Lisbon Travel Guide: Navigating, Eating, and Exploring
If a trip to the beautiful city of Lisbon is on your radar, then we’ve most certainly got you covered here. We’ll be looking at navigating around the city, saving some time by skipping all those queues, getting the most from the local cuisine, choosing the best location for your hotel, and offering a bunch of suggestions for visiting the popular day trip to Sintra. I’ve ordered everything into chapters, so feel free to jump to the section that’s most useful for you. So, number one, let’s talk about the two best ways of getting around the city.
1. Getting Around Lisbon
VivaCard
There’s the VivaCard, which acts like a prepaid top-up travel pass, and the LisbonCard, which offers unlimited travel and includes many of the most popular attractions that you might be visiting.
You can purchase the VivaCard from the machines at the airport or subsequent stations for just 50 cents. Here, you can decide how many upfront journeys you want to pay for, or you can simply add a 24-hour pass. They can then be used on metros, buses, funiculars, trams, ferries, and some train routes. This is a great way to keep on top of your spending, and each journey works out at half price when compared to paying in cash. However, it may mean sometimes waiting in line for top-ups whenever you run out of your prepaid journeys. The only other downside I saw was the massive queue at the airport when everyone was trying to buy the card for the first time and top it up, but overall it’s usually the most affordable way to get around Lisbon.
LisbonCard
The other option is the LisbonCard, which is what we opted for. This can be used over a 24, 48, or 72-hour duration. It can be purchased before arrival and then activated at the airport, which, for us at least, had a much shorter line for pickup. The best thing about the ticket was the convenience of never having to think about topping up or even waiting to top up during our entire stay. It also included entry to Lisbon’s most popular attractions, which we were planning on visiting anyway, so it worked out cheaper than buying everything separately. I’ve linked the LisbonCard in the description below, and it should be appearing in the top right of your screen now.
2. Skipping Queues at Popular Attractions
Santa Justa Lift
One of Lisbon’s most popular and unique sights is the Santa Justa lift. While it might give you wonderful views of the city, I’m not so sure they’re worth the up to 45-minute wait time. So, I wanted to share a way to actually skip all of this. Simply search and follow the directions for Carmo Convent, which is a 5-minute walk from the lift, and you’ll end up here. This alleyway to the right-hand side will lead you onto the same viewing platform, but without wasting your time in the queue. I almost wanted to yell at everyone below to help them out, but I feared they would just assume I was insane. I did read online that you need to pay €1.50 to access the platform this way, but for us, that wasn’t the case, and everything was just totally open and free. It also has the bonus that if you still want to experience the lift, taking a trip down is a lot less crowded than taking it up when it leaves full at the bottom.
Tram 28
Another popular attraction is Tram 28, which allows you to experience the city as if you’ve been transported back in time. It’s certainly a unique journey, but here are a couple of tips that should make it a little smoother. The first is that it can get really busy, even in the shoulder month that we visited. A few times when it passed us by, it was standing room only, which at that point becomes less of an attraction and more about holding onto a handrail and trying not to fall over. So, the easiest way to avoid the crowds is to visit early in the morning or after 9 pm. This was 8 am, and it meant we had a mostly empty carriage, making it a much more relaxing, enjoyable trip than if we’d been in commuter mode. In terms of where to join the route, its best and therefore longest queues are at the first stop, which allows you to grab a window seat. Our hotel was only a 5-minute walk away, so it was a no-brainer to start here. But if you’re near the end of the line, I’ve read that it’s a much quieter journey going in the opposite direction, so it should be easier to get a seat from there. I’ve linked the official transport page in the description if you want to see every stop along the route, so you can see what’s best for you.
3. Choosing the Best Hotel Location
As for where to stay in Lisbon, most of my saved places on Google Maps were in Baixa Chiado, so anywhere between these points is going to be super central and walkable. Because of that, I ended up really loving the location of our hotel as it was central but still on a quiet street. It was a simple 30 minutes from the airport via the metro, a 5-minute walk from the Santa Justa lift where most of the shops and touristy places are. As mentioned, it was 5 minutes from Tram 28 and also Rossio Station, which is the main train line that takes you into Sintra, a popular day trip location. I’ve linked where we stayed in the card popping up now and in the description, which helps the channel if you book any hotel after visiting. Despite looking fancy, the hotel itself was somehow cheaper than the nearby ones, but overall it just had a really good polish to it. For example, the mirror here doubled as a TV. There was a plug inside the safe so you could charge your stuff while keeping it secure. The curtains were automatic, we had pretty fast Wi-Fi, and the door handles lit up green when you turned off the do-not-disturb sign. It was just a generally well-thought-out modern hotel, and we had zero complaints.
4. Suggested Duration of Stay
As for how much time to spend in Lisbon, we had 4 full days, which for us was about perfect, so that’s my personal suggestion. But we totally could have spent a week here, to be honest, as there were still quite a few day trips and places we didn’t get to visit. For visiting mainland Portugal itself, you could easily spend two weeks in this country, traveling north and south. As mentioned at the end of the Lisbon travel vlog, we next took a domestic flight to Madeira, which is a beautiful Portuguese island. That video will be shared here soon, so please keep an eye out for it once it’s ready. This combination of city break and island escape was a great pairing and something I’d suggest as an option when visiting.
5. Best Time to Visit Lisbon
Weather-wise, since it’s one of the southernmost cities in Europe, Lisbon’s average temperature fares pretty well year-round, but November to March are the wettest times to visit. April to September are great in general, but May, June, and September stand out as overall winners without it being too hot, rainy, or during peak season. We visited in October, and when the sun was out, it was a perfect temperature, but it did rain about a third of the time, which was in keeping with this chart that makes me feel vindicated.
6. Culinary Recommendations
Now, I covered a bunch of great food in the main travel vlog, so check that out for the complete list, but one of our favorite restaurants I didn’t show was De Prata 52. This is a Portuguese tapas-style eatery, and to give you a bit of flavor, we ordered the cottage cheese pastries with pumpkin, octopus risotto, goat meat croquettes with sweet chili sauce, which worked really well together, diced beef, and shrimps in coconut milk, with the sauce here being particularly amazing. We ended up reserving this restaurant a day or two in advance as we noticed they were booking up, but you could also wait for a table if it’s busy. We booked using The Fork app, which we found was how most restaurants had set up their online reservations. The app also seems to regularly offer discounts of up to 50%, so it’s worth keeping an eye on just for that.
While we’re on the subject of food, if you are in Belem, you simply have to eat at least one Pastel de Nata at the famous Pastéis de Belem. My main tip here is just to be aware that there are two queues on arrival. The instinct is to join the big line on the right-hand side, but this is actually just for takeaway. There’s also an entrance to the left, which surprisingly acts like a TARDIS in that it opens up and goes on for longer than you assume. The other popular Portuguese appetizer I wasn’t able to showcase in the main vlog was the Pastel de Bacalhau. This codfish cake, sprinkled with salt, mixed with eggs and parsley, and then surrounded by hot baked potato, was exactly to my taste. Especially when the particular chain that we visited adds a dollop of runny cheese into the mix, and then neatly serves it up with a glass of sweet port, another Portuguese staple, which as you can see here, I certainly enjoyed.
7. Overall Cost of Visiting Lisbon
In terms of the overall cost of visiting Lisbon, when compared to other similar European capitals, I found it to be average to below average in price. For example, transport was average or cheap with the LisbonCard, attractions were reasonably priced or free with the card, restaurant meals were about €20-30 per person for food and a drink, while a pint of beer was between €3-4. As for our hotel, that was a little higher, around €170 per night, though you can find cheaper options or rent out an apartment. Lastly, our flight was about €35 one way with Ryanair from London, and if you are looking at flights, both EasyJet and TAP Portugal seem to offer the most affordable ones. I’ll leave my Skyscanner link here, as it’s my go-to search engine to find flights when booking.
Conclusion
That brings us to the end of this Lisbon travel guide. My name is Ismail Siddiky, and if you want to see more blogs about Portugal, stay with me. We’ll see you next time.
Thank you so much!
