Portugal

Portugal occupies the western edge of the Iberian Peninsula, roughly 900 kilometres of Atlantic coastline running from the Minho down to the Algarve, plus the mid-ocean islands of Madeira and the Azores. Lisbon sits on the Tagus estuary in the centre, Porto anchors the north on the Douro, and between them the country packs river valleys, walled towns, cork plains, and some of the biggest surfable waves on Earth into a space smaller than most people expect. I have lived in Lisbon since 2020, and after years of photographing it in every season, this is the country I know best.

Lisbon

Lisbon is built on seven hills above the Tagus, and the climb is the point. The Bica funicular has hauled people up its 245-metre incline since the 19th century, its yellow car framed by the pastel houses of the Pombaline downtown with the river showing turquoise at the bottom of the street. Over in the labyrinth of Alfama, the oldest district and the only one to survive the 1755 earthquake largely intact, the trams still squeeze through streets so narrow you press yourself against a wall as they pass.

The city rewards height. From the ramparts of São Jorge Castle you look down on the whole terracotta sprawl, a Roman-era hilltop over a modern capital. Down at river level in Belém, the Jerónimos Monastery shows off the Manueline stonework that Portugal invented at the height of its sea power, and the Monument to the Discoveries still faces the water the caravels sailed from.

Photographing Portugal

The work I am proudest of here was planned to the metre. In March 2025 I spent weeks in PhotoPills fine-tuning coordinates to catch the full moon rising directly behind Belém Tower, shot from 6.6 kilometres away at 560mm so the disc came up huge and red beside the 16th-century tower that once guarded Portugal’s maritime maps. Clouds swallowed the first rise. A fisherman shouted that it was coming back, and the second rise gave me the frame with the moon, the tower, and the bridge together.

The alignments are a habit. I joined the PhotoPills World Meetup on the coast at Costa da Caparica to line the setting sun up behind the Farol do Bugio lighthouse, moving the tripod ten metres between frames as the sun dropped. During the 2020 lockdown, when I could not go far, I caught a super moon lining up with the 25 de Abril bridge from my own balcony in Ajuda. Living here is the advantage: I can wait for the sky Portugal only gives on the right evening.

The Lisbon Waterfront

The Tagus front is where Lisbon looks most like somewhere else and stays entirely itself. The 25 de Abril bridge reads as San Francisco at first glance, and for good reason: it was raised by the American Bridge Company, the same firm behind the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Behind it in Almada stands the Cristo Rei statue, commissioned after a cardinal returned from Rio, arms open toward the city.

Further west, the MAAT museum curves along the riverbank like a low wave, its tiled skin catching the sun at the exact hour it rises behind the bridge. Inland, the tile tradition itself covers half the city: the blue-and-white azulejo began as a practical way to regulate a building’s temperature and became Portugal’s signature surface. For a different Lisbon, the LX Factory in Alcântara fills a dead industrial complex with bookshops, restaurants, and a shop selling tinned sardines stamped with the year you were born.

Sintra and Cabo da Roca

Half an hour from Lisbon, the Serra de Sintra grows a forest and a set of palaces out of the damp Atlantic air. Pena Palace is the loud one, a 19th-century Romantic fantasy in red and yellow built by a German architect on a peak above the town. Down in the gardens of Quinta da Regaleira, the Initiation Well is an inverted 27-metre tower you descend on a spiral stair, its platforms laid out to echo Dante and Tarot ritual.

The range runs to the ocean and stops hard. Cabo da Roca is the westernmost point of continental Europe, hundred-metre cliffs with a lighthouse and waves breaking far below. Just north, Praia da Ursa is the westernmost beach, reachable only on a steep scramble and worth every careful step. The cliffside village of Azenhas do Mar sits a little south, still mostly overlooked by photographers.

Cascais

Cascais is where Lisbon goes to the seaside, a former fishing town turned resort at the western end of the Estoril coast. One year we walked the whole 20-plus kilometres from Belém along the Tagus to get here, sunburned and finished by the end of it, and still could not resist climbing over the star-shaped Forte de Santo António da Barra, a 16th-century fort that later served as Salazar’s summer residence and only opened to the public in 2018.

The town itself is compact and easy. Praça 5 de Outubro, named for the 1910 revolution that ended the monarchy, is the centre, with the old town hall and the citadel a minute’s walk from the sand. Tucked below the promenade, Praia da Rainha is the smallest beach in Cascais, a 50-metre cove ringed by limestone that Queen Amélia liked enough to claim as her own.

The Setúbal Peninsula

South across the Tagus, Setúbal is our regular escape from the city, and it is best in the low season. The Tróia peninsula has the whitest sand and the most turquoise water near Lisbon, and in winter it empties out entirely, which is the only way we like it. Behind it, the Serra da Arrábida drops green hills straight into the sea. We stopped the car on a December morning near Azeitão when the Arrábida vineyards opened up bare and frost-touched, the region whose Moscatel and layered reds are among our favourites in the country.

The Sado estuary adds its own textures. The Carrasqueira palafitic pier near Comporta is a run of wooden stilts built by fishermen in the 1950s and still in daily use, best at sunset with Tróia glowing across the water. Upriver, Alcácer do Sal has been settled since the Neolithic and traded salt under the Romans as Salacia, its hilltop castle now a pousada looking over the bend of the Sado.

Évora and the Alentejo

Inland from the coast, the Alentejo slows everything down: cork oaks, wheat, whitewashed towns, and long empty roads. Évora is its historic heart, a UNESCO-listed town where Roman, Moorish, and medieval layers sit on top of each other. Its most famous room is the Chapel of Bones, built by 17th-century Franciscans from the remains of some five thousand townspeople, an inscription over the door translating to “better is the day of death than the day of birth.” Told well by a guide, the chapel reads less as a warning than as an argument about the shortness of a life.

The Algarve

Portugal’s south coast is where most of Europe pictures the country: ochre cliffs, sea caves, and long beaches. It works hardest in winter. We photographed the fishing town of Ferragudo on the Arade river at night over Christmas, when the tourists were gone but the six a.m. fishermen were not, and shot the panorama of Carvoeiro on a New Year’s Day that touched 18 degrees.

The winter light suits the whole coast. Albufeira, which swells from roughly 14,000 residents to several hundred thousand in high summer, hands its beaches back at sunset once the season ends, the white town glowing above an empty shore. West toward Lagos, the Forte da Ponta da Bandeira guards a harbour that shipped the first voyages of the Age of Discovery, and an almost-full moon that evening lit the corners the low sun could not reach.

Leiria, Batalha and Óbidos

The stretch of central Portugal north of Lisbon is thick with castles and monasteries, and most of it stays quiet. Leiria Castle is the anchor, a nine-century fortress raised by Dom Afonso Henriques, the first king of Portugal, that watches over the town from a single hill. I caught it in a light I had to build in two passes, one frame for the sun on the walls and a second half an hour later for the cloud that formed above them, then combined the two.

A short drive away, the Monastery of Batalha is late Gothic at its most extravagant, begun in 1386 as thanks for the victory at Aljubarrota and built across the reigns of seven kings before it was finished. We reached it late on an autumn afternoon, too late for the interior, in time for the sky to turn purple over the flamboyant stonework. The walled town of Óbidos, with its ring of medieval ramparts, sits close enough to fold into the same day.

The Silver Coast

North of the capital the Atlantic turns fierce, and one town made a name out of it. Praia do Norte in Nazaré sits above an underwater canyon that funnels Atlantic swell into some of the largest surfable waves in the world, drawing big-wave riders from October to March. From the lighthouse platform on the headland you watch the waves stack up and detonate against the rocks, a spectacle even on a day the sets only reach six metres.

Further out to sea, the São João Baptista fortress on the Berlengas islands is reachable by boat from Peniche and, like the rest of this coast, best photographed in winter when the crowds thin and the ocean allows the crossing. Inland at Aveiro, often called the Venice of Portugal, painted moliceiro boats work a grid of canals past Art Nouveau facades, and the striped houses of Costa Nova sit a short hop away on the dune. It is a town that is genuinely worth the detour most itineraries skip.

Coimbra and the Serra da Estrela

Between the coast and the Spanish border, central Portugal climbs into mountains few visitors reach. Coimbra was the capital from 1131 to 1255, but what towers over it is not a castle: it is the university on the hill above the Mondego, founded in 1290 and still running, the oldest institution of its kind in the Portuguese-speaking world. Nearby, the gardens of Bussaco Palace, a Neo-Manueline palace turned hotel, run to moss-covered pergolas and quiet paths I photographed at sunrise one February. Higher into the Serra do Açor, the schist village of Piódão stacks its grey stone houses up a hillside like an amphitheatre.

Portugal still surprises me after years here, and the Serra da Estrela is why. Above the town of Manteigas I went looking for autumn colour and instead found a cluster of moss-covered stone cottages being reclaimed by the forest. The same trip took me to the Poço do Inferno waterfall, a ravine of cascades in the mountains, and along the Rota das Faias, a beech trail that turns to a corridor of gold every October.

Porto and the Douro

Six weeks into our first long Portuguese stay, friends kept asking the same question: Porto or Lisbon? The north makes a strong case. Porto is built in granite rather than pastel, monumental where Lisbon is playful, and the Palácio das Cardosas on the Avenida dos Aliados, now an InterContinental, shows the city’s heavier, grander hand.

The river is the show. The double-deck Dom Luís I bridge over the Douro was designed by Théophile Seyrig, a former partner of Gustave Eiffel, and reads best at sunset from the far bank. That far bank is Vila Nova de Gaia, where the port wine lodges line the water, aging a wine whose grapes are grown a hundred kilometres upriver in the Douro valley and only stored here. Out at the river mouth, the Felgueiras lighthouse takes the full force of the Atlantic; we were soaked by a rogue set there once, and came back a year later for the calm sunset instead.

Madeira

Nine hundred kilometres out into the Atlantic, Madeira is Portugal at its most vertical. The island rises straight from the sea into ridges wrapped in cloud, and its microclimates make and unmake the weather in minutes. On the misty mountain roads above Santana I pulled over at a random lay-by to reach for the telephoto as a single shaft of light found a ridge of houses through the cloud, the kind of moment the island hands out and then takes back.

The coast is just as raw. Ponta de São Lourenço, the easternmost peninsula, is volcanic and treeless, all wind-scoured grass and red rock, atypical for an island otherwise green to the summits. In the village of Santana, the triangular thatched A-frame houses are the postcard, and May brings the Madeira flower festival that carpets Funchal’s streets.

When to Visit Portugal

The country runs against the usual calendar. Winter is when I do my best coastal work: the Algarve, Cascais, Tróia, and the Berlengas islands all empty out, the light stays low and warm, and a New Year’s afternoon can still hit 18 degrees in the south. October and November belong to the interior, when the beech forests of the Serra da Estrela turn and the mountains fog and clear. Spring, especially May, is the moment for Madeira and its flower festival. Summer brings the crowds and the heat, and the one place that goes quiet in warm months is Nazaré, whose giant waves only run from October to March.

For the historic core, Coimbra’s UNESCO-listed university and the monasteries of the centre reward the shoulder seasons of spring and autumn, when the tour buses thin and the stone gets the light to itself. You can read the full listing for the oldest university in the Portuguese-speaking world on the UNESCO World Heritage register.

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