5 Days in Lisbon: Seven Hills
& the Sound of Fado

Begin at the top, where the city began. The Castelo de São Jorge crowns the highest hill, a Moorish citadel turned royal fortress where Lisbon has been defended, ruled and surrendered for a thousand years, and from its ramparts the whole capital spills down to the river — the red roofs, the white domes, the great rust-coloured suspension bridge, the Tagus opening to the Atlantic. Below the castle the Alfama falls away in the city's oldest and most stubborn quarter, a Moorish tangle of lanes too steep and twisted for the cars or the planners to straighten, where the laundry hangs across the alleys and the locals still know each other and the tram 28 grinds up through it all on rails worn silver. The earthquake of 1755 levelled most of Lisbon; Alfama, built on rock, survived, and so it survives as the city's memory of itself.

The way to read the city is from its miradouros, the terrace viewpoints set into the shoulders of the hills, each one a different angle on the same beauty. Portas do Sol and Santa Luzia look out over Alfama's rooftops to the river, tiled and bougainvillea-hung; São Pedro de Alcântara, reached by the 1885 Glória funicular, faces the castle across the valley of the lower town; and the Senhora do Monte, highest of them all in Graça, gives the widest sweep, the one to save for last light. Between them the city is all gradient and reward — every climb in Lisbon ends in a view, and every view costs a climb. That is the bargain the place is built on.

In the evening the city changes register. In the tiled back rooms of Alfama and the Bairro Alto, the lights go down, the chatter stops, a guitarra portuguesa picks out its silvery line, and a single singer — eyes closed, shawl pulled tight — begins to fold the whole weight of saudade into a voice. This is fado, the city's music, and the thing to understand about it is that it is not a performance staged for the tables. It is an argument, made with a voice, about loss — about the sea that took the sailors, the love that left, the life that turned out smaller than the dream of it. The good fado houses still enforce silence while the singer sings, because what is happening is closer to confession than to cabaret.

The traveller meets it on its own ground: at A Tasca do Chico, a cramped Bairro Alto tavern where amateur and professional fadistas take turns through the night over cheap red wine; at the Clube de Fado down in Alfama, more polished, where the singing comes with dinner and the guitars are masterful; and, by daylight, at the Museu do Fado, which traces the music's birth in these same poor riverside streets and keeps the memory of Amália Rodrigues, the voice that carried it to the world. Up the road the Panteão Nacional holds Amália's tomb among the kings and presidents — a singer of sailors' sorrows lying in state with the country's great, which tells you exactly how seriously Lisbon takes its sadness. Fado is not the soundtrack to the city. It is the city's argument with itself, sung aloud.

West along the Tagus, where the river widens toward the ocean, lies Belém, the quarter from which the empire sailed. It was from this shore that Vasco da Gama set out for India, and the wealth that came back built the two great monuments that still anchor the riverbank. The Mosteiro dos Jerónimos is late-Gothic Manueline architecture at full volume — a cloister carved with ropes, corals, artichokes and astrolabes, the whole iconography of a seafaring nation rendered in honey-coloured stone, with da Gama and the poet Camões entombed inside. A short walk along the water stands the Torre de Belém, the small fortified tower that guarded the harbour mouth and waved the ships out, its Moorish-Gothic balconies and stone rhinoceros the most photographed silhouette in Lisbon. Between them the Padrão dos Descobrimentos rears up like a stone ship's prow, Henry the Navigator at the front and the whole Age of Discovery lined up behind him, gazing out at the water that made and ruined the country.

It is a quarter that asks an honest question of the traveller — what the Age of Discovery cost the places it discovered — and Lisbon is beginning, slowly, to ask it too. But it also bakes the pastel de Belém, the original custard tart, sold warm and dusted with cinnamon from the same shop since 1837, and a stop there is not optional. Back in the centre, the Time Out Market in the old Mercado da Ribeira gathers the city's kitchens under one iron roof — a stand-up lunch of the country's best, from suckling pig to seafood, eaten elbow to elbow at the long tables. The empire's appetite, it turns out, outlasted the empire.

Down between the hills lies the Baixa, the lower town, and it is the one flat, orderly part of Lisbon — because it was built that way on purpose. When the 1755 earthquake, fire and tsunami destroyed the medieval centre and killed tens of thousands, the Marquês de Pombal rebuilt it from nothing as one of Europe's first planned grids: wide straight streets, uniform façades, the first anti-seismic timber cages hidden in the walls. The grid runs from the great riverside Praça do Comércio, through the triumphal Arco da Rua Augusta, up the pedestrian Rua Augusta to the Rossio. It is rational, handsome, and a little cold — the Enlightenment's answer to the Alfama's chaos, the two halves of the city's temperament laid side by side.

Climbing into the Chiado, the elegant old shopping quarter, the city softens again. Here is the dazzling Jesuit Igreja de São Roque, plain outside and, within, hiding the Chapel of St John the Baptist — assembled in Rome from lapis, gold and alabaster and shipped here, once the most expensive chapel in the world. And here are the small shops that are their own kind of monument: Livraria Bertrand, the oldest operating bookshop on earth, trading since 1732; Conserveira de Lisboa, where tinned sardines and mackerel come wrapped in bright waxed paper like gifts; Vellas Loreto, a candle-maker working since 1789. They are the unhurried, unbookable Lisbon — the city not as a list of sights but as a place that has simply kept doing its small, beautiful things for three hundred years.