Walking back after dinner through another neighbourhood, along another unfamiliar route, the same question surfaced: where were the people of Lisbon? In any metropolitan centre, the daytime population differs from the nighttime population. Central districts are naturally more expensive, and when workers depart overnight, they leave behind fewer residents. A baseline tourist flow is also a given, but in central Lisbon, that transient demographic seems to crowd out residents and workers alike, and with them, almost any semblance of the quotidian.

Though I prefer quiet neighbourhoods, I still find it’s best to orient myself in the centre before charting the peripheries. As a first-timer in Lisbon, that meant staying in Baixa, the low-lying downtown between São Jorge and São Roque, two of seven hills that define the city's topography. Its strict grid, rebuilt after the 1755 earthquake, is distinct from the surrounding web of serpentine streets. I anticipated tourist traffic but was taken aback by its scale. The population felt reduced to a binary: those present for sightseeing, and those on hand to facilitate it.