Day 1 - Tuesday, August 9 - Lisbon
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Day 1 Stats
Lunch: Time Out Market. Cozinha Da Felicidade, $30 for Pork Cheeks with Sweet Potato Puree and Sautéed Cabbage; Sardines on Toast with Roasted Peppers, Water; $2 for 2 Pasteis de Nata from Manteigaria.
Dinner: Solar Dos Bicos $35
Hotel: 2 nights (My Story Hotel Augusta): $390 A nice hotel right on the Rua Augusta. We had reserved a room with a balcony on Booking.com but the hotel staff said that wasn't communicated to them. But they moved us the second day to a top floor room with a full balcony. Also our first bathroom would completely flood when we took showers. I never understand why European bathrooms don't have curbs between the shower and the rest of the room. The rooms are small (the website says that it's only 97 square feet but it didn't feel that small).
Extras: Arco da Rua Augusta elevator: $3 x 2
Drive: 6 miles (taxi from the airport to the hotel). We tried to take an Uber but couldn't find the pick up spot at the airport. The taxi was the same price anyways.
Walk: 6.3 miles
Weather: Sunny and 84 degrees. This was the hottest day of the trip.
Things that are overrated: Miradouro de Santa Luiza
Wish we could have spent more time at:
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Day 1 Itinerary
A.
Rua Augusta
Our check in time isn't until the afternoon so we drop off our bags and head out to explore. We walk down the Rua Augusta, a stone paved main pedestrian street. (The stones can be surprisingly slippery, especially on the hills in the rain.)
The hotel room that we would eventually end up in it the top floor corner seen in the photo.sollicitudin metus. Donec lobortis congue scelerisque. Suspendisse tempus, ligula id vulputate dapibus, nunc diam pretium sem, ac pretium metus urna in lorem.
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B.
Arco da Rua Augusta
At the end of the street you can take an elevator up to the top of Arco da Rua Augusta. From the top, you can see the hills of the city the rise up to the east and west, and look over the Praça do Comércio and the Tagus River.
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C.
Time Out Market
We walk along the waterfront on our way to Time Out Market. The place gets busy and it can be difficult to find a seat in the middle but some of the restaurant stalls have seating on the outer edge. We have lunch at Cozinha Da Felicidade and get our first of many Pasteis de Nata at Manteigaria.
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D.
Retrosaria Rosa Pomar
Yarn Shops are a must see on any vacation so we hop on the Metro to find this small shop that only sells yarn produced from Portuguese wool
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E.
Miradouro da Senhora do Monte
We start exploring the eastern hills of the city center. The hills are so steep, many of them are just endless flights of stairs.
Our first stop is a viewpoint (miradouro) at the top of Lisbon's highest hill. It had a great view of the Castelo de Sao Jorge, Tagus River, Cristo Rei Statue, Baixa, and hills west of the center.
I thought that this was the best viewpoint of all that we visited. It has the best view over the entire city and I've read that it's great at sunset. Other viewpoints had more limited view.
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F.
Miradouro Santa Luiza
1. The place has become too Instagram famous.
2. & 3. The views aren't terribly picturesque except maybe at sunrise. You do get a good sense of how people live though since you can look into everyone's back yards
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G.
Castelo de S. Jorge
We wander up the hill towards the castle and stop a small shopfront (really just a door) where a man has laid out Portuguese Azulejos tiles. We stop and talk for awhile and he gives us a history lesson and says that he has sold tiles to a project in Boston. We ask how much a tile would cost, expecting them to be very expensive. He says that he can only sell them to people who appreciate them and that there are cheaper ones up the street that were made yesterday. All his tiles are from demolition projects and many of them predate the American Revolution. We pick out a tile that he says was made in the mid 1700's and ask the price. $20. Sold.
The castle is exactly what you'd expect an 11th Century Moorish castle to be - massive stone crowed by crenellations with places to shoot arrow through and drop boiling oil down. But it was really fun to scramble around its walls and up and down its towers.
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H.
Lisbon Cathedral
We end our day at Santa Maria Maior de Lisboa before heading back to the hotel to actually check in and rest before heading back to the waterfront for dinner.
You can go out on a terrace on the West Front with a nice view of the square below and the city in the distance.
Our dinner on our last night in Portugal was near the cathedral so we were able to go back for some night shots.
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