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.
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.
