Bairro Alto is a shuttered grid by day that turns into a street party after eleven. In daylight it is asleep: shutters down, laundry across the facades, and almost nobody about. After about eleven at night 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 knowing before you arrive. 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. The grid itself was laid out on the hill above Chiado in the sixteenth century, one of the first planned extensions outside the medieval walls. Residents live above all of it and the city enforces a cut-off, so the noise moves downhill in the small hours.