Lisbon

Lisbon sits on Portugal’s Atlantic coast and wears its capital city status lightly, with none of the stiffness that title can bring elsewhere in Europe. The pleasure here is in the pace: long mornings over coffee in a pastelaria, then afternoons spent wandering between neighbourhoods like Alfama and Bairro Alto, where the streets climb and dip with the city’s seven hills. Trams rattle past on routes that have barely changed in a century.