3 Days in Lisbon: A Literary Guide Through Cafés, Bookshops and the City Pessoa Never Left

Lisbon is a city built on hills, which means it’s also a city built on views: you round a corner and the Tagus opens up beneath you, tiled rooftops stacked all the way down to the water. It’s the kind of place that seems to have been arranged for someone to sit and write about it, and for the better part of a century, someone usually was. Fernando Pessoa wandered these same streets under at least seventy different names, inventing whole biographies for his own alter egos. José Saramago won Portugal’s only Nobel Prize in Literature and asked to have his ashes scattered under an olive tree a few streets from here. This itinerary follows both of them, and a few more besides: three days, three registers of a city that has always written itself down.

Day 1: Chiado & Baixa (Pessoa’s Lisbon, and the Café He Actually Preferred)

Start in the neighbourhood most associated with Lisbon’s literary mythology, and then quietly correct it.

Morning: the Fernando Pessoa statue and Café A Brasileira. In Chiado, on Rua Garrett, a bronze Pessoa sits permanently at an outdoor table, inviting tourists to take the empty chair across from him. The café behind him opened in 1905 and was a genuine gathering point for Lisbon’s early-20th-century avant-garde, including the Orpheu group, which Pessoa helped found. It’s worth a coffee for the Art Nouveau interior alone. Just know that Pessoa’s own favourite café was a different one entirely.

Midday: Livraria Bertrand. A short walk away, this is officially the oldest operating bookshop in the world, trading continuously since 1732 and holding a Guinness World Record to prove it. The current shop dates to 1773, rebuilt here after the original was destroyed in the 1755 earthquake. Its seven vaulted, tile-lined rooms are arranged around named corners honouring the Portuguese writers who used to hold court in them. Pessoa and the 19th-century novelist Eça de Queirós were both regulars, back when the bookshop doubled as an informal literary salon.

Afternoon: Praça Luís de Camões and Praça do Comércio. From Chiado, walk down toward the river past the statue of Luís de Camões, Portugal’s national poet, author of the 16th-century epic “Os Lusíadas.” At the bottom of the hill, Praça do Comércio opens onto the Tagus. Just off it sits Martinho da Arcada, founded in 1782 and, by Pessoa’s own account, his actual favourite café in the city: quieter and less photographed than the one bearing his statue.

Evening: Casa dos Bicos, Alfama’s edge. A short walk east, this 16th-century house with a distinctive spiked stone facade now holds the José Saramago Foundation. Saramago’s personal library sits inside. Out front, beneath an olive tree transplanted from his hometown of Azinhaga, his ashes were scattered after his death in 2010.

Day 2: Belém (Poets of Empire)

A tram ride west, to the neighbourhood built to commemorate an age of exploration, and the writers who turned it into myth.

Morning: the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos. This UNESCO-listed monastery, largely funded by the spice trade that Vasco da Gama’s voyages opened up, holds da Gama’s tomb in its lower choir. Directly across from it lies Camões, whose “Os Lusíadas” turned that same voyage into Portugal’s national epic. In the cloister nearby is a third tomb: Fernando Pessoa’s remains were transferred here in 1985, decades after his death, once his reputation had caught up with his talent.

Midday: the Torre de Belém. A short walk along the river, this 16th-century fortified tower once marked the starting point for ships setting out on the voyages Camões wrote about. It photographs better than it reads, but the view back toward the monastery is worth the walk regardless.

Afternoon: Pastéis de Belém. Not a literary stop by any definition, but a necessary one. This pastry shop has been baking the original version of Portugal’s custard tart since 1837. Pausing here for one, still warm, is as close as this itinerary comes to a purely sensory break.

Evening: the riverfront back toward Alcântara. Walk or tram back along the water as the light drops. This stretch of the Tagus, wide and unhurried, is the same view that shows up again and again in Lisbon’s own literature, usually as a stand-in for departure, distance, or both.

Day 3: Alfama, Campo de Ourique & Alcântara (The Quiet City)

The final day moves into the neighbourhoods where Lisbon’s writers actually lived, away from the statues built in their honour.

Morning: Casa Fernando Pessoa. In the residential Campo de Ourique district, this house museum occupies the building where Pessoa spent the final fifteen years of his life. It holds his glasses and first editions of his work, alongside a bedroom preserved with its original furniture. Researchers and casual visitors alike tend to leave quieter than they arrived.

Midday: the miradouros of Alfama. Climb into Lisbon’s oldest quarter, a tangle of narrow lanes that survived the 1755 earthquake largely intact. Find one of the neighbourhood’s viewpoints, Miradouro de Santa Luzia or Miradouro das Portas do Sol, both looking out over the same rooftops and river this whole itinerary keeps circling back to.

Afternoon: Livraria Ler Devagar, LX Factory. A tram or taxi ride to Alcântara brings you to this converted 19th-century printing factory, now a sprawling bookshop with a kinetic flying-bicycle sculpture suspended above the shelves and a working printing press still standing at its centre. It’s been called one of the most beautiful bookshops in the world, and for once the description undersells it.

Evening: dinner in Alfama, wherever the alleys lead. Fado, the melancholic musical form born in these streets, still gets performed in small, unmarked restaurants throughout the neighbourhood. You don’t need to seek one out specifically. Most evenings, one finds you.

Bookshops to Visit

A consolidated list, if you’d rather build your own route than follow the days above:

• Livraria Bertrand (Rua Garrett, Chiado): the world’s oldest operating bookshop, trading since 1732
• Livraria Sá da Costa (Rua Garrett, Chiado): a long-standing Chiado neighbour to Bertrand, worth the same short walk
• Livraria Ler Devagar (LX Factory, Alcântara): a former printing factory turned vast, atmospheric bookshop

Where to Stay

For a three-day, book-focused stay, three areas cover most of what this itinerary needs:

Chiado puts you within walking distance of Livraria Bertrand, the Pessoa statue and Praça do Comércio. Central and lively, though also the busiest part of the city after dark. Hotel Borges Chiado (Rua Garrett) opened in 1884 and is now the oldest continuously operating hotel in Lisbon, on the same street as Bertrand and the Pessoa statue. Its guests over the decades are said to have included the same writers, Pessoa and Eça de Queirós among them, who frequented the bookshop next door.

Alfama is quieter and steeper, its narrow lanes leading up toward the castle and its miradouros looking back down over the city. Memmo Alfama sits inside a restored 19th-century building in the heart of the old quarter, its rooftop terrace looking directly out over the rooftops, just from a slightly more comfortable chair.

Belém and the riverside route toward Alcântara sit a little further out, better suited to a base if Day 2’s monastery and Day 3’s LX Factory matter most to your plans. As Janelas Verdes (near the National Museum of Ancient Art, en route to Belém) occupies an 18th-century townhouse rumoured to have been home to Eça de Queirós, who supposedly wrote his novel “Os Maias” here. A wood-panelled rooftop library and a room named for him carry the connection through to today.

None of it needs to be grand. What matters is whether you can step outside and find a hill, a view, and somewhere quiet to sit with a book, which in Lisbon is nearly always close by.

Getting Around

The Chiado, Baixa and Alfama neighbourhoods are walkable, though the hills are real and the cobblestones are not always kind to unfamiliar shoes. The historic Tram 28 winds through much of this itinerary’s territory and is worth riding once, ideally outside peak hours.

Belém and LX Factory sit further out, best reached by tram, train, or a short taxi ride rather than on foot. A single rechargeable transport card covers trams, buses, the metro and the funiculars, and is worth picking up on day one.

Lisbon is made for getting lost, and half of what’s worth finding sits down some side street that wasn’t on the map you made to begin with. Wander without purpose, find a quiet café, an old bookshop, and be rewarded with a view no one else has stopped for.