One of the iconic things in Lisbon is the historic electric trams, Tram 28 in particular. These trams look a lot like cable cars, but they run on overhead electricity, and have been doing so since 1901. Before that they were pulled by horses.
They are now major tourist attractions, but for people who live in the Alfama neighborhood (where we are staying), they are the only means of public transportation as the streets are very narrow with very tight turns. In some spots they miss the buildings by so little that you couldn’t fit between the tram and the building. They tend to be jam packed with tourists all day, and have become known as a hotbed for pick pockets. There are signs warning about pick pockets everywhere in Lisbon!
We spent our second day with a tour guide who recently wrote a book on Tram 28, taking the tram a portion of the way, and then walking the rest so she could point out interesing historical items along the way. I highly recommend this tour we found via AirBNB. Tram 28 tour
One of the interesting things we learned is that there is a bank at the corner of Rua da Conceicao and R. Dos Correeiros that starting building an underground parking garage and ran into dozens of roman artifacts and structures. The government only allowed a portion of the underground parking to be built, and the bank had to preserve the bulk of the ruins. They don’t advertise this, but according to our guide, every weekday on the hour they are required to give a tour of the underground site to anybody that walks in and asks for a visit. We will be checking this out in the next few days and will confirm.
There is a building at the corner of Largo Madalena and Tv. do Almada where you can see they have incorporated former tombstones into the wall. These tombstones rose to the surface during the 1755 earthquake, and are from the Roman period. Without a guide we never would have noticed.
Our guide also pointed out some stone support pieces in the Lisbon Cathedral that are from the Roman (first photo) and Visigoth (second photo) era. They pretty much used whatever they could find when they were rebuilding.
Our tour ended at the Portas do Sol, which has a beautiful overlook of Alfama. Our guide advised the area had become a “freakshow” due to a lot of hustlers trying to con tourists out of a few Euros. One guy walked by holding some really ugly jewelery asking if we wanted any “bling bling”. Now I know what to get everybody as gifts!
We ended the evening with dinner at Tagide, a beautiful restaurant overlooking the city and the Tagus River. The dinner was good, but they are much more slow paced than we are used to. We barely had a bottle of wine open before the first course arrived. I’m used to half the bottle being gone before that! The Grouper was to die for though, likely some of the best fish we’ve eaten in a long time, and that includes all of the fish we recently had in Hawaii! I think I annoyed the staff when I grabbed our wine bottle off the back table, but they need to be faster. An empty wine glass is one of the great sins in life! They have a Michelin “plate”. Maybe if they picked up the pace they might get a star?
