Day Trips
The coast is closer than people think
A short train ride reaches the Atlantic, and the beaches vary enormously in shelter and character.
Nuno Aguiar
Contributing writer, Coffee in Lisbon
Nuno writes about the practical city — transport, admin and living here beyond a fortnight.
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16 articles
Day Trips
Reading the landscape from a train window
The countryside around the city is a worked landscape, and knowing what the trees are doing makes the journey part of the day.
Day Trips
Visiting wine country without a car
Several producing regions are reachable by public transport and a short taxi, which solves the obvious problem with tasting.
Practicalities
The dozen words that cover ordering
A very small vocabulary handles almost every transaction in a cafe, and using it changes the temperature of the exchange.
Practicalities
Tipping in Portugal, described honestly
There is no fixed percentage, practice varies, and the confident advice you read online is mostly wrong in one direction or the…
Practicalities
Working from a cafe without becoming a problem
Laptops in cafes are normal in some rooms and genuinely unwelcome in others, and the difference is readable.
Practicalities
The weather year, and what each part of it does
The seasons here are milder and wetter than the postcard suggests, and each has a specific failure mode.
Practicalities
Smoking, terraces and the noise question
Outdoor seating sits at the intersection of two rules that everyone experiences and few people know precisely.
Practicalities
Toilets, tap water and what a cafe will do for you
The small logistics of a day walking around a city, and the unwritten arrangement that governs them.
Practicalities
Why nobody is queueing, and how to get served anyway
Service order here runs on ticket machines in some places and on collective memory in others, and both work.
Practicalities
Public holidays, and when things actually shut
Two layers of holiday operate here, and the local one closes things in one town and not the next.
Day Trips
The estuary is a bird reserve, and that is a day out
Upriver from the city the water spreads into shallow marsh and mudflat that feeds enormous numbers of migrating birds. It is close…
Day Trips
Fishing villages that still fish, and the ones that stopped
Some coastal towns still land a catch and some just look like they do. The difference is visible in ten minutes and it changes what…
Practicalities
How you pay for a journey, and the card that holds it
A reusable card, loaded in one of two different ways, covers almost everything. The confusion comes from the two modes not mixing.
Practicalities
Shade is infrastructure, and it moves all day
In summer the difference between a pleasant walk and a miserable one is which side of the street you are on. That is a…
Practicalities
Pharmacies and the first stop for a small problem
A pharmacy here does more than hand over boxes. For minor problems it is the sensible first port of call, and knowing that saves a…