffee shops and eccentricities. San Francisco also has a cool tower, though Lisbon has a thousand-year-old castle. Parallels abound, except for Lisbon’s lack of parallel streets.
I won’t further debase Lisbon by comparing it to a city so far its junior.
Lisbon revealed itself while I roamed in a sleep-deprived stupor during our first day, nervous to be a bumbling tourist in any café I might enter, so that I continued to push along, following arbitrary streets and mostly avoiding the staircases. I walked south from Chiado to the bank of the Tagus, then banked west until I reached a massive plaza and archway. I had already seen three smaller plazas, each with a few stone benches and a central statue; two of them had a café concession stand on the grounds, and all of them were surrounded by additional cafés and pastelarias.
Heading north through the archway, I found a small tourist shopping area designated by a Sephora. Restaurants in side streets were beginning to arrange their outdoor seating beneath umbrellas and awnings, preparing to open at noon in a city that is slow to wake. I followed long, curving avenues via narrow sidewalks where two people could barely walk side-by-side. I often stepped into the street or trotted to the opposite side.
Over a year of living on the East Coast did not prepare me for how infrequently drivers honked their horns at each other or pedestrians. I saw no dangerous or aggressive driving, and drivers were only annoyed that I didn’t understand they would always stop for me at a crosswalk. I can’t ignore the possibility I was an ignorant pedestrian tourist on several occasions, but it didn’t seem that way.
I pushed into the Alfama neighborhood, the oldest and hilliest section of the city, centered around the castle with its pre-medieval construction of sturdy walls, massive courtyards, and replete with adorable cannons aimed at the river port. Nowadays, peacocks hang out on the grounds. Did you know peacocks can totally fly and contentedly roost high up on the boughs of old trees?
We planned to visit the castle the following day, so I didn’t quite make it to its base, instead opting to zig and zag around hairpin roads until I noticed a line of people on an unusually large chunk of sidewalk that jutted into an awkward intersection at the confluence of three curving roads. I turned around and was awed by the sight of Lisbon’s Cathedral. I entered on a whim—the entrance was a door cut out of a larger door—and paid the seven euros to tour. The displays were magnificent. There were ancient priestly regalia, thrones, fans, and chalices. An abundance of Catholic miscellany. I adored the hymnals that were transcribed well before our modern musical notation existed, when notes were written mostly as diamonds without a clear rhythmic element.
After leaving the Cathedral, narrowly avoiding the strong temptation to dip into one of the dozen inset “chapels” that surround the stonework of the main altar for a quick snooze, I meandered my way back to our hotel. I didn’t purposely retrace my steps. In fact, I was trying to purposely take a slightly different route, an effort in which I horribly failed. A later look at the map made it clear that had I succeeded in finding new roads, I might have taken significantly longer to return. Without a grid system, there’s often only one reasonable way to navigate between two points.
It was only back at the hotel’s rooftop bar, some Portuguese drink in hand alongside a Coke, that I could see the beautiful chaos Lisbon offered. A wash of old gray and yellowing buildings with their dark red tiled roofs offered a fantastic canvas for the brilliant blue, pink, and green structures spotted across the cityscape. There’s no regularity to the heights of buildings. Church staves burst up from nowhere, and nowhere can one find a concrete and glass skyscraper. The winding roads ensure the buildings along them face all sorts of directions, making the view pleasantly cluttered and enormously, endlessly interesting. There’s always a new detail to pick out like a Where’s Waldo book.
There’s so much more I could say to recap our stay in Lisbon, but for now, suffice it to say that it adds yet another difficult decision the next time we’re in a position to travel: do we return and see even more because we adored it so much, or yet again hope to be captured by somewhere new?