Lisbon - Portugal

If you want to search out Lisbon's treasures, fine; if all you want to do is sip coffee while watching the world go by, that's fine, too. Lisbon is a city built for the ultra-relaxed, aimless fl3/4aneur, with its shuttered houses clad in beautiful blue and green tiling, and shimmering suddenly at the end of narrow streets a hilly vista of dusty red, blue and mustard rooftops, with the golden castle of Seao Jorge glowing atop one of the city's seven hills. Many buildings are in an advanced state of dilapidation: cats enjoy leisurely tongue-baths in the windows of overgrown empty stone houses. As Portugal's most celebrated poet, Fernando Pessoa, who lived nearly all his life in Lisbon, wrote: 'All is scattered, nothing entire./ O Portugal, fog you are...'

The cutest example of Lisbon's rather lackadaisical attitude is the clanking, old, wrought-iron Elevador de Santa Justa, a 45m lift built in 1901 by a pupil of Gustav Eiffel to connect the west end of Baixa, the shopping district, with the Carmo church in Chiado. Unfortunately, the viaduct these days is closed, as the buildings on the hill are in danger of collapsing. So you buy a ticket and go up, and once you've done that, er, you go down again. It doesn't matter, though, because there is, surreally, a little cafe perched at the top, dispensing beverages against the ferocious wind and affording an impressive view of the city.

The more practical downside of laid-back Lisbon is that you may well turn up to a museum only to find the main hall closed, or search out a cathedral cloister to find a messy web of scaffolding disfiguring the space. And be sure to avoid Lisbon if you're a lobster, as you will be piled into a restaurant window's tiny aquarium six deep among your suffering comrades, antennae futilely awaggle, with only the boiling pot to look forward to.

Lisbon is a waterside city, but the shoreline is a dirty strip of pebbles, cut off from the conurbation by a choking motorway. The Atlantic is first and foremost the city's larder - bacalhau, the national dish of salt cod, or any number of grilled seabass, grouper and so on are the main fare in restaurants. Seen from a high vantage point, in fact, the precarious jumble of white and rosy buildings plonked up the hillside that constitutes Lisbon seems to be all a-huddle, a city at Europe's westernmost tip seeking consolation before the seas whose mastery was once its country's glory.

Travellers to Lisbon should start the day like the Lisboetas do - shaking off cosmic-historical woes at a cafe. The celebrated Cafe A Brasileira is a Rua Garrett institution that has been serving short, strong coffees and pastries since 1905, and its green-and-gold facade invites the visitor into a narrow interior of carved dark wood, brass and mirrors. It was also a favourite hang-out of that man Pessoa, who is immortalised in a bronze statue outside, sitting forever at his regular table, dreaming up new poetries of metaphysics.

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