Lisbon and the Algarve

Claudia da Costa

Claudia is an excellent guide (mobile +351 965-560-216, [email protected]).

Fado music

While authentically traditional, most Lisbon fado bars cater to tourists these days; even the seemingly homemade "fado tonight" (fado esta noite) signs are mostly for tourist shows. Still, if you choose well — and can find a convivial restaurant with relatively reasonable prices and fewer tour groups — it's a very memorable evening. (And be wary of your hotel's recommendations, which are often skewed by hefty kickbacks.) The two main areas for fado in Lisbon are on either side of the Baixa: the Bairro Alto and the Alfama.

Your basic choices are a polished restaurant with a professional-quality staged show; or — my preference — a more rustic place with fado vadio, a kind of open-mic fado evening when suspiciously talented "amateurs" line up at the door of neighborhood dives for their chance to warble. The music typically begins between 20:00 and 21:00; arrive a bit earlier to be seated and order. To avoid disappointment, it's smart to reserve ahead.

Prices for a fado performance vary greatly, but assume you won't leave any fado experience without spending at least €30 per person — and more like €50–60 per person for the fancier restaurants. Many places have a cover charge, others just expect you to buy a steeply priced meal, and some enforce a €25–30 per person minimum. Most people combine fado with a late dinner. Night owls can have a cheaper dinner elsewhere, then show up for fado when the first round of diners is paying their bills (around 22:30 or 23:00). Both elegant, high-end places and holes-in-the-wall generally let nondiners in late for the cost of an overpriced drink and/or a €10–15 cover charge.

Solar do Vinho do Porto

This place (closed for renovations through the end of 2020) boasts perhaps the world's greatest selection of port — the famous fortified wine that takes its name from the city of Porto. If you're not headed to Porto, this it's your best chance for a serious lesson. The plush, air-conditioned, Old World living room is furnished with leather chairs (it's not a shorts-and-T-shirt kind of place). You can order from a selection of more than 150 different ports (€2–22/glass), generally poured by an English-speaking bartender. Fans of port describe it as "a liquid symphony playing on the palate." Start white and sweet (cheapest), taste your way through spicy and ruby, and finish mellow and tawny. A colheita (single harvest) is particularly good.

São Roque Church and Museum

Built in the 16th century, the Bairro Alto's church of St. Roque is one of Portugal's first Jesuit churches. The church's museum is more interesting than your typical small church museum. It's filled with perhaps the best-presented collection of 16th- and 17th-century church art in town, and is well described in English. The church and this art, rare survivors of the 1755 earthquake, illustrate the religious passion that accompanied Portugal's Age of Discovery.

Café A Brasileira

Slinky with Art Nouveau decor, this café in the Bairro Also (across from the Baixa-Chiado Metro stop) is a 100-year-old institution for coffeehouse junkies. A Brasileira was originally a shop selling Brazilian products, a reminder that this has long been the city's shopping zone. Drop in for a bica (Lisbon slang for an espresso) or a pingado (with a dollop of steamed milk).

Gulbenkian Museum

This is the best of Lisbon's 40 museums. It's two miles north of the city center, and worth the trip for art lovers. Calouste Gulbenkian (1869–1955), an Armenian oil tycoon, gave Portugal his art collection (or "harem," as he called it). Gulbenkian's wide-ranging collection, spanning 5,000 years of art, offers the most purely enjoyable museum-going experience in Iberia — it's both educational and just plain beautiful. The museum is cool, uncrowded, gorgeously lit, and easy to grasp, displaying only a few select and exquisite works from each epoch. Walk through five millennia of human history, appreciating our ancestors by seeing objects they treasured.

National Coach Museum

The impressive collection is split between two buildings, each with its own ticket. The main branch — in a huge, blocky, concrete building closer to the river — has the bulk of the collection, all described in English, and is the better option if you're mainly interested in the coaches themselves. The Royal Riding School, closer to the tram tracks, only displays about a half-dozen coaches — but with its a gorgeous historical interior, is worth adding on if you'd like to see one of Lisbon's rare regal spaces.

Monastery of Jerónimos

King Manuel's 16th-century, giant white-limestone church and monastery stretches for 300 impressive yards along the waterfront of Lisbon's Belém neighborhood. The church is free to enter, but the accompanying cloister has an entry fee. There's often a long line to visit the cloister, but you can cut through it to get immediately to the church entrance.

Belém Tower

Perhaps the purest Manueline building in Portugal (built 1515–1520), this white tower celebrates Lisbon's seafaring past with carved stone representing ropes, Manuel's coat of arms, armillary spheres, and shields with the cross of the Order of Christ, charged with spreading the faith in new territories.

Monument to the Discoveries

This giant riverside monument, originally constructed for a 1940 world's fair, takes the shape of a huge caravel ship, in full sail, with Henry at the helm. An elevator inside takes you up to the tiptop for a tingly vista — including a fine aerial view down over the mural in front.

Pensión Maré

A blue-and-white building looking over the village along the main road into town, Pension Maré is the best hotel value in Salema. It's run by friendly Bettina, who offers six comfortable rooms, three fully equipped apartments, and an inviting breakfast terrace in a tidy paradise.

See the Travel Details above for recommendations highlighted in bold, excerpted from Rick's guidebooks.

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Hi I'm Rick Steves, back with more of the best of Europe. This time we return to Portugal! Stick around — with a little luck, we'll catch one of these!

Portugal has centuries of history and culture chiseled into its grand buildings and ground between its salty cobbles. It was once a global superpower with a vast empire stretching from Africa to Brazil all the way to the Far East. Then it was the poorest nation in Western Europe. Today it's thriving once again as an equal partner in the European Union.

In Lisbon we'll delve into a colorful capital rich in history. We'll sing with locals buried deep in the old town, sip coffee on stools once warmed by great Portuguese poets, covet slinky Art Nouveau jewelry, and marvel at the architectural heritage of the Age of Discovery. Then we head for the "Land's End of Europe" — where we'll fish for octopi and savor the freshest of seafood on the south coast of my travel dreams.

Portugal and Spain fill the Iberian Peninsula, sharing the oldest border in Europe. From Lisbon we travel south to the Algarve, checking out the resort city of Lagos and Cape Sagres before settling into the fishing village of Salema.

We're starting in Lisbon, a city of about 600,000 on the yawning mouth of the Tejo River. With its huge port welcoming ships from around the globe, this city of Magellan and Vasco da Gama still feels like Europe's gateway to the world.

Lisbon's mile-and-a-half-long suspension bridge — one of the longest in the world — was built in 1966 by the same company that built its cousin in San Francisco.

A towering statue of Christ overlooks Lisbon from across the Tejo River, stretching his arms wide to symbolically bless the city.

Lisbon is a ramshackle but charming mix of now and then. Old trolleys clatter up and down its hills, bird-stained statues mark grand squares, taxis rattle and screech around cobbled corners, and well-worn people hang out in Art Nouveau cafés. Survey the city's charm on a trolley. Sleek new ones glide while vintage models from the 1920s shake and shiver through the old town. Climbing steep hills, and somehow weaving within inches of parked cars, they offer sightseers cheap and breezy views of this great city.

Lisbon's history goes all the way back to Roman times. But the city's glory days were the 15th and 16th centuries, when Vasco da Gama and the gang sailed around Africa opening up new trade routes to India, and making the city one of Europe's wealthiest.

Portugal's Age of Discovery fueled an economic and cultural boom time in the 1500s. In the early 1700s, the gold and diamonds of Brazil, one of Portugal's colonies, made Lisbon even wealthier.

The scarred pillars of the rebuilt church of San Domingos evoke the worst calamity in Portuguese history. On All Saints' Day in 1755, while most of the population was in church, a tremendous earthquake struck the city.

They say candles quivered as far away as Ireland. 30,000 died as two-thirds of Lisbon was leveled. It was three disasters in the space of a few horrible minutes. After the quake, fires raged throughout the city, then a massive tidal wave slammed the harborfront.

The city was reconstructed under the energetic and eventually dictatorial leadership of its prime minister; The Marquês de Pombal. The new Lisbon was built on a progressive grid plan, with broad boulevards and square squares.

And today, the city — with its Pombaline squares newly buffed and a financial boost from its membership in the European Union — seems better organized, cleaner; more prosperous and people-friendly than ever. And, with some of Europe's lowest prices, Lisbon is easy on the budget.

Lisbon's castle of St. George was first built by the Muslim Moors who swept in from North Africa and conquered this region in the eighth century. After Portugal's King Afonso Henriques beat the Moors in the 12th century, the castle became a royal palace. Later, the king moved and the castle fell into ruins. While today the castle is just a barren shell, it's surrounded by a peaceful and inviting park with the city's best viewpoint.

Lisbon's salty sailors' quarter — the Alfama — tumbles from the castle to the river. It dates back over 1,000 years to Moorish times. The tangled street plan here is one of the few aspects of Lisbon to survive the great quake of 1755, helping make the Alfama a cobbled playground of Old World color.

The Alfama's urban-jungle roads are squeezed into a maze of confusing alleys. Bent houses comfort each other in their romantic shabbiness; the air drips with laundry and the smell of clams and raw fish.

With the help of my friend and fellow tour guide Claudia da Costa, a wander through the Alfama takes on some meaning.

Claudia: I just love this place. I just love this place…just see everybody is here. Everybody knows each other, you see?…You can leave the door open because they know each other. Here you don't have police because they protect each other. It's like a big family. It's very nice, very nice.
Claudia: Here you have St Anthony. St Anthony is the local patron saint and the fishermen's patron saint because fishermen live here. And then you have plastic bags filled with water because we say these keep away the flies.
Rick: Does it work?
Claudia: Funciona?
Claudia: It works!
Rick: Yeah? No flies?
Woman: Funciona, bem.
Rick: Obrigado!
Claudia: Adeus. Obrigada.
Claudia: In Alfama traditions are strong. If a woman loses her husband, she will wear black for the rest of her life. And if some reason she wants to stop wearing it I think her neighborhoods will question her about her respect, and love, about her husband or son because it's like this. Traditions are very, very strong in Alfama.

And traditions survive in the passionate music called fado. We're having dinner in a restaurant that serenades diners with the folk music of Lisbon's back streets. This is an experience I recommend in my guidebooks — rustic Portuguese cuisine seasoned with this unforgettable music.

The Marquês de Pombal's rebuilt center of Lisbon — called the Baixa — is today a flat, inviting shopping area of grid-patterned streets. The main boulevard is pedestrians-only Rua Augusta. The uniform post-earthquake (or "Pombaline") architecture is utilitarian. It is decorated only with wrought iron and tiles. In the years after the earthquake Lisbon did a lot of building without a lot of money.

The Santa Justa elevator was built to connect the lower town with the high town. It was constructed in 1902 — a few years after its inspiration: the Eiffel Tower.

The Rossio train station brings in workers from the suburbs, and a funicular works hard all day, hauling people from the lower town to the characteristic Bairro Alto (or "high town").

While in the high town we're visiting the Port Wine Institute [which runs Solar do Vinho do Porto], where you can sample Portugal's most famous beverage in clubby comfort. While here, you can select from a menu of 300 different ports, most available by the glass. Port differs from wine in that its fermentation process is cut short by the addition of pure alcohol, which fortifies it. Even so, there is great diversity among ports.

Rick: What should we try? Give us two glasses please.
Server: Two glasses, OK. I recommend one tawny, 10 years old. It's excellent wine — it's very good wine — tawny 10 year.
Rick: OK let's have two glasses of that.

A 10-year tawny is a blend of ports of various ages averaging 10 years old.

Rick: What do you eat with this?
Server: With ice cream it's excellent.
Rick: With ice cream?
Server: Yes, ice cream or with pastries it's very, very delicious.
Rick: I can imagine it with ice cream…

Hmm…this one looks like it would match up well with a complex rocky road, or perhaps a pralines and cream…

Just down the street, the church of San Roque was built by the Jesuits in the 16th century. The acoustics here are top-notch, important in a Jesuit church where the emphasis is on the sermon. The ceiling — while flat and made of wood — is painted to give the illusion of marble arches and domes.

The Chapel of St. John the Baptist is one of the most costly chapels per square inch ever constructed. It looks like it came right out of the Vatican…because it did. Made in Rome out of the most precious materials, it was used for one papal Mass, then it was disassembled and shipped here to Lisbon. While these look like paintings, they're actually intricate mosaics. A Vatican specialty, mosaics were used to avoid damage from candle smoke that would darken paintings.

Coffeehouse junkies have a near religious experience nearby at the grand old A Brasileira café. This café retains some of the ambiance it had back in the 1920s and 30s when it was the literary and creative soul of Lisbon. It was the hangout of avant-garde poets, writers, and painters…and it's still a good place for a cup of coffee and a pastel de nata. The beloved poet Pessoa still sits outside.

Lisbon, the capital of the Portuguese-speaking world, is a melting pot of its once-vast empire. Immigrants from former colonies such as Mozambique and Angola have added diversity and flavor to the city, making it as likely you'll hear African music these days as Portuguese fado.

This is a great taxi town. Cabbies stick to their meters and are generally good-humored. Rides are cheap, and decals on the window clearly spell out all charges in English. Especially if you're sharing costs, Lisbon's cabs are an economic time-saver. We're heading for Lisbon's top museum.

The Gulbenkian Museum offers one of the most enjoyable museum experiences in all of Europe. The cool, uncrowded, gorgeously lit museum displays only a few exquisite works from each epoch. Visitors stroll across the globe through five millennia of human history, appreciating our ancestors by seeing objects they considered beautiful.

Five thousand years ago, Egyptian civilization brought an unprecedented refinement to humankind. This feline-topped coffin held the mummified remains of a cat.

Mesopotamian reliefs remind us that it was in the Fertile Crescent — present-day Iraq — that writing was invented.

Centuries later, but still long before Christ, the Greeks took civilization to new heights. This vase, decorated with scenes of half-human satyrs chasing human women, reminds us of the rational Greeks' struggle to overcome their barbarian, animal-like urges.

The collection helps bring to life the mysterious world of the Moors, who ruled this part of Europe through the Middle Ages. They came from an Arabic and Muslim realm where ornately patterned tiles and fine glass lamps decorated mosques and palaces.

In the 1500s, Portuguese sailors began trading with China. Among the many treasures they brought home were blue-and-white Ming ceramics, which became all the rage, inspiring the Delftware of Holland and Portugal's azulejo tiles.

The creativity of medieval Europe was devoted mostly to its Christian faith. Fold-up altarpieces eight inches tall helped travelers worship. Early Bibles and religious books were richly decorated. Illuminated manuscripts like these came with some of Europe's finest pre-Renaissance art.

Later, Renaissance and Baroque painters celebrated God's creation in the faces of ordinary people, whether Ghirlandaio's fresh-faced young maiden, Frans Hals' wrinkled old woman, or Rembrandt's portrait of an old man, whose crease-lined hands tell the story of his life.

Gulbenkian's collection of furniture, once actually owned by French kings, is a royal homeshow. It shows off the Louis XIV style — ornate, with curved legs and animal-clawed feet, and the Louis XVI style — straight-legs, tapered, and more modern.

Follow the progression of Europe's increasingly refined styles, from stormy Romanticism (like this tumultuous shipwreck by Turner) to pre-Raphaelite dreamscapes (like this Mirror of Venus), to the glinting, shimmering Impressionism of Monet…Renoir…and the Englishman John Singer Sargent.

And finish your walk through Gulbenkian's garden of manmade beauty with the nubile Art Nouveau glasswork and jewelry of the French designer René Lalique.

A trolley takes us along the waterfront from downtown Lisbon to the Belém District — a stately pincushion of important sights from the days when Portugal was Europe's richest power.

Belém survived the big earthquake. Because of that, Portugal's suddenly safety-conscious and rattled royalty chose to live out here — under wooden rather than stone buildings. To this day, Portugal's royal palace stands behind these walls.

The adjacent royal stables now house one of Europe's top coach museums. In 1905 the last queen of Portugal realized that cars would soon make horse-drawn carriages obsolete. She decided to preserve her fine collection of royal coaches here. The museum shows 70 dazzling carriages in the queen's elegant old riding room.

The oldest is the crude and simple coach used by King Philip II to shuttle between Madrid and Lisbon in around 1600. This coach had no driver's seat; its drivers would actually ride the horses. With bad roads and crude leatherstrap suspension, the ride was slow and rough. You'll have to trust me on this, but, if you lift up the cushion, you'll find a potty hole — also handy for road sickness.

Tracing the evolution of coaches through the next century, you'll notice the decoration evolves along with the comfort. The Portuguese coat of arms indicates this carriage was part of the royal fleet. The ornamentation includes a folk festival of exotic faces from Portugal's distant colonies.

The lumbering Ocean Coach is as ornate as it is long. At the stern, gold figures symbolizing the Atlantic and Indian oceans holding hands, reminded all of Portugal's mastery of the sea.

Just down the street is the Jerónimos Monastery, with Lisbon's most impressive church. King Manuel — who ruled around the year 1500 — built this giant church and monastery as a thanks for overseas discoveries.

Manuel financed the construction in part with "pepper money," a five percent tax levied on spices brought back from India. He built all this on the site of a humble sailors' chapel, where seafarers would pray before embarking on their frightening voyages. The style of Manuel's church? "Manueline."

This uniquely Portuguese style reflects the wealth of the times and the many cultural influences of the Age of Discovery. Manueline decoration is ornate, featuring motifs from the sea.

This style is on the cusp of the Renaissance. Unlike earlier medieval churches, the interior is more open. Palm tree–like columns are slender, rather than massive, and the side isles are as lofty as the nave.

The interior is decorated with more Age of Discovery motifs: monsters evoke the mystery of undiscovered lands, a totem pole of faces celebrates Portuguese conquests, artichokes — eaten for vitamin C to fight scurvy — remind of hardships sailors faced at sea, and the ceiling — a Boy Scout handbook of knots — trumpets Portugal's technical expertise.

This is Vasco da Gama's tomb. In 1497, he spent an evening praying here for a safe voyage. The next morning he set sail with four ships — caravels like this — and 150 men.

His mission? To find a direct trade route to the vast wealth of Asia. When he succeeded (sailing around Africa), sea trade eclipsed overland trade with Asia. And almost immediately, Italy's trade plummeted, Portugal's trade skyrocketed, and the seafaring nations along Europe's Atlantic coast — England, Holland, Spain, and Portugal — emerged as economic powerhouses.

With all that prosperity came money for art. These lacy Manueline cloisters — my favorite in all of Europe — are the architectural highlight of Belém. The sheer size of this religious complex is a testament to the religious motivation that — along with money — propelled the Age of Discovery.

The Belém Tower, with more textbook Manueline decor, protected Lisbon's harbor. Today, it symbolizes the voyages that made Portugal powerful. This was the last sight sailors saw as they left and the first when they returned, bearing gold and spices.

The giant Monument to the Discoveries — built in 1960, on the 500^th anniversary of Henry the Navigator's death — shows that exploring the world was a team effort. Standing on the prow of a ship are royalty, poets and painters, knights who Christianized foreign lands with the sword, great explorers such as Vasco da Gama, and finally the man who spearheaded the push for exploration — Prince Henry the Navigator, holding the ship that made it possible: a caravel.

To mix in a little fun in the sun with our history, we're driving three hours south to the rugged southwestern tip of Portugal: Cape Sagres. This was as close as you could get to the edge of our flat Earth in the days before Columbus. A lighthouse marks what was referred to even in ancient times as "the end of the world." Today, salt-of-the-earth merchants sell seaworthy sweaters, fishermen cast their lines off the dizzying cliffs, and tourists go for that "end of Europe" photo.

Five centuries ago, Prince Henry the Navigator, determined to broaden Europe's horizons and spread Catholicism, established his sailing school right here. This was Henry's mission control, from where he sent sailors ever further into the unknown. And here he debriefed shipwrecked and frustrated explorers as they washed ashore.

Little remains of Henry's original school beyond this evocative stone circle. Nobody really knows its function. Some say it was a tool for celestial navigation; others figure it was a wind-compass, with a flag in the middle blowing in the direction of the wind. Whatever the case, sailors came here to learn everything they needed to know for world exploration: ship-building, map-making, navigation — even languages and salesmanship for mingling with natives in newly discovered lands.

Today, Cape Sagres marks the western tip of the Algarve. Portugal's south coast was once known as Europe's last undiscovered tourist frontier. But now it's well-discovered, the darling of tour brochures, and much like Spain's Costa del Sol, paved, packed, and pretty developed.

Lagos, with a jet-ski marina and a beach-party old town, is as enjoyable as a big-city resort can be. The major town on this stretch of coast, Lagos hides some history. It was the capital of the Algarve in the 13th and 14th centuries. The first great Portuguese maritime expeditions embarked from here, and Europe's first African slave market was held under these arches. The old town, defined by its medieval wall, is a jumble of pedestrian streets, funky craft shops, seafood restaurants, and sunburned tourists. The beaches — with the exotic rock formations of post-card fame — are dramatic.

While Lagos is pretty touristy, one bit of old Algarve magic still glitters quietly in the sun: Salema. This simple fishing village has just enough B&Bs and restaurants, a classic beach, and endless sun. Salema has a split personality: The whitewashed old town is for locals; the other half was built for tourists. Locals and tourists pursue a policy of peaceful coexistence.

Salema is still a fishing village. Weather-worn fishermen, oblivious to the tourists, go about their work while old-timers remember the days when life was "only fish and hunger."

The pottery jars stacked everywhere are octopus traps. They get shore leave only for a periodic barnacle scraping. Otherwise they're busy at sea catching octopi.

Local fisherman Luís is taking us out to check the pots. They're strung along the seabed just off shore — a technique that has changed little since ancient times. The octopus, thinking these pots would make a cozy place to set an ambush, climbs in and gets ambushed himself. When the fisherman hoist's him in, he hangs on — unaware he's made his final mistake. The octopus is indelicately maced out of his refuge, ends up in the village market, and — who knows? — perhaps on my dinner plate tonight.

These days locals hook more tourists than fish. They rent cheap and characteristic rooms to travelers. For a little more comfort and convenience, you can stay at Pensión Maré. The breakfast is a buffet and comes with a view. Guests enjoy Internet access and plenty of sightseeing tips, and the living room is mostly under the sun.

For seafood lovers, the Algarve is as good as it gets. Salema's handful of surfside restaurants have a knack for friendly service, getting white fish just right, and complimenting that with plenty of vegetables.

After a great lunch, the beach beckons, and after so much history and art, Salema is refreshing for its lack of turnstiles. The major activity is no activity…stretched out on the sand. While locals grab the shade, tourists see how slow they can get their pulse under the Algarve sun.

Whether in a fishing village like Salema or a big city like Lisbon, Portugal's an endearing land with a superpower past that mixes comfortably with a charming and laid-back present. I'm Rick Steves. Until next time…keep on travelin'.

Credits:

Claudia: Yes, that's interesting. You have water, plastic.

The style of this church, the style of Manuel's church — "man will lean"!

England, Holland, Spain, and Portugal emerged as economic powerhouses!

This is Rick Steves wishing you seasickness and happy travels!

• Algarve, Portugal: Lagos and Salema
• Cape Sagres, Portugal: The End of the World
• Lisbon, Portugal: The Age of Discovery
• Lisbon, Portugal: Backstreets of Alfama
• Lisbon, Portugal: National Coach Museum
• Lisbon, Portugal: Port in the High Town