Where to stay in Lisbon

Santa Maria Maior contains almost everything on a first visit: the Baixa grid, Rossio, Praça do Comércio, the cathedral, the castle hill and the lower half of Alfama. Book here and the whole trip is on foot.

The grid is the flattest ground in central Lisbon, laid out on a rational plan after the 1755 earthquake. Walk two streets east and that ends. Alfama is stairs and lanes too narrow for a car, so an address there is one a taxi cannot reach and a suitcase has to be carried up.

The cost is the obvious one. Rua Augusta has restaurant touts working it from late morning, tram 28 is the route named in every police warning about pickpockets in this city, and the same three-star room runs about a third above Avenidas Novas. If that is the trade you want, this is the right freguesia and there is no close second.

Misericórdia holds two districts a booking site will describe in one sentence and that you would not pick for the same trip. Chiado is the shopping and café half, calm by 23:00, with the Baixa-Chiado metro under it. Bairro Alto sits directly above it and is where Lisbon drinks, standing in the street.

Príncipe Real is the third piece and the quiet one: a garden square, restaurants that take reservations, ten minutes of hill between it and the noise. Cais do Sodré at the bottom gives you the Time Out Market and the train to Cascais and the beaches.

So the verdict depends on the street, not the district, which is why it is amber rather than green. If the address is inside the Bairro Alto grid, assume noise until 03:00 from Thursday to Saturday and ask about the windows before you pay. If it is Chiado or Príncipe Real, this is one of the best places to stay in Lisbon.

Santo António is Avenida da Liberdade and what sits at either end of it: Restauradores at the bottom, Marquês de Pombal and Parque Eduardo VII at the top. This is where Lisbon put its five-star hotels, and because they compete with each other, a four-star here often beats a three-star in the old town on both price and room size.

The practical argument is the gradient. From Avenida station you walk downhill into the Baixa in about fifteen minutes on flat, wide pavement, and you ride the blue line back up instead of climbing. Nothing else this central lets you do that. The airport is one line and about fifteen minutes.

What you give up is character. The Avenida is a ten-lane road with trees down the middle, the buildings are 20th-century, and by 23:00 the district is empty. You will be visiting old Lisbon rather than staying in it, and you will pay the highest rates in the city for the privilege.

São Vicente is Graça, the upper half of Alfama, the National Pantheon and the Feira da Ladra flea market. It has the two best free viewpoints in the city, Miradouro da Graça and Senhora do Monte, and a room with a view up here costs less than a room without one down in the Baixa.

The reason is transport. There is no metro station anywhere in the freguesia. You have tram 28, which is standing-room-only in both directions by the time it reaches Graça, a handful of buses, or the climb: roughly 90 vertical metres up from the Baixa on cobbles that are slippery in rain.

Book it if you will be out walking all day anyway and the view at breakfast matters more than the walk home. Do not book it for anyone hauling a suitcase up from the metro, because there is no metro to haul it up from.

Estrela is the quiet western edge of central Lisbon: the basilica and its garden, the parliament, Madragoa's low streets, and Lapa above the river, which is where the embassies and the expensive restaurants are. Tourists pass through it on tram 25 and almost none of them sleep here.

That is most of the appeal. You get a genuinely residential Lisbon fifteen to twenty-five minutes' walk from the Baixa, at rates below Chiado, with Cais do Sodré and the Time Out Market a walk east along the river.

Two things hold it back. There is no metro station in the freguesia, so it is trams 25E and 28E or a long uphill walk, and Lapa is steep in every direction. And the Santos waterfront at the bottom is a bar strip that runs late at weekends, which is a different district from the one you booked three streets uphill.

Avenidas Novas is where Lisbon works. Saldanha, Picoas and São Sebastião are office blocks, chain hotels and the Gulbenkian museum, laid out along broad early-20th-century avenues that were new when the name was chosen and are not new now.

The case for it is arithmetic. Rates run about a third below the historic centre for the same star rating, the yellow and red metro lines cross at Saldanha, and the airport is twelve minutes on the red line with no change. For a week-long stay, a family that wants a real supermarket, or anyone here for a conference, that adds up fast.

The case against it is everything you came for. No river, no tram, no tiled façades, no old town. It is about thirty-five minutes on foot to the Baixa and the return leg is uphill. On a Sunday the avenues are shut. Treat it as somewhere to sleep cheaply and commute from and it works; expect Lisbon out of the window and it does not.

Arroios is the parish immediately north of the Baixa: Almirante Reis running up the middle, Intendente and Anjos at the bottom, Pena and the Campo dos Mártires da Pátria on the hill to the west. Thirty-three thousand people live in two square kilometres, which makes it the densest and the least staged part of central Lisbon.

Book here for the reason people actually live here. It is fifteen minutes on foot to Rossio, four metro stations sit inside the parish, and the eating is Nepalese, Chinese, Bangladeshi, Mozambican and Portuguese on the same block for a third of Chiado prices. Prices for a flat are well under the Baixa and the streets have shops rather than souvenir stands.

The caution is specific and it is about two streets, not the parish. Intendente and the Martim Moniz end of Almirante Reis were Lisbon's drug and prostitution district; policing has changed that a great deal since about 2015 and Intendente now has the fashionable end of it, but Wikivoyage still names the area and it still looks the part at 01:00. A block uphill into Pena, or north past Anjos, and it is an ordinary residential district.

Campo de Ourique is the nineteenth-century grid laid out west of Estrela, between the Prazeres cemetery and the Rato. It is the rarest thing in central Lisbon: level ground. The streets run straight, the pavements are wide, and the whole parish is the size you can cross in fifteen minutes.

This is where Lisbon families live, and it shows in what is on the street - a covered market that turned into a good food hall without turning into a tourist one, bakeries, hardware shops, and restaurants where the menu is not in four languages. Tram 28 terminates here, so you board it at the start of the route with a seat, rather than fighting on at Graça.

The cost is distance and quiet. It is about half an hour on foot down to the Baixa and a real climb back, there is no metro station in the parish, and the evening ends early. Nothing on a first-timer's list is here. For a second visit, for a week, or with children, that is the point rather than the problem.

Penha de França is the parish above and east of São Vicente, running up from the Alfama's back edge to the Alto da Eira. Most of it was built between the wars, and it is where a lot of the flats advertised as "Graça" actually are - the boundary runs between them and the difference is about eighty vertical metres.

What it gets you is price and view. The Miradouro da Senhora do Monte and the Graça terraces sit on this ridge, tram 28 runs along the western edge, and the Baixa is twenty-five minutes down. A flat here costs meaningfully less than the same flat in Alfama, and the streets are ordinary residential Lisbon rather than a queue.

The two problems are the hill and the isolation. There is no metro in the parish, the walk back from dinner is a genuine climb whichever way you take it, and past the ridge the district turns into 1970s social housing towers with nothing for a visitor. Book the western slope near Graça; anything advertised as Penha de França proper is further out and further up than the photographs suggest.

Areeiro is the planned district north-east of the centre: the Avenida de Roma, the Alameda fountain, Praça do Areeiro and streets of solid five-storey Estado Novo apartment blocks laid out in the 1940s. Flats here are the largest in central Lisbon and among the cheapest per square metre.

The practical case is transport. Alameda is the interchange of the green and red lines, which means the airport is twelve minutes away without changing and the Baixa is six. If you land late, leave early, or are travelling with a family that needs three bedrooms rather than a view, this is the most sensible booking in the city.

What you give up is Lisbon. Nothing here is old, nothing here is pretty, and the walk to the Baixa is a flat forty minutes past car showrooms. The restaurants are neighbourhood tascas that close at ten. It is a perfectly decent place to sleep with excellent transport, and it is not a place you will remember.

Alcântara is the old industrial strip between Estrela and Belém, and it is the part of Lisbon that changed most in the last fifteen years. LX Factory, a print works turned into bookshops, restaurants and a rooftop, is here. So are the Docas de Santo Amaro, a row of restaurants and clubs in the old dock buildings directly beneath the 25 de Abril bridge.

The rooms are the cheapest riverside stock in the city, the Cascais train stops at Alcântara-Mar, and Belém is four minutes away by rail. For a second visit, or for anyone whose evening is the point of the trip, that is a real argument.

What you are buying with it is a motorway overhead. The bridge carries traffic all night and you hear it. Between LX Factory and the docks the district is warehouses, dual carriageway and container yards, the Baixa is forty-five minutes on foot, and midweek the Docas are a car park with the restaurants shut.

Belém is where Portugal keeps the monuments: the Jerónimos Monastery and the Belém Tower, both UNESCO sites, plus the Monument to the Discoveries, the Coach Museum, MAAT and the original Pastéis de Belém. Everyone visits. Almost nobody should sleep here.

It is seven kilometres west of the Baixa. Tram 15E takes about 25 minutes when you get a seat and considerably longer when you do not, and the waterfront monuments are cut off from the streets and the tram stop by a working railway line you cross on footbridges. Coach parties start arriving at 09:00, so you get the crowds without getting the evening.

By 22:30 the restaurants have closed and the district is residential and dark. The hotels are good and the setting is genuinely handsome, but you will spend an hour a day travelling to the city you bought the flight to see.

Parque das Nações is the Expo '98 site, kept and built on after the world's fair closed. It is the cleanest and most orderly part of Lisbon: wide riverside promenades, the Oceanário, a cable car, a casino, the Vasco da Gama shopping centre and Calatrava's Oriente station.

It is also the reason people come home disappointed. Nothing here is older than 1998. No old town, no tram, no tiled street, no fado. Reaching the historic centre means the red line to Alameda, a change onto the green line and about half an hour door to door - each way, twice a day, for the whole trip.

There are two honest reasons to book it: a conference at the FIL, or a very early flight, since Oriente is eight minutes from the airport. With small children and the Oceanário as the point of the trip it is defensible for one night. Otherwise this is the classic Lisbon booking mistake: cheap, modern, well reviewed, and in the wrong city.