Lisbon was built on seven hills, tiled most of them, and paved the gaps with calçada portuguesa, the little limestone cobbles four hundred years of feet have polished to an ice rink. I came in June, in the heat, the week of Santo António, when Alfama hangs paper streamers across its lanes and grills sardines on the doorstep until two in the morning. The first day I fought the gradient, the Santa Justa lift, a funicular, before giving up and doing the only sensible thing, which is to walk and let the city set the pace. Four days on foot will ruin you for flat cities. It costs almost nothing, and the best of it happens between the places you meant to go.
The only flat ground is the Baixa, the grid the Marquês de Pombal threw up after the 1755 earthquake levelled the old town, matching arches and chessboard streets running back from the river at Praça do Comércio. It does not last. Every street that leaves the water tilts within a block, and the payoff for the climb is a miradouro, a railed terrace with a view and usually a kiosk selling cold beer. I worked through the good ones: Santa Luzia, tiled and hung with bougainvillea, the old men slapping down cards; Portas do Sol next door, looking clean over the roofs of Alfama to the cruise ships; and Senhora do Monte up in Graça, highest of all, where half the city comes at dusk to watch the light go and somebody always has a guitar.
Above the Baixa the map gives up, and you should too. Alfama is the Moorish quarter the earthquake spared, too steep for cars and too crooked for sense, the washing strung overhead and a cat on every warm step. On a Tuesday or a Saturday the Feira da Ladra, the thieves' market, lays its junk along the railings by the white dome of the Pantheon: a dead man's medals, a single odd cup, a cassette of somebody's wedding. At night I followed a real voice into A Baiuca, a room the size of a kitchen where the neighbours take turns singing fado, you eat what you are given, and you clap when you are told.
The best of Lisbon costs nothing and happens on foot. You do not so much find it as wear it out, one hill at a time.
Chiado is where the city puts on a collar: the bronze Pessoa outside A Brasileira for the tourists to pose with, the old bookshops, the trams squealing past the statue of Camões. From there the Bica funicular hauls itself up a street so steep the houses look to be tripping downstairs. The thing to drink before any of it is a ginjinha, and the place is A Ginjinha by Rossio, a doorway that has poured nothing but sour-cherry liqueur since 1840, a euro forty a shot, com or sem, with the boozy cherry or without; I had mine com. After dark the noise climbs to Bairro Alto, where the bars are the size of front rooms and the party is out on the cobbles, or drops to Cais do Sodré and the pink length of Rua Nova do Carvalho, an old sailors' street now lined with bars, one of them, Pensão Amor, a former brothel that kept the wallpaper. Eat first: I queued at Cervejaria Ramiro for garlic prawns and a plate of percebes, the goose-barnacles that look like dinosaur toes, and finished, against all reason, with a steak sandwich.
One morning belongs to the river, west to Belém on the 15 tram. This is the grand Lisbon, the one with history and money both: the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, a wedding cake in carved stone with Vasco da Gama tucked inside, and the little tower out in the water where the caravels shoved off for the edge of the map. See them early, before the coaches. Then the queue that actually matters, at Pastéis de Belém, the shop that has guarded its recipe since 1837; you take a deli ticket and wait, and a warm tart arrives with a scorched top and a loose custard middle, cinnamon and icing sugar on the counter to wreck it properly. They are the best in the city, except for the ones at Manteigaria back in Chiado, where a bell rings every time a fresh tray lands. Have the argument yourself. I ate my way to no conclusion.
The last evening belongs to the water, and the trick is to leave it: from Cais do Sodré a battered orange ferry crosses to Cacilhas on the south bank in ten minutes, where the seafood is cheaper and the view comes back the other way, the whole tiled city stacked up its hills under the big red bridge the Americans built to look like San Francisco's. I ate grilled fish at Ponto Final, at a table set so close to the edge the river lapped the legs, and watched the light go gold and then bruised pink over all of it. Four days was enough to learn the shape of the hills and to stop fighting them. I came to walk Lisbon. I left a pair of shoes the worse for it, and sure that on foot is the only honest way to take the place.
