Lisbon

Lisbon is a city of hills, and the hills are the point: street after street ends in a viewpoint over red roofs and the wide silver Tagus. Yellow trams grind up the steepest of them, tiled facades change colour block by block, and the light coming off the river is the thing people remember afterwards. Two Lisbons sit against each other here. The lower centre is a grid of matching blocks, rebuilt from nothing after 1755, when an earthquake, a wave up the river and three days of fire destroyed it. Around that rectangle the older city held on across its slopes — Alfama's tangle of lanes below the castle, laundry strung over the alleys, doorways that fill with music after dark. Out west at Belém the river opens wide and the monuments face the water the ships left from.

Phoenicians and Greeks traded on this estuary, and Rome made it a municipium called Olisipo. From 711 it spent four centuries under Muslim rule — long enough to name Alfama and leave the street plan that still climbs the castle hill. A four-month siege in 1147 ended with Afonso Henriques and a crusader fleet taking the city; the surrender terms were broken and it was sacked. The wealth came from the sea: from 1498 Portuguese ships reached India and then Brazil, and the spice, sugar and gold paid for the monastery at Belém. It was administered through the Casa da Índia, which also licensed and taxed a crown-run trade in enslaved people. The earthquake of 1 November 1755 ended the old city in a morning. A republic came in 1910, and from 1933 the country lived under the Estado Novo. A military coup ended it on 25 April 1974, with four people shot by the political police and otherwise almost no fighting, and Portugal joined the European Community in 1986. The two Lisbons the earthquake left are still two. The grid below runs on offices and visitors; the hills keep the old street plan, the stairs and the neighbourhoods that fill the alleys every June.

Two days cover Belém, the Baixa and one hill. Four let you walk Alfama and Graça without a plan, sit through a fado evening, and cross the river or go out to Sintra.