Lisbon in 48 hours, by the people who live there

Most Lisbon guides are organised by neighbourhood, which is close to useless, because the city changes character by the hour far more than it does by the street. The Alfama at 9 a.m. and the Alfama at 9 p.m. are two different places with two different populations, and only one of them is worth your morning.

So here is forty-eight hours arranged the way the city actually runs. This assumes you arrive on a Friday evening, which is the right time to arrive.

Friday, 8 p.m. — eat where the queue is not

The visitor dinner hour in Lisbon is 7 to 8.30. The local one starts at 9 and peaks around 10.30.

If you show up at 8 you will wait behind everyone who read the same list you did. Show up at 9.15 and walk into the same places. This is the single highest-value piece of timing information about the city and it is free.

Skip the restaurants with a person outside holding a menu. Not because they are bad — some are fine — but because a place that needs somebody on the pavement is a place whose business model is people who do not know where they are, and you are trying not to be that.

Friday, 11 p.m. — the street is the venue

The thing visitors misread about a Lisbon night is that the bars are mostly somewhere to buy a drink, not somewhere to be. People take the drink outside and stand in the street, and the street is where the night happens.

This means two things. You do not need to pick the right bar — pick the right street and the bars on it are close to interchangeable. And you should not be sitting down at 11 p.m. Sitting down is a 1 a.m. activity.

Saturday, 8 a.m. — the viewpoints, and only now

Every miradouro in this city is spectacular and every single one is unbearable after about 10.30 a.m.

Between 8 and 9.30 you will have them essentially to yourself, the light is better anyway, and the cafés attached to them are serving the people who live in the buildings around them rather than four coach parties. If you take one instruction from this piece, take this one: do the views before breakfast, not after lunch.

A miradouro at 8 a.m. and the same miradouro at noon are not the same attraction. One is a view. The other is a queue with a view behind it.

Saturday, 10 a.m. — pastéis, correctly

You do not need to go to the famous one. You need to go to any bakery where the tray is coming out of the oven while you are standing there.

The rule is temperature, not address. A pastel de nata that has been sitting under glass for two hours is a completely different and much worse object than one that is four minutes old, and no amount of queueing at the correct address fixes that. Ask for the ones that just came out. Every bakery understands this question.

Cinnamon goes on top, at the counter, by you — not in the kitchen.

Saturday, 2 p.m. — leave the city

This is the part almost nobody does on a short trip and it is the best thing on this list.

Twenty-five minutes on a train and you are at the Atlantic. Not a nice urban river beach — the actual, cold, enormous ocean, with a line of beaches that Lisbon treats as its back garden. The train runs along the water for most of the way and costs about the same as a coffee.

Go to the far end of the line rather than the first stop. The first stop is where everyone gets off.

Saturday, 7 p.m. — the golden hour problem

Sunset in Lisbon is a competitive event and you will not win it at the famous spots.

The move is to be somewhere west-facing that is not for sunset — a square, a terrace, the top of a random street that happens to point the right way. The city is built on hills facing a river that runs into the sea; there are hundreds of these, and the ones without a name are empty.

Sunday — one thing, slowly

Two days is not enough time to see Lisbon, and pretending otherwise is how people end up exhausted and vaguely disappointed by a city they liked.

Pick one thing on Sunday. One museum, or one neighbourhood, or one long lunch that runs to four hours. The city rewards depth much more than coverage, and the group photo you will actually keep is from the lunch, not from the sixth viewpoint.

Then get the train back along the water and try to remember whether you were meant to be somewhere on Monday.