Lisbon

Landmarks

What I would eat first.

Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.

• Castelo de São Jorge 1,500 points

  The high point of the level, and every lane up here tips toward it sooner or later. The way up is honest work with no shortcut in it. From the wall you get the river, the roofs and most of this walk in a single look. Worth the legs.

• Elevador de Santa Justa 500 points

  There is a queue at the bottom and a footbridge at the top. Go up through Chiado, come at it from behind, and you reach the high end with nobody in front of you. A shortcut that is also a longer walk, which is my favourite kind.

• Igreja de São Domingos 500 points

  The door opens straight off the busiest square here, and hardly anyone turns into it. Step through and the noise stops dead, which is the quickest change of weather you get all day. Then stand still and let your eyes catch up.

• Praça do Comércio 500 points

  Three sides of stone and one side left open to the water, which is the correct way round. Go to the far end, out between the columns, and take the steps down to where the ground stops being ground. Flattest mouthful on the level.

• Praça Dom Pedro IV 500 points

  Everybody calls this one by an older name than the one it has, which I find entirely reasonable. Sit at the top end by the theatre, watch the whole city cut across on the diagonal, and count how many take the straight line. Not many ever do.

• Sé de Lisboa 500 points

  It sits where every lane off the river runs out of climb, so you arrive at it whether you meant to or not. Stand across from it and wait. Sooner or later a yellow tram grinds past the front of it and the picture assembles itself.

• Chafariz d'El Rei 250 points

  It is set into the hillside on the low road, and most people walk straight past because it reads as a retaining wall with a bit of decoration on it. Stop. Put a hand on it, then look up at how much hill is stacked over your head.

• Igreja da Conceição Velha 250 points

  It hides on a working street, shoulder to shoulder with the shops, and its face is the oldest thing on the block by a wide margin. Look up before you go in. Then look up again, because the first time you will miss most of it.

• Miradouro de Santa Luzia 250 points

  You do not climb for this one. It opens off the pavement, which makes it the cheapest reward on the level. Take the far corner under the pergola, put your back against the rail and give it ten minutes. Everybody else gives it forty seconds.

• Mouraria - Berço do Fado 250 points

  The steepest corner of this walk, and the one still busy being somebody's home. Washing overhead, doorways open, a cat on every third step. Come up slowly. What you came for here is not a building.

• Museu do Fado 250 points

  The lanes above it are full of doors that open only at night and only with a table booked. This one opens in the afternoon and asks nothing of you. Sit down with the recordings for half an hour and the whole quarter starts to make sense.

• Museu Militar de Lisboa 250 points

  The far eastern end of the level, down on the flat where the river runs alongside. Most people turn back before they get this far, which I think is a mistake. The long face of it is one of the best walls in this city, and standing in front of it costs nothing.

• Teatro Nacional de São Carlos 250 points

  A pale face on a paved pocket of a square with no view of anything, which is why nobody waits in it. Come after dark, when the lamps are lit and the doors are open, and the pocket fills up in about four minutes.

Why here

Somebody stood here and decided.

One hill, standing straight up out of the river. The Iron Age settlement sat on the north and the south of it. When the Romans wanted a theatre they cut it into the rock outcrops of the slope and let the natural fall of the ground carry the seats, which is the laziest good idea anybody has had here. Roman traces run along the water too, from the Ferragial down to the Campo das Cebolas. Everything you walk today is stacked on top of that arrangement.

Sources: castelodesaojorge.pt, imovel.patrimoniocultural.gov.pt, museunacionalarqueologia.gov.pt

Who ruled

Everyone who thought they owned this.

I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.

1–500

Rome. The city was Felicitas Iulia Olisipo and it held a standing close to the cities of Italy itself, which was handed out rarely. The theatre on the southern slope was working from the first years of the first century and was smartened up in 57. From the fifth or sixth century it was taken apart again by people who wanted the stone more than they wanted a theatre.

Sources: museunacionalarqueologia.gov.pt, imovel.patrimoniocultural.gov.pt

700–1147

The Muslim period. The settlement on the hill may go back to the eighth century, and the town was fortified soon afterwards. The fortress up top was rebuilt and made bigger, and the first ring of wall around the town went up with it. In 1147 the city changed hands, and the cathedral was begun on the site of the mosque.

Sources: castelodesaojorge.pt, imovel.patrimoniocultural.gov.pt, imovel.patrimoniocultural.gov.pt

1147–

Portugal. The cathedral's first building push runs from 1147 into the opening years of the thirteenth century, and after that every king who wanted taking seriously did something to the fortress: Afonso Henriques, Afonso III, Denis, Ferdinand, John I, Manuel. Ferdinand is the one who put the second wall around the town. It has been Portuguese ever since, and in all that time nobody has asked the pavement.

Sources: imovel.patrimoniocultural.gov.pt, castelodesaojorge.pt, imovel.patrimoniocultural.gov.pt

Three facts

Three things I know about this place.

1. The Roman city is directly underneath this walk. The theatre is on the castle's southern slope, the burial ground was under the Praça da Figueira, and the racing circus lay under the big square at the top of the Baixa. The theatre came back into daylight around 1798, when foundations were being dug all over town to rebuild after the earthquake, and a good deal of its stone was then carried off into the houses that went up over it. Nothing here goes to waste.

   Sources: imovel.patrimoniocultural.gov.pt, museunacionalarqueologia.gov.pt

2. This level has two old outlines in it and you cross both. Under Islamic rule the fortress on the hill was rebuilt and made bigger, and the town got its first defensive ring at the same time, the Cerca Moura. Much later, under King Ferdinand, a second and far wider ring went up, and that one took in the low ground and the hill facing the castle to the west for the first time. Almost every lane in this walk sits inside one or the other. I like a town that draws around itself twice.

   Sources: imovel.patrimoniocultural.gov.pt

3. Water comes up out of the ground under Alfama, and for a long time the city washed in it. The Alcaçarias do Duque on the Rua do Terreiro do Trigo were the first public bath house of their kind here: fifteen small rooms in two rows, each of them starting out with a limestone tub, fed by lead piping from tanks at the back. They ran until 1978. At the back of the room the water is still bubbling up out of what is probably the spring. Warm stone. I think about it more than I let on.

   Sources: imovel.patrimoniocultural.gov.pt

Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.

• 290streets
• 2,314dots
• 35.3km of street
• 45.1km on foot
• 12.9hours at a stroll