Practicalities
What catches visitors out
A short list of practical things that are obvious to residents and consistently surprise everyone else.
Practicalities
Transport, hills, tickets, timings and what catches visitors out.
21 articles · updated August 11, 2026 · page 1 of 2
Practicalities
The hills are the transport system
Lisbon is built on slopes, and understanding the vertical layer changes how you move around it.
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Practicalities
The tourist tram, and what to ride instead
One route is famous, crowded and pickpocketed. Several others do the same thing better.
Practicalities
Cafe etiquette from the door to the pavement
The customs are few and mostly unspoken, and getting them right takes about a day.
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.