Bairro Alto was laid out on the hill above Chiado in the sixteenth century, one of the first planned extensions outside the medieval walls, and it is still a tight regular grid of narrow streets. By day it is asleep: shutters down, laundry across the facades, a few grocers, record shops and tattoo parlours, and almost nobody about. After about eleven at night it becomes the opposite. Dozens of very small bars open their ground floors, and because most are a single room holding only a handful of people, everybody drinks outside — the crowd is in the street, moving from door to door with plastic cups.
That is the actual form of the place, and it is worth understanding before arriving at nine and finding nothing. Rua da Atalaia, Rua do Diário de Notícias and Rua da Barroca carry most of it, mixing student bars, cocktail rooms and old fado houses where a guitarist may start up with the door open. Residents live above all of it and the city enforces a cut-off, so the noise moves downhill toward Cais do Sodré in the small hours rather than continuing here.