My wife gave me Lisbon for Christmas. Not the city itself, obviously — just four days in it, in January, when England is at its most relentlessly grey. I want to be clear that this was an act of love. I also want to be clear that Lisbon, as I came to understand it, is not entirely the city it appears to be.
We stayed in the Alfama district, in a hotel overlooking the estuary where the Tagus meets the Atlantic. Alfama is Lisbon’s oldest neighbourhood — the part of the city that survived. That word, survived, is doing a great deal of work here, and I will come back to it. The famous Tram 28 ran directly past our window, grinding through streets so narrow that the buildings on either side seemed to lean in to hear it pass. We rode it. Of course we did. You cannot be in Alfama and not ride the tram. It felt, in the January rain, like something between a tourist attraction and an act of submission to the city’s own logic.
Alfama is the kind of neighbourhood that makes you feel observed. Not threatened — just watched, carefully, by something that has been here long enough to have opinions.
The district has been continuously inhabited since the Moorish occupation of the eighth century, when it was the heart of the city. When the Portuguese reconquered Lisbon in 1147, Alfama remained. When the great earthquake came in 1755, Alfama remained. This is not coincidence — the neighbourhood sits on bedrock, and the rest of the city does not. But there is something about a place that keeps surviving the things that destroy everything around it that invites a certain quality of attention.
The earthquake struck on All Saints’ Day — a Catholic holy day, which meant that every church in the city was lit with candles and full of people. The quake was followed by fires, and then by a tsunami. Estimates of the death toll range from ten thousand to one hundred thousand; the true number is not known, because the city itself did not survive intact enough to count. The Marquis of Pombal, the man charged with rebuilding Lisbon, reportedly responded to the disaster with the instruction: bury the dead and feed the living. Which they did. And then they built the new city on top of the old one, on top of its dead, and called it Lisbon.
I did not know all of this when we walked down to Martim Moniz and I ate my first Pastel de Nata in the rain — that specific, light, custard-yellow rain you get in January in Lisbon that is technically not heavy enough to justify an umbrella but is absolutely enough to soak you through. The pastry was from A Padaria Portuguesa, probably a tourist trap, definitely delicious. I ate it standing on a pavement that was, in all likelihood, built directly over the rubble of the 1755 disaster. The dead city under the living one. It didn’t spoil the pastry.
; ?>/uploads/claudio-schwarz-K3XGEoZgA0s-unsplash.jpg” alt=”Praça do Comércio, Lisbon”><figcaption>Praça do Comércio — the square was once a royal palace. The earthquake took it. Photo: Claudio Schwarz / Unsplash</figcaption></figure>
<h2>Sintra, and the men who wanted to speak to God</h2>
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The second day we took a guided bus tour to Sintra and Cascais. I had been told the Palace of Sintra was worth seeing. I was not told that it would feel, from the moment you approach it, like a building that was assembled by someone who had given up on the idea of consistency as a virtue. The architecture is Romanesque and Gothic and Manueline and Moorish and later additions of pure Victorian fantasy, all compressed into one palace that somehow works. It has been described as Romantic style, which is the architectural term for “we did whatever we wanted and we stand by it.”
What the tour guide did not mention — or perhaps did, and I was distracted by the sheer audacity of the building — was that Sintra has been considered a place of occult significance for centuries. The Romans called it Mons Lunae, the Mountain of the Moon. The Moors built a castle here, on the hill above the palace, that was never breached in battle — it was only surrendered when the city below fell. In the nineteenth century, the hill became home to the Sintra Vila, an estate built by Ferdinand II, a king with a deep interest in Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, and the esoteric traditions of the Portuguese nobility. The palace itself contains symbols and motifs from several initiatory traditions, woven into its extraordinary tilework.
Every beautiful place has its underside. Sintra’s is the history of men who came here specifically because they believed the hill was thin — that the distance between this world and whatever lies beyond it was, at this particular point, shorter than usual.
I bought a magnet. My wife took photographs of the tiles. We had lunch in Cascais, a fishing village on the coast where she found a vegetarian restaurant called House of Wonders, and I found a Mexican place called Chac Mool that was, genuinely, one of the best Mexican restaurants I have ever visited. I ate carnitas in the winter sun, overlooking the Atlantic, with no idea that I was in a place that had once been a destination for people seeking contact with something they couldn’t name.
The Tagus, and what the water knows
On Sunday we walked the famous landmarks — the Torre de Belém, the Monument to the Discoveries, the Ponte 25 de Abril that spans the river like a smaller, European cousin of the Golden Gate. We took a boat out onto the Tagus, just us and an American couple from California who were warm and funny and made the cold river feel hospitable. I spent most of the trip taking photographs of the skyline. The city from the water looks improbable — too much hill, too much sky, the coloured buildings stacked against each other as if the earthquake never happened, as if everything is perfectly fine.
The Tagus is the longest river on the Iberian Peninsula. It ends here, in Lisbon, where it dissolves into the Atlantic. The Portuguese called this point the Fim do Mundo — the End of the World — not as a metaphor but as a geographical statement of fact. For centuries, this was the last piece of known land before the ocean became unknown. The ships that left from here were sailing into the unmapped. The ones that came back brought gold, spices, and stories. The ones that didn’t come back left nothing but names on the water.
We had dinner that night at a Nepali restaurant — Yak & Yeti — which was unexpectedly excellent. We took the tram back through Alfama in the dark, and I watched the city through the rain-streaked window and thought about what it means to build a new city on top of the ruins of the old one. To go on, cheerfully and beautifully, as Lisbon does. To make pastéis de nata and ride historic trams and open restaurants and light the streets, all on top of the bones of the thing that came before.
We flew home on Monday morning into the grey English winter. The trip was four days long. I have been thinking about it since.
If I were to live somewhere in Europe — and this is not a small thing to say — it would be Lisbon. Not despite what lies underneath it, but perhaps because of it. There is something honest about a city that knows it has been destroyed and simply got on with things. Something I find, in a way I cannot fully articulate, deeply familiar.