I’M IN LOVE WITH LISBON
With fantastic food and wine, beautiful scenery striking buildings and low prices, Portugal’s capital is a real gem
THE view from our room in Hotel Lisboa Plaza sums up much of what I love about the Portuguese capital.
Walking down Avenue da Liberdade, past Mui Mui and Cos, then turning into an airy, tiled, flower-filled four-star hotel, I expected a vista of trees, smart flats, that sort of thing.
That was the foolish expectation of someone who had never been to Lisbon before.
Instead, the bedroom, at the back of the hotel, overlooked an abandoned theatre, complete with crumbling masonry and trees growing out of the walls.
Beside it was a smart new theatre, a car park and a tiny rustic restaurant that would look more at home in a sleepy Algarve resort than in handbag-throwing distance of the Prada shop.
Brutalist blocks from the further edges of town poked up in the background. There were rows of traditional apartment buildings in Opal Fruits colours and cranes in the distance.
Exploring this view on foot, we encountered ancient, tiny ladies dressed all in black walking past graffiti-covered walls.
Migrants from Portugal’s former colonies sold bottles of water and giant bags of crisps from hole-in-the-wall stores.
Two minutes away from the city’s fanciest shopping street, Prada-free Portugal carried on as normal.
All of a sudden, Lisbon has become a tourist destination. This is partly down to Americans who are frightened to go to Paris because of terrorism.
Easy-Jet flights and an airport that is a quick five euro bus trip from the centre also help. It’s great value for money.
We stopped for coffee and wine whenever we fancied it, bought water in a fancy patisserie, jumped into taxis when our feet were sore, all without that horrible ripped-off feeling that can ruin a holiday.
Lisbon is heart-stoppingly beautiful. Rome and Paris and other European capitals are too, obviously, but the Portuguese capital is less familiar, which makes it fresher and so much more exciting.
There are delights on every scale, from castles, palaces, cathedrals and monasteries to streets upon streets of enchanting white buildings with tiles and balconies at every turn.
Also seafood and custard tarts. Plus tremendous wine. The Portuguese take eating very seriously, as I discovered at my first ever meal in the city.
Please don’t ask me where it was. To get the address, I had to promise never to pass it on to anyone else.
To get there from the waterfront, we passed several streets of tourist-trap eateries with smiling waiters waving lurid illustrated menus at tables on the pavement. This is not how the locals lunch. They want somewhere cool and dim, with a TV on the wall, high
stools at the bar for a quick espresso and staff who don’t rush them when they are catching up with the boys and want to order a second bottle.
We were seated beside the only other tourists in the place, a Russian couple who had wandered in at random.
Everyone else was Portuguese. Old chaps in hats, with napkins tucked in under their chins. Elderly couples who greeted the waiters like their grown-up sons.
While we waited for our lobster with rice, the waiter brought us a sliced cheese to share.
When it arrived, in a kind of cauldron, we toasted our decision to come to Lisbon with glasses of rosé. The rice was slurpy with tomato and shellfish stock. Giant hunks of crustacean sat on top. It was beyond tremendous.
Lisbon’s super-cheap and easy-to-navigate public transport system took us back to the hotel for a delicious siesta. One ticket works on the underground, buses and trams. All the places a visitor might want to go are easily accessible. Result.
The next day, after a light breakfast of custard tarts and the dark rocket fuel the Portuguese call coffee, we took one of these fine trams to Belem, the historic area to the west of the city.
It is a delightful mixture of bracing seafront and extraordinarily elaborate buildings. It’s also home to MAAT, the city’s brand new museum of architecture, art and technology.
This astonishing, undulating structure, designed by London architect Amanda Levete, sits beside a renovated power station which is also part of the gallery space.
After so much 16th-century magnificence, the clean lines jolt the eyes like a double espresso.
That’s another thing I loved about Lisbon – the confidence to build a massive statement museum across the road from some of the country’s most important architectural treasures.
I can’t wait to go back.
Lisbon is fresher and much more exciting than other European capitals ANNA