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’.