City Guides - Detour

Lisbon in Three Hills

Delphine Roy — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Everybody arrives in Lisbon with a list and leaves with sore calves. The list is not the problem. The problem is that the list is flat and the city is not: two places four hundred metres apart on a map can be ninety vertical metres and twenty minutes of stairs from each other, and no amount of planning fixes that after the fact.

So stop planning by neighbourhood and start planning by hill. There are three that matter. Do them in order, take the descents as rewards, and the city stops being a series of unrelated climbs.

The first hill: Graça, early

Start high and walk down. This is the whole trick, and it is worth saying twice: start high and walk down. Take the 28 up if you must — at eight in the morning it is a tram rather than a queue — and get off at Graça.

From there the descent is continuous for about an hour, through Mouraria, past the doors people actually live behind, and out into the flat. You will pass four miradouros. Stop at two. The other two are the same view with more people in it.

Best hour: before 9am, or after 6pm in summer.
Skip: the castle, unless you have pre-booked. The queue is the attraction.
Wear: anything but new shoes. The calçada is polished limestone and it is genuinely slippery when damp.

Mouraria, on the way down. The streets narrow before they flatten.Riccardo Toso

The second hill: Bairro Alto, late afternoon

The second climb is short and mean — Calçada do Duque, or the lift if the queue is under ten minutes, which it is roughly never. Do it at four. The light gets low across the Baixa around five and everything you photograph between five and seven will look better than it deserves to.

Lisbon is not a city you see. It is a city you get above, twice a day, and the rest of the time you are in a street too narrow to see anything at all.

Bairro Alto before dark is a different place from Bairro Alto after it. Before dark it is a grid of quiet streets with the shutters down. After dark the shutters go up and the same streets are unwalkable. Both are worth seeing, which means arriving early and staying put.

The third hill: Estrela, the morning after

The third is the one nobody does, which is the argument for doing it. Walk out west along Rua de São Bento, up to the basilica, and into the garden behind it. It takes a morning, there is almost nothing to queue for, and it is the only part of this walk where you will hear Portuguese more than any other language.

What this costs

Two days, one transport pass, and one pair of shoes you have already broken in. Everything above is free except the tram, and the tram is optional in the direction that matters.

The thing nobody tells you: the funiculars are covered by the day pass, and there are three of them. If your knees have an opinion about descents, that is the part of this plan to spend money on.

Porto Between the Bridges

Delphine Roy — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Porto is two towns that agreed to share a river. Everything people come for is on the north bank; everything they photograph the north bank from is on the south. You cannot do the city properly without crossing at least twice, and the crossings are the best part of it.

Start at the top. Walk out onto the upper deck of the Luis I bridge, where the metro runs and where the drop is genuinely alarming, and keep going to the Serra do Pilar terrace. That is the postcard, and it is worth ten minutes before the coaches arrive.

Looking back over the old town from the south bank. Photo: Tobias Reinert.

Down, then back

The descent into Vila Nova de Gaia takes twenty minutes and the cellars at the bottom open at ten. Book one. They are all much the same, and which one matters far less than the fact that you sat down for an hour in the middle of a day made entirely of hills.

Cross high, return low. The upper deck for the view, the lower deck for the shade and the river noise.
Ribeira is for the evening, not for lunch. At noon it is a wall of menus in four languages.
The cathedral is free; the cloister is not, and the cloister is the part worth paying for.

Porto rewards being slightly above it. Ten metres of height turns the whole town from a jumble into a plan.

The bit people skip

Walk east instead of west. Past the Infante bridge the riverfront empties out inside four hundred metres, and a path follows the water for another two kilometres with nothing on it but joggers and one very good cafe. It is the only stretch of Porto where the river is allowed to be just a river.

Seville in the Shade

Delphine Roy — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Nobody plans a July trip to Seville. People end up there in July, discover it is forty degrees at four in the afternoon, and conclude the city is unvisitable for a third of the year. It is not. It is a city with a very old and very good answer to heat, and the answer is shade.

The old town was laid out so that you can cross most of it without leaving it. Streets run narrow and north to south on purpose. From June the city strings canvas awnings over the busiest of them, and under one at two in the afternoon it is a genuine ten degrees cooler.

The colonnade at the edge of the old town, walkable at any hour. Photo: Ricky Esquivel.

The shape of a hot day

07:00 to 11:00 — the Alcazar, the cathedral, anything with a queue.
11:00 to 14:00 — the shaded streets: Sierpes, Cuna, the lanes behind them.
14:00 to 18:00 — indoors, and genuinely indoors. This is not a failure of nerve, it is what everybody who lives here does.
18:00 to midnight — the river, the bridges, the whole city outside again.

The mistake is treating the afternoon as time lost. Four hours out of the sun is what buys you the six hours after it, and the six hours after it are the reason to have come.

Courtyards

Ask about patios. Dozens are private, some are semi-public, and a handful open properly in the first two weeks of May for the patio festival. Even outside it, a surprising number of doors stand open onto a tiled square of shade and a fountain, and nobody minds you looking as long as you stay on the step.

Kyoto Before Seven

Delphine Roy — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is a version of Kyoto with four hundred people in it and a version with nine, and they are separated by ninety minutes of sleep. That is the whole article. Everything below is detail.

Temple grounds open long before the halls do, and several of the famous walks are streets rather than sites and so never close at all. Between about five and seven in the morning you can have the lot: Gion with the shutters down, the Philosopher’s Path with nobody on it, the lower gates at Fushimi Inari in silence.

The lower gates at Fushimi Inari, only ever this empty at dawn. Photo: G N.

A first morning that works

05:30 — walk to Fushimi Inari. Go up for forty minutes, not to the top.
07:15 — two stops north, breakfast near Tofuku-ji.
08:30 — Kiyomizu-dera as it opens, then down through the Ninenzaka lanes while the shops are still putting their boards out.
10:30 — stop. Sleep. Come back out at four.

Kyoto does not reward stamina. It rewards two short days stitched into one, with a gap in the middle where you are not looking at anything.

What to drop

The bamboo grove at Arashiyama is a hundred metres long, it is photographed from the one angle that hides a fence, and by nine it holds a crowd four deep. If you are going anyway, be there at seven. When you have had your ninety seconds, walk on into the park behind it, which is enormous, empty and much better.

What a Week Actually Costs

Delphine Roy — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Travel writing is coy about money, which is strange, because money is the single constraint every reader shares. So: here is a week, itemised, from a trip we actually took, with nothing rounded in our favour.

Two people, seven nights, southern Europe, no flights included because flight prices are noise and depend entirely on where you start.

The bag that avoided two checked-baggage fees, which is a budget line in itself. Photo: Shvets Production.

The ledger

Accommodation, 7 nights: the largest line and the least surprising. Booked eleven weeks out, mid-range, two of the seven nights notably cheaper because they were midweek.
Food: roughly a third of accommodation. One proper dinner, the rest markets and counters.
Local transport: less than a tenth. Almost everything was walked.
Entry tickets: more than we expected, by a lot. Six sites at fifteen to twenty each, twice, adds up faster than any meal.
The unbudgeted line: a taxi at midnight, a pharmacy, and a replacement charger.

The two things that blow a travel budget are tickets and arrival days. Nobody plans the first evening, and the first evening is always the most expensive one of the trip.

What we would change

Buy the city pass if there is one and you will do more than three things. Eat the big meal at lunch, where the same kitchen charges less. And put fifty a week aside for the taxi you swore you would not take, because you will take it.

Naples, Read Vertically

Delphine Roy — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Naples gets called chaotic by people who only walked the bottom of it. The historic centre is a Greek grid — three long streets running dead straight east to west, crossed at right angles — and it is one of the most legible old towns in Europe. What confuses people is that the city also climbs six hundred metres above that grid, and the two halves barely acknowledge each other.

Learn the funiculars. There are four, they run every ten minutes, they cost what a bus costs, and they turn a brutal climb into ninety seconds of looking at somebody’s washing through a window.

The bay from Vomero. Everything in the lower half of this photograph is walkable. Photo: Kelly.

Up, along, down

Up on the Centrale line from Augusteo.
Along Vomero: the Certosa di San Martino, the terrace beside it, and a neighbourhood that feels like a different and much calmer city.
Down on the Montesanto line, which lands you at the top of the Spanish Quarter and lets you walk the rest of the way.

The Spanish Quarter is not somewhere to be brave about. It is somewhere to be normal about: walk in, look up, buy something, walk out.

One thing to book

The underground city, the Bourbon tunnel, or the catacombs — pick one, not three. They make the same excellent point, which is that this place has as much beneath it as on top, and you will have stopped being amazed by the third.