Lisbon
Seven hills, with the flat Baixa between them, redrawn after the earthquake
- When to go
- October 19° · 10 rainy days
- Per day
- ~65 · 157 · 290 €budget · mid · comfort, per person · checked 7 Sep 2026
- How many days
- 3days
- For you
- 6 questions →
- Nearest airport
- 6 km Lisbon · 18 km Cascais
- Right now
Lisbon is seen one or two hills a day: Alfama and São Jorge Castle to the east, Bairro Alto and Chiado to the west, and between them the flat Baixa, laid out on a grid after the 1755 earthquake. Belém, six kilometres down the river, needs a day of its own, and Sintra a fourth.
The view people pay the castle for is free from the viewpoints, the miradouros. Portas do Sol looks over the Alfama rooftops to the river, and São Pedro de Alcântara, on the opposite hill, over the Baixa to the castle. So a day in Lisbon is built from viewpoint to viewpoint, and you only buy a ticket for what they can't show you — a cloister, the ramparts, the inside of the tower.
Belém is most often mis-planned as an afternoon with something else tacked on. The Jerónimos cloister and the Belém Tower are shut on Mondays and close at half past five, and the Pastéis de Belém bakery, making custard tarts since 1837, sits between them. Set off in the morning and give it the whole day and you get all three plus the riverside walk; turn up after lunch and you pick one.
Guides for Lisbon
Shorter, practical pages for one concrete question each — how many days, how much money, where to sleep, where to escape the city.
Lisbon in 3 days
→The castle at its nine o'clock opening, all of day two in Belém, tram 28 from the empty end on day three — three days…
Day trips from Lisbon
→Six day trips from Lisbon by public transport — from Sintra, forty minutes and €2.05 away, to Évora, which wants a…
Where to stay in Lisbon
→Six Lisbon neighbourhoods to sleep in, judged on what listings leave out — how high up it is, how many steps lead to…
What Lisbon costs
→In Lisbon a day's spend comes down to the bed and where you sit down to eat; transport is a day ticket, and admissions…
Lisbon without the queues: tram 12E and the Prazeres cemetery
→Ten things Lisbon doesn't put on postcards — tram 12E instead of 28, the one funicular still running, a cemetery with a…
What to see in Lisbon
Jerónimos Monastery
A 16th-century monastery, UNESCO-listed since 1983. Only the cloister is paid, at €18; the church of Santa Maria, which holds Vasco da Gama's tomb, is free and has its own entrance, so skipping the cloister doesn't mean missing the tomb.
Belém Tower
Built 1514–1519 on the bank of the Tagus to guard the river mouth. It reopened in May 2026 after a year of works and now lets in sixty people every half hour; entry is €15. Inside you climb a narrow spiral staircase, so if tight spaces aren't for you, the view of it from the riverbank gives you most of it.
São Jorge Castle
A fortress on the hill above Alfama, looking over the Baixa and the river. Entry is €17, and what you pay for is walking the ramparts — the view of the centre alone is free from the Portas do Sol viewpoint just below.
Tram 28
A regular Carris line running 1930s carriages from Martim Moniz through Graça, Alfama and Chiado to Prazeres. From ten to five it's packed and known for pickpockets; before nine you get a seat. A ticket from the driver is €3.30, or €1.72 on a Navegante card with zapping credit.
Alfama
The oldest quarter, on the slope between the castle and the river, and the one the 1755 earthquake largely spared — which is why it is still a maze of stairways and squares the size of courtyards. Fado houses open here at night; by day you walk down through it from the castle to the river, no map needed.
Three things you probably did not know
The 1755 earthquake was the first anyone studied scientifically: the Marquis of Pombal sent every parish in the country a questionnaire asking how long it lasted and how the animals behaved. The answers survive, and seismology grew out of them.
The houses Pombal put up downtown after the quake have a wooden cage inside the walls, the gaiola. Models were tested by having troops march around them to shake the ground, the first earthquake-resistant construction in Europe.
Lisbon sits further west than Dublin and Edinburgh, despite being in southern Europe. That is why Portugal keeps London time rather than the time in Madrid, to which there has been no direct train since 2020.
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