Lisbon in May: seven hills, one tram, a palace the colour of a child's drawing, and the custard tart queue

Ellie plans the museums. I plan the coffee. That is the arrangement, and it has survived eleven city breaks, so I am not changing it. For Lisbon she had a list with palaces on it and I had a list with one word on it, which was bica, the small strong espresso they drink standing at the counter, and I am pleased to report that I got through nineteen of them in five days and she got through her list too. May was the right month. Warm enough for shirtsleeves, not hot enough to kill you on the hills, and there are hills. Seven, they say. It felt like more.

The hills and the tram

Lisbon is built on steep streets paved with small white and black stones, calcada, laid by hand in patterns, beautiful and, when wet, like walking on soap. Ellie went over on the first evening outside a bar and blamed the pavement. The pavement was partly to blame. The 28 tram is the famous one, a yellow wooden box from the 1930s that grinds up through Alfama and Graca with its bell going, and the trick is to catch it at the end of the line early in the morning, because by ten it is a sardine tin on rails. We got a seat at the back and I am still pleased about it. Alfama is the old Moorish quarter below the castle, lanes a metre wide, washing overhead, fado coming out of a doorway at lunchtime, and the castle itself, Sao Jorge, is worth the climb for the walls and the view and the peacocks, which have the run of the place and know it.

The miradouros are the viewpoints, and there is one on every hill, usually with a kiosk selling beer and a bloke with a guitar, and Ellie made a rule that we were not allowed to pass one without stopping. Good rule. The river is wide as a sea from up there, the roofs are orange, the light in the evening goes gold and then pink, and the bridge at the end looks like the one in San Francisco because the same people built it.

Belem

Belem is the bit by the river where the ships left for everywhere, and the tower is the postcard: a small white fort standing in the water, carved with ropes and crosses, and a queue to go in that we skipped, because the outside is the point. Along the river from it the monument to the explorers, and behind that the monastery, and behind that the reason half the queue was really there: the Pasteis de Belem, the custard tart shop that has been doing one thing since 1837. The queue goes round the block. It moves fast. You get them warm, in a paper tube, with sachets of cinnamon and icing sugar, and you eat them on a wall by the river and then you go back for more. We had six each over the week. Ellie had seven. I counted.

The Oceanarium is the one indoor thing I would fight for: a tank in the middle the size of a swimming pool with sharks and sunfish and rays going round, and four habitats off it, so you walk from the Antarctic penguins to a tropical reef in ten minutes, and the sea otters at the end, which held Ellie for twenty minutes against her will. Praca do Comercio, back in the centre, is the big yellow square open to the river with the arch at the top, and the thing to do there is nothing, at a table, with a bica, at four in the afternoon.

Sintra

The day in Sintra is the day you plan around, and Ellie planned it. The train from Rossio takes forty minutes and then you are in a wooded hill town with palaces on every ridge, and the one everyone comes for is Pena, a palace painted red and yellow with domes and battlements and tiles like a child drew it and then an adult built it in a fit of enthusiasm. Buy the ticket online three days ahead and go in the first slot, which we did, and we had the terraces for half an hour before the coaches came up the hill and the whole place became a queue. The walk up through the park is worth doing on foot; the bus is for the way down.

The Moorish castle is across the valley, a line of walls along the ridge, nine hundred years old, windy, and you walk the whole length of it with the mist coming through the gaps. The National Palace in the town has the two chimneys like upside-down ice cream cones and rooms painted with swans and magpies. And Quinta da Regaleira, the one Ellie had been quiet about, has the Initiation Well: a spiral staircase sunk into the ground nine storeys deep, moss on the walls, that you walk down into the dark and out through a tunnel into the garden. Do not miss it. We nearly did. Ellie had it last on the list and we almost ran out of day.

What was worth it

The tram, early, once. Every viewpoint. The tarts, warm, as many as your doctor allows. Pena at opening and the well at Regaleira, which is a better palace than most palaces. The grilled sardines in Alfama in the evening, eaten on bread with your fingers. The ginjinha, the cherry liqueur in a shot glass from a hole in the wall, once, because twice is a mistake. What was not: the queue to go inside Belem Tower, the palace at Queluz, which is fine, and my idea of walking back from Belem, which Ellie has asked me to put on the record as mine.

What I know now

Shoes with grip. May or October. The first train to Sintra and the first slot at Pena. Coffee at the counter, not the table. And let Ellie plan it, obviously. I have been saying that for eleven trips.