Outward bound

Paris, Venice, Montevideo, Cape Town, Hobart. There are cities, like fado, that pluck at the gut. In my personal half dozen, having also lived there, Lisbon ranks high. ‘What beauties doth Lisboa first unfold,’ gasped Byron’s Childe Harold. Two centuries on, Portugal’s capital remains Queen of the Sea.

Yet beyond a sombrely sentimental gift to entrance, the character of Lisbon is elusive. It outreached the grip even of its greatest modern muse, Fernando Pessoa, whose posthumous 100-page guidebook, Lisbon: What the Tourist Should See, finally published in 1992, included the helpful information that Lisbon ‘rises like a fair vision in a dream, clear-cut against a bright blue sky which the sun gladdens with its gold’. Nor did Antoine de Saint-Exupéry penetrate to the nub on his visit in 1940 — when the city was a capital of refugees from the Nazis — describing Lisbon as ‘a kind of clear and sad paradise’ that ‘partied in defiance of Europe’.

To Barry Hatton in this enchanting history, ‘Lisbon is a mood’ which ‘cannot be captured in a travel brochure or photographs on a website’. The city’s special quality consists largely, he believes, in its exhilarating light, which falls on blue-tiled walls and white stone pavements with an intensity that is un-European, and more reminiscent of Portugal’s former colonies in Africa, India and Brazil. ‘It is a textured brightness, a creamy glow, at the same time vivid and silky.’

Lisbon’s second unique ingredient is what one Portuguese historian has called the ‘hybridism of cultures where, like nowhere else, the influences of Christianity and Islam converged’. To the Nobel laureate José Saramago, the city’s spirit lies in this spicy stew, ‘and it is the spirit that makes cities eternal’. Lisbon’s cultural tolerance throws up: the footballer Eusébio (from Lourenço Marques) — his statue ‘poised in mid-kick’ outside the Benfica Stadium of Light; the Belém Tower — whose architect had worked for two years in Marrakesh and was mimicking its mosque there; and São Domingos Square — where you can purchase a voodoo spell from Ouidah, drink throat-pinching firewater from Cape Verde, and eat an eye-watering Mozambican curry while listening to kizomba music from Angola.