My little apartment was in Alfama, the oldest surviving part of Lisbon. Everything else was destroyed in the 1755 earthquake, which is why the city's architecture seems to skip a few centuries. Alfama is a hill covered in mutating white labyrinth of stairs, alleys, and ever-narrowing cobblestone sidewalks where smiling old women sell drams of liquor from tiny doorways, sardine-scented smoke hangs over everything, little groups of men argue obscurely over patches of broken cobblestones, and red-faced tourists stare with hurt expressions at Google Maps, which has never betrayed them before. If Prince Henry could navigate Alfama, everything else was probably easy.
Cruise ships are moored on the Tagus, and on top of the hill is St. George's Castle, a beautiful ruin successively occupied by Celts, Phoenicians, Romans, Visigoths, Moors, Portuguese, and, for a couple of hours on Tuesday, myself, until I was displaced in turn by a group of Spanish teenagers who are, as far as I know, still in possession. There are also peacocks at the castle, because what the hell, let's get some peacocks in the mix. Maybe there's some tenuous Vasco da Gama link, but I'd like to see tourist sites think outside the peacock box. Why not capybaras, which everyone loves and aren't so loud.
Along the Tagus is the later town of equestrian statues, boulevards, and symmetrical squares flanked by mustard-coloured palaces. There are tuktuk tours here, tiny yellow trams, expensive custard tarts, brightly-decorated sardine shops, and men in all denim who need tourists' help in complicated schemes to sell gold rings. It's heartening that the old artisanal cons haven't yet been displaced by margin-backed crypto ETF call option opportunities, or whatever.
The Mercado de Ribeira is a plain, practical space for butchers, vegetable sellers, and fishmongers with piles of fresh ice, clear-eyed fish and large-ish squid -- the fabled Sizeable Squid, I think, which inspired medieval travelers' tales of tentacled monsters mildly inconveniencing very tiny ships. Attached to the actual market is the Time Out Market, a modern food hall that offers the timid tourist a way to try Portuguese food without actually going into one of the tiny restaurants with Portuguese-only menus that travel guides urge you to try. I can report that I had cod fritters, and that a woman nearby had a hacking cough, in case that comes to seem relevant later for any reason. I think it will be okay, because she held her fist a foot in front of her mouth, just as public health authorities advise.
