I’ve been to Portugal before, both the more popular Algarve in the south and some quieter regions in the far north on the border with Galicia in Spain. I’ve even been to Oporto, its other major city, but somehow, the capital, Lisbon, had always eluded me.

Lisbon is a coastal city, about halfway ‘up’ Portugal on the western coast. It sits by the estuary of the Tagus River, or Rio Tejo. Despite being an Latin country, it is NOT a Mediterranean country since all of its coast borders the Atlantic Ocean – it’s very easy to forget this simple fact as some aspects of Portuguese life are so similar in feel and infrastructure to those of neighbouring Spain – just don’t tell anyone Portuguese that I said so!

GETTING TO THE CITY

Incidentally, using the Lisboncard and its discount vouchers, which I’ll deal with later, the cost of the Aerobus is brought down to the flat fare of a normal bus, i.e around €1.30

Our accommodation for the three nights was the Hotel Marquês de Pombal, which is a smart modern affair on the corner of the main Avenida de Liberdade and Rua Alexandre Herculario. This is not a totally central location, being some 15 minutes walk to the waterfront, but has the advantage of having a metro station, (Marquês de Pombal) nearby. From our sixth floor window, we could see a reasonable panorama of the city and the River Tagus – a somewhat better view than Basil Fawlty’s “You CAN see the sea, it’s the gap over there between the land and the sky!” at least.

Breakfasts were the usual multi-national affairs with cheese, cooked meats, and juices, combined with a modicum of cooked items, e.g. bacon, scrumbled (sic) eggs and sausages.

We only drank once in the smart tranquil bar of the Restaurant Blú at mezzanine level, which seems like as good a way of getting a tray full of peanuts without cracking open the mini-bar as any! Of course, you had to buy a drink…….yeah, yeah, I know - ”it’s a dirty job etc.”

GETTING AROUND LISBON

Fares are around €1.30 for any single journey, but we had pre-booked the Lisboncard for three days at around 30€ each. Not only did this give unlimited travel on public transport, but free or reduced admission to many tourist sights. You’d have to be keen on the latter to get your money’s worth though since local fares are so reasonable and short taxi rides only rack up about €4.00, that’s when your driver remembers to turn the meter on that is! One of ours didn’t but we gave him €5 for his honesty. However, the Lisboncard (Lisboacarte) does also give access to longer national rail journeys too. For instance we also took the train to Estoril and Cascais, two well-known resorts to the west of Lisbon. This is like buying a London Travelcard and finding that it includes Southend or even Brighton. The Lisboacarte is a ‘touch-card’ like London’s Oyster, and to initiate it, you just use it, writing the time and date on it, in case it comes in for any ‘non-automatic’ inspection.

Of course, the major attraction of Lisbon’s public transport is its vintage tramway. This used to be a very comprehensive network, if the number of partly asphalted-over tracks is anything to go by. It’s now reduced to two or three key routes, one of which is strictly for the tourists, being a sightseeing tram on the Hills Circuit Tour of some two hours length, the other two being a mixture of ancient and modern rolling stock. All along the seafront to Belem in the west, the trams alternate between modern articulated jobs redolent of Croydon or Sheffield and old four-wheelers lovingly preserved.

Some of the slopes attacked are the kind of thing that the Swiss build rack-and-pinion lines for, and yet these worthy little ‘pit ponies’ of the tram world tackle them just with the aid of an occasional bit of sand fed onto the rails. They also tackle narrow one way streets with the accuracy that only a short wheelbase tram could manage. Even a mini-bus would get in trouble here, especially as people wouldn’t feel so obliged to park thoughtfully! Parking outside of designated bays along a tram route carries some rather hefty body-damage penalties!

The beauty of this line, quite apart from the intricacies of the ride itself, is that it will also get you to the Castelo de São Jorge, the splendid redoubt that dominates the skyline of the eastern hillsides of the downtown area. Sunday morning is a great time to sample the trams.

If you stand in the northern end of central Lisbon, in the Parque Edouardo VII, everywhere around you is at ‘alto’ level. Then you notice that there seems to be a central strip with a clear view all the way to the waterfront. It’s as if someone has dug a long sloping ramp through the hills on either side. In this slot sits the Avenida de Liberdade and accompanying side-streets and squares. By the time you near the water at the Praça Do Comércio, the contrast between ‘baixa’ and higher districts is much more marked, and this is where Lisbon’s famous array of hill-climbing machinery comes into the picture.

b) Get on a No.28 tram.

Another 'fun' way to see Lisbon is to book a ride on a motorbike-and-sidecar tour (helmets provided). For obvious reasons, these can only take two passengers, one in the sidecar itself and one riding pillion.

Central Lisbon also has an endearingly large number of unspoiled shop fronts, one of which sticks particularly in my mind. The local speciality drink is a cherry-based spirit known as Ginjinha, and it was on the main pedestrianised Rua dos Sapateiros (Shoemakers Street) that I espied this beautiful little single door bar, complete with old men propping it up (the bar not the door). No doubt they were settled in for the afternoon with their one single drink. Over the door was one of those splendid brown glass and gold-leaf relief signs proclaiming the bar’s presence. I haven’t seen anything like it lately except perhaps the umbrella shop in Holborn. See my pictures.

Before deserting Belem, you could also visit the Maritime, Archeological and Natural History Museums – personally, at this stage in the late morning there was a beer with my name on it nearby…….

Pictures of Lisbon (Portugal)

Oi, I can see Brazil from up 'ere!

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One thing I did manage to avoid is ‘fado’, the traditional Portuguese music and song. If you think Leonard Cohen’s miserable, listen to this lot. To be honest, the street busking wasn’t very uplifting either, and one Bob Dylanesque folk singer seemed to have it in for the Welsh, with his rendition of “Knock, Knock, Knockin’ On Evans’ Door”. All it needed was “Frank Evans For Little Girls” to complete their persecution. The moral being: “Never sing in a foreign language having only learned the lyrics phonetically.”

ON FOOT

Portuguese beer can be quite simply classified as ‘Sagres’ or ‘not Sagres’, the latter usually being the curiously German-sounding Super Bock which is still Portuguese. At least it’s not all lager though. Super Bock do actually brew a stout, believe it or not.

Many countries have speciality restaurants based on their old colonial activity. Amsterdam has its Indonesian, Paris its Vietnamese and Lisbon has Brazilian (Brasileiro). These offer an interesting alternative to southern European fare and we dined one evening at ‘Comida do Santo’ – Saint’s Food (Well if you’ve got it, flaunt it, as they say). As you can imagine, this is a more fiery and tropical affair than Portuguese cuisine, but anyone used to a late-night ‘Ruby Murray’ after eight pints won’t be daunted.

On our first night there, we dined at Ribadouro on the Avenida de Liberdade, just a few minutes from our hotel. This is a bar-restaurant with quite a high reputation for fish and seafood. Being greeted by a tank of live lobster is always a good sign even if I can’t afford one. To be fair, the bill was pretty high, but this was partly down to my wife’s choice of prawns for a starter. They showed her how large two fresh ones were before preparation to which she nodded, forgetting to ask how heavy they were (They’re charge at a €/kilo rate). When our bill arrived, my starter of Cream of Seafood Soup had cost €5.65 whilst hers had cost €27.50 about £19! Oh well, at least she says they’re the best prawns she’s had in a long time!

Olivier doesn’t have a menu as such, it being a kind of running buffet or meze affair. We were treated to ten small starter dishes each, 5 hot and 5 cold, reflecting Portuguese specialities, one of which sticks in my mind for visual impact if nothing else. This was a stuffed vine leaf, the stuffing being pork mince with spices. Nothing too odd about you’d think, except that it was topped with the daintiest fried egg I’ve ever seen, presumably quail’s. Then came a final larger ‘main’ course. Mine was the Italian-style Osso Bucco and it was delicious if a trial since I was full already, and I’d been assured that it was ‘only little’. Yeah, right.

For a start there’s the language, which despite, on paper at least, looking rather more like a dialect of Spanish than a whole new language, has rather odd pronunciation and seemingly a lot of truncation of words that you thought could be pronounced phonetically.

To help with deciphering it from any knowledge of Spanish you might have, it’s useful to know one of two of the written differences. For a start, many Spanish words that have an ‘L’ in them, take on an ‘R’ in Portuguese, hence playa = praia, blanco = branco, plaza = praça.

The ‘LL’ sound of Spanish, as in paella is spelled ‘LH’ in Portuguese and the ñ as in ‘señor’ is spelled with ‘nh’.

Train announcers are, like in London where Hammersmith becomes ‘Empsmy’, a race apart. I strained my ears to hear how Estoril was pronounced (fortunately the display also told me where the next stop was!) All I could make out was “Shtoor’l”

Being able to read the menu (A amenta) is nice though! Also, I just loved the high-flown language of the Metro’s excuses board. “Esteemed ladies and gentleman passengers, the Red Line is, for reasons of a technical nature, encountering perturbations”, which is a light year ahead of “Due to a points failure in the Acton Town area, there are delays to all destinations*” at least in politeness if not in content.

WEATHER