Port du jour: Lisbon

Portugal

Excerpt from Vetted: Portuguese Riviera

If you’re like me and prefer to roam free with a few items to do in mind, rather than have day-to-day itineraries, Lisbon feels like a playground. It’s a relatively small city, filled to the brim with pretty and interesting architecture, packed with food and wine that you’ll never forget (I still think about the first pastel de nata I ever had), and home to the westernmost port in continental Europe.

If you’ve been to Portugal, you know about the earthquake of 1755. Simply, Portugal got rocked, and most buildings standing today were built, or at least renovated, after the earthquake. Even hundreds of miles away, cathedrals in Spain have persisting damage from the quake’s tremors. Sintra was at the heart of the quake, and so most of the architecture is c. 18th century and beyond.

Lisbon is one of the many places throughout the Iberian Peninsula that’s been ruled and conquered and renaissanced by layers of peoples over time, and it still shows.