Lisbon: A Long Time Coming

We were eating seafood in a flood-damaged town when Portugal inaugurated its new president.

The drive north from Lagos paused in Alcácer do Sal, in the Setúbal district, where the worst flooding in decades had hit just weeks earlier, severe enough that the town's vote in the presidential election was delayed until two weeks after the rest of the country. The waterfront still showed signs of repair. Above it, the streets climbed toward a medieval Moorish fortress carrying its 13th-century walls with the quiet authority of something that has survived considerably worse than a winter flood. We found lunch at Salinas Restaurante nearby and watched the television in the corner as António José Seguro was inaugurated as the 21st President of the Portuguese Republic at the Assembly of the Republic in Lisbon, the city we were driving toward.

We arrived that evening into hills that redirect you before you have decided where to go, with terracotta rooftops falling toward the Tagus river and streets moving at their own pace. What the week kept returning to was something the city seems to produce without effort: the ceremonial and the everyday occupying the same address, history worn without announcement.

One morning brought an immigration appointment we had long been working toward. Forty-five minutes at a government office in Estrela. Then, we took a breath and walked to the Basilica da Estrela, where a side room holds an enormous royal nativity scene: five hundred cork and terracotta figures commissioned by Queen Maria I between 1791 and 1814, the kind of thing that rewards knowing nothing about beforehand. Afterward, the garden next door offered old trees, winding paths, and people on benches, the kind of day that feels different after something long-awaited has finally been set in motion.

The city's habit of keeping things running across centuries became the week's recurring discovery. One afternoon we rode Tram 28, the yellow trolley threading Graça, Alfama, Mouraria, Chiado, and Estrela since the late 19th century, and found ourselves moving through central Lisbon among three of the city’s longest-running institutions . Livraria Bertrand, the oldest continuously operating bookstore in the world, established in 1732 and rebuilt after the earthquake that remade much of the neighborhood in 1755. Chapelaria Azevedo next door, the oldest hat shop in Portugal, open since 1886. A Ginjinha beside it, pouring Lisbon's sour cherry liqueur from the same address since 1840.

We bought a copy of A Very Short History of Portugal by A. H. de Oliveira Marques at Bertrand and had it stamped inside the front cover with the shop's certificate: "We hereby certify this book was bought at the oldest operating bookshop in the world." Ninety seconds later, we were drinking small glasses of ginjinha at the standing bar next door, preserved cherries at the bottom, the bill roughly 1.50 euros. The afternoon required nothing further.

Cascais, reached by train on a sunny Thursday, offered a different rhythm: the ease of a town that has hosted royalty, wartime spies, and exiled European monarchs without being unduly impressed by any of them. Ian Fleming spent time in the area during the war; something in the atmosphere reportedly contributed to the eventual character of James Bond. We spent the afternoon at Praia da Rainha, one of Cascais’s most attractive small beaches, sheltered between the rocks and once reserved for Queen Amélia herself. We returned with five miles and something of the coast's calm still with us.

In Sintra, we hiked the Caminho da Vila Sassetti to the Castelo dos Mouros, a Moorish fortification built in the 8th and 9th centuries, with Pena Palace faint in the fog and the valley spread wide beneath us. Back in town, we circled the exterior of Quinta da Regaleira, with its Gothic extravagance and Rosicrucian and Templar symbolism, and closed the day with queijadas, travesseiros, and a tin of sardines from a shop called The Fantastic World of Portuguese Sardines, which is exactly what it sounds like.

Belém closed the week. The Jerónimos Monastery and the Tower of Belém, Lisbon's two most significant UNESCO World Heritage sites, both rise from the 16th century in Portugal's elaborate Manueline style: late Gothic architecture ornate with maritime imagery, rope motifs, coral branches, and armillary spheres. We admired each from the outside, walked through Jardim do Império along the Tagus river waterfront, and stopped at the Monument to the Discoveries, the 184-foot stone caravel that places Henry the Navigator at its prow, with the navigators of Portugal's maritime age ranked behind him. The return to Lisbon took us through Alcântara and LX Factory, a converted 19th-century textile complex that now holds galleries, restaurants, and the unfinished energy of a place still becoming what it is going to be.

Our arrival in Lisbon brought an appointment we had been working toward for two and a half years.

The Portugal Golden Visa process is not simple. Ours began in late 2023 with the initial submission, moved through attorney consultations and layered documentation requirements, and then entered the extended waiting period that defines most interactions with AIMA, Portugal's immigration authority. The biometrics appointment in Lisbon was the first major in-person milestone in that process: the step at which the government formally receives the application, records biometric data, processes the fees, and issues an acknowledgment.

It took approximately 45 minutes. It went without complication.

What made our situation more complicated is that Portugal processes joint applications one person at a time, beginning with the primary applicant. In practice, that means residence permits will be issued separately, not together, and we will need to return when called for a second biometrics appointment for the other applicant, potentially later this year, depending on processing time. That adds cost, planning, and uncertainty. It is not ideal, but it is simply how the process works here.

The residency card itself will arrive later, on its own timeline. For now, the first major in-person step is complete. Afterward, we walked to Jardim da Estrela and let the afternoon slow down again.

For anyone navigating a Portuguese residency application, the process is manageable, but it is long, and an immigration attorney who understands AIMA's current requirements is worth the cost.

On our final evening in Lisbon, we went to Alfama for Fado.

Alfama is the oldest neighborhood in the city, Moorish in its street plan, medieval in its buildings, draped down the hillside beneath São Jorge Castle toward the Tagus. It survived the 1755 earthquake largely intact, which is why its alleys still run the way they do, and why it has retained the character of a working neighborhood longer than most of Lisbon’s historic quarters. It is also where Fado took root, and where it still feels most genuinely itself.

Fado emerged in Lisbon’s riverside quarters in the early 19th century, shaped first by sailors, dockworkers, and the working-class neighborhoods along the waterfront. Its origins are contested, but its character is unmistakable and not easily imitated. The music is built around a concept that has no direct English equivalent: saudade. The word describes a state of longing for something absent, a person, a place, a time, a version of things that no longer exists, combined with the understanding that such longing is part of life itself. It is not despair. It is not nostalgia in the sentimental sense. It is something closer to a clear-eyed reckoning with impermanence, set to music.

A fadista, the lead singer, is accompanied by two instruments: the guitarra portuguesa, a 12-string instrument with a teardrop-shaped body and a bright, resonant tone, and the viola baixo, a standard acoustic guitar holding the bass line. The voice does not ornament the melody. The melody serves the voice. The performance moves at the pace of the words, and the room gives it the space it requires.

Fado was taken up by Salazar’s Estado Novo regime in the mid-20th century as a symbol of national character and used, deliberately, to present melancholy endurance as a national virtue. After the Carnation Revolution of 1974, the music carried that political association for a generation. Its return to broader cultural prestige is relatively recent. In 2011, UNESCO added it to the Intangible Cultural Heritage list. The better venues in Alfama have continued through all of it, carrying the tradition forward with little regard for its changing official status.

Our evening was structured the way Fado evenings are meant to be: unhurried. Multiple sets, intervals between performers, a seafood-oriented table, house wine, and a room quiet enough that the music had the space it required. The meal and performances extended well over three hours. We walked home through busy, light-filled streets, stopped for gelato, and found that a fitting close to the week.

Seven days in Lisbon offered a useful reminder of how different a short city stay feels from our preferred 28-plus-day rhythm.

Accommodation absorbed the largest share, as it usually does in a city like Lisbon. We stayed in an Airbnb suited to four people, which distributed the nightly cost reasonably across the group, but the per-night rate at a shorter booking window was still higher than what a month-long commitment would produce. One of the financial advantages of slow travel is simple: the longer the stay, the lower the per-night cost tends to be, and the more time the other fixed costs, setup, orientation, and the first week of grocery inefficiency, can be spread across the calendar.

Fitness this week meant one gym day pass at 14 euros each. A monthly membership would have been hard to justify for a single week’s use. We made the session count, long, full-body, and offset the rest with heavy walking. Lisbon’s hills are not a metaphor for difficulty. They are a real physical factor. Thursday and Friday each produced more than five miles. Saturday in Sintra logged eight, with substantial elevation gain on the hike to the Moorish Castle. The City of Seven Hills earns its name.

We would have liked to see more of Sintra’s major sites, but staying mindful of the budget meant being selective about what we paid to enter. We paid for the Castelo dos Mouros, were content to admire Pena Palace from a distance, and took in Quinta da Regaleira from the perimeter instead. Tram 28 was paid by credit card upon boarding. The tourist queue for the tram at peak hours is real; boarding mid-route or at a terminus avoids the worst of it.

We ate simply and kept grocery costs low, trying to hold the daily food budget steady. Other paid expenses were occasional and purposeful: the trains to Cascais and Sintra, a pizza in Chiado, pastries in Sintra and Belém, coffee at The Folks Coffee in Alcântara, and the Fado dinner. Portugal’s wines remain one of the better per-euro values on the continent, and we continued to take full advantage.

The pastel de nata is settled history. The recipe originated with the monks of the Jerónimos Monastery in Belém, who sold it during the dissolution of the monasteries in the early 19th century to a sugar refinery next door. That refinery became Pastéis de Belém, which has operated continuously at the same address since 1837, producing the tarts to the original recipe: undisclosed, carefully maintained, served warm with cinnamon and powdered sugar. The line outside the door is a permanent condition of the place. It is worth the wait, not because it is the only good pastel de nata in the city, but because the location and the continuity of the thing are genuinely part of the experience.

In Sintra, we worked through the town’s two signature pastries in sequence. Queijadas: dense, round, made from sheep’s milk cheese, thin-shelled, direct in their sweetness. Travesseiros: oblong pillows of layered flaky pastry filled with almond cream and egg yolk, richer and more elaborate. Both are worth trying. Given the choice, we would take the queijada.

Ginjinha requires its own note. Lisbon’s sour cherry liqueur has been poured at A Ginjinha on Largo de São Domingos since 1840. The format is a standing bar, a small glass, a choice of whether to have the preserved cherries with it or without, and a bill that comes to roughly 1.50 euros. The transaction takes no more than 90 seconds.

The Folks Coffee in Alcântara appears on CoffeeFest Madrid’s list of the world’s top 100 coffee shops. The flat whites we had were made with house-roasted, naturally processed beans: fruit-forward, less acidity than many espresso drinks, and finished well.

Home meals leaned on the pantry staples that have served us throughout Portugal: eggs, tinned fish, avocado, good bread, hard cheese, yogurt, and market fruit. A small glass of local wine, some evenings, at the price point Portugal does reliably well.

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We leave Portugal for Turkey.

Istanbul is one of the world’s genuinely consequential cities: built across two continents, shaped by more than two thousand years of successive empires, and home to sixteen million people navigating daily life between the Bosphorus, the bazaars, the mosques, and the narrow back streets of neighborhoods that compress several centuries into a single city block. We will be based in Cihangir, a hillside quarter of Beyoğlu known for its independent cafés, its mix of artists and longtime residents, and the texture of a neighborhood that still feels layered and lived-in.

We have a great deal to learn about Istanbul. A few weeks is a beginning.

Coming next week: first impressions of the city, the neighborhood, and what it means to arrive somewhere so large and so old, then begin the work of learning it.

Lisbon reminded us that even a week, approached with intention, can carry you beyond the surface of a place. By the end of the week, we knew where to get coffee, how to use the public transportation system, and how long it actually takes to walk from one neighborhood to the next. That kind of knowledge is small in one sense and meaningful in another. It is the difference between simply visiting a place and beginning, however briefly, to inhabit it.

The biometrics appointment on Tuesday remains this week’s fixed point for us. Two and a half years of a process ran quietly alongside everything else, every move, every planning document, every month on the road, and then resolved in 45 minutes at a government office in the Estrela district. We are grateful for the attorney who guided it, for the patience the process has required, and for the simple fact that it is now moving forward. One week was not enough for Lisbon, and we expect to return.

Istanbul is next. We look forward to sharing it with you.

Until next week,
S&S

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