Overlooking neat rows of grapes on the hills near Pinhão, in the Douro Valley, Portugal.Adrian Lee/The Globe and Mail
I can’t imagine what it was that gave me away to the petite woman yanking a tiny glove onto my hand in the two-person showroom of Luvaria Ulisses, a 99-year-old leather-goods institution in Lisbon.
Maybe it was the chunky camera that slipped inelegantly off my shoulder as she shoved the glove down over my knuckles, or my big, ugly, sun-safe hat. Maybe the coffee I had brought in to help bridge my jet lag, or the handheld battery-powered fan hanging out of my sling bag, marked me.
The gloves shop Luvaria Ulisses, with its tiny Chiado storefront in a neoclassical style, was founded in 1925 by a former Lisbon city councillor.Adrian Lee/The Globe and Mail
Or maybe it was the concern that flickered over my face – that I might have to pay for a now-stretched glove I’d just wanted to try on, and I didn’t know any Portuguese beyond a thick-tongued obrigado – that did me in.
Whatever it was, her remark cut me: “Wow, you’re a real tourist!”
I felt like I’d been outed, caught red-handed in a brown glove. I’d been branded with that word that can’t help but be hissed: tourist.
Over the course of my relatively short travelling life, I’d learned that was the last thing I wanted to be. To be a tourist felt embarrassing and basic: They were mere followers in madding crowds, checking off attractions with an iPhone snap, and wearing vacation uniforms of Dri-Fit and khaki and thick walking shoes that broadcast that they were from elsewhere. Any place described as “too touristy” was a place to avoid.
Tourists, I believed, were other people – and thus, as Sartre famously said, hell. They are sheeple who entrap themselves on packaged, surface-level tours, complete passionless lists of TripAdvisor’s top-ranked must-sees, and trample the locals while mindlessly taking selfies. That couldn’t be me, of course – I’m the cool, high-minded traveller slinking through in shoulder season, gliding into lineless restaurants, stumbling across hidden gems, learning the history, and trying to blend in. Surely, I am more mindful, more demure, maybe even ... better?
The Pérgola da Nevogilde overlooks the Praia do Molhe in Foz, a beach district of Porto.Adrian Lee/The Globe and Mail
Tourists have even become a political issue. A month before my wife and I touched down in Portugal, protesters chanting “Tourists go home” sprayed visitors with water guns in neighbouring Spain. In March, Kyoto’s geisha district closed its picturesque alleyways amid increased harassment of the entertainers by blinkered tourists. All around Portugal, we saw tourism’s consequences – not just in the sweltering heat made worse by carbon-belching planes, but in stickers condemning Airbnb and its users for driving up rental prices. And the Portuguese newspaper Expresso reported last month that some Lisbon restaurants are secretly offering tourists menus with higher prices.
If you suspected you were being silently derided as an unwelcome tourist before, that fear is now being loudly validated.
But this August, owing to vacation-time complications, I found myself in Portugal at the very peak of peak season – that most hectic and hot slice of the summer when the vacationing tourist hordes jet-set to sunny climes, and a time I’ve always avoided for travel. And we only had a week to see a country for which I had no real context. Like it or not, I was going to be touring Portugal.
So, I leaned into being a tourist. And actually, I liked it.
Though I’d typically be disappointed to eat food that wasn’t local and unique to a place I was visiting, our dinner at Come Prima, a much-decorated Italian restaurant in Lisbon run by a Nepalese chef, was rewarded by some of the best pastas we’ve ever had.
Praça do Município, a square in Lisbon's Baixa district, is seen in the high sun of the mid-afternoon.Adrian Lee/The Globe and Mail
We signed up, with trepidation, for a daylong Douro Valley tour, and wound up making real connections with people from around the world, including the loving, jovial and hilariously self-deprecating family running the small Quinta da Bela winery, which overlooks a glorious vista we couldn’t have seen otherwise.
I even fell for Super Bock, Portugal’s bestselling and most common beer – not enough to buy a Super Bock branded T-shirt at one of the ubiquitous souvenir shops, but enough to understand, for the first time, why someone might pay for such cheap, impersonal swag.
In Lisbon, we took selfies at two tourist hotspots, the Jerónimos Monastery and the Belém Tower (crucially, we did not go in, because my loathing for lines endures), and downed sour-cherry liqueur at Ginjinha Sem Rival. In Porto, I gawked at the peacocks striding across the Jardins do Palácio de Cristal, learned my wife loves tawny port on a wine-cave tour and indulged in a Francesinha sandwich at Café Santiago, which was on all the must-do lists. I walked around in shiny athletic wear, accepting that the style downgrade was worth mitigating how sweaty I was getting in the heat. I took flat-lay photos at Michelin-starred restaurants, chased golden hour at a rooftop bar in the ancient Alfama district and posted everything on Instagram.
The sun starts to set on Porto's busy harbourfront. The municipality of Gaia can be seen across the Douro River.Adrian Lee/The Globe and Mail
Nothing was obscure, and everything was beautiful.
Even the places that seemed like they’d be tourist traps felt anything but basic. Pastéis de Belém, the first shop to sell the famous Portuguese custard tart and which still uses the original centuries-old recipe handed down by monks, more than lived up to the hype: A crispy exterior rings a pocket of cream that threatens to spill out after a bite, all perfectly balanced by cinnamon and icing sugar. (We proceeded to have one tart from a different place every day of our trip.)
At Lisbon’s seafood institution Cervejaria Ramiro and the Porto snack bar Gazela, the Anthony Bourdain-approved dishes (stone crab and roe served in its own carapace, and crunchy sausage-and-cheese rolls called cachorrinhos, respectively) were as delicious as they looked on his TV shows. (Ironically, the late Bourdain – who made a name on the rather judgmental mantra “Be a traveller, not a tourist” – has spawned a tourist subculture centred around restaurants he visited; his face loomed large in a photo collage at Gazela.)
What I realized is that when I stand in smug judgment of tourists, I’m spending time worried about how I’m being judged – meaning that I was missing as much as I thought the tourists were. I started to acknowledge that being a tourist is an unavoidable fact of travel, regardless of my approach, simply because I am from elsewhere. Not only can I not hide that, I shouldn’t.
Travelling with a tourist’s overtness – collecting as many sights as you can, no matter how well known – is no better or worse than trying to blend in. It’s just another way of enjoying that most precious of things: time off. What all travellers can do better, though, is accept that we can never truly understand a country, and aim to just be good houseguests.
Even Portugal’s signature author, José Saramago, looked down on tourists. “The traveller has seen much of the world and of life, and has never felt comfortable in the role of a tourist who goes somewhere, takes a look at it, thinks he understands it, takes photos of it and returns to his own country boasting that he knows the Alfama,” he harrumphed in his book Journey to Portugal. But he also acknowledged his resentment stemmed from a feeling that tourists were rearranging the country’s furniture – and from a kind of envy. “The foreigners come to Portugal and we have to make them feel at home in a way the traveller would love to find himself made to feel at home in their countries,” he bemoaned.
Places we visit don’t owe us anything, and so they always overdeliver – and we could probably do better at meeting that measure as hosts at home, too.
So yes: I am a tourist, just like all the others. Still, I can try to be a better one – one who simply meets people where and as they are. As Paige McClanahan, author of The New Tourist: Waking Up to the Power and Perils of Travel, told the BBC, the modern tourist should be “someone who realizes they’re an ambassador for their country and comes looking to make authentic human connections with people who live in the place, not to just consume and tick a box.”
And yet.
Toward the end of our trip, my wife shared her go-to trick for understanding a new foreign city better: Go for a morning run. I’m training for a 5K race anyway, so I decide to lace up my shoes and start jogging along the Douro River.
As I trot away from downtown Porto’s clamour, a barista setting up his signage for the day nods when I pass. I start to feel like I’m undercover, and it’s a heady feeling. I wave to a runner going the other way – and I let myself wonder if he thinks I live here, part of this coalition of the waking. “Maybe I’m not that much of a tourist,” I think, gazing at the river as old habits reform in my head. I extend my run, past the wine caves and under the Ponte da Arrábida, which stretches into suburban Porto. “Surely,” I muse proudly, “not a lot of tourists make it to this bridge!”
And that’s when I trip on some upturned cobblestone, tumbling to the ground and ripping my legs raw. As my road rash starts to bleed, nearby fishermen rush to my aid and speak with concern in Portuguese, and I know the jig is up: “I only know English,” I admit.
If only I’d accepted that “tourist” fits me like a glove.
If you go
Enjoying tarts, a duck pie and a coffee from Pasteis de Belem on a park bench in the Jardim Afonso De Albuquerque.Adrian Lee/The Globe and Mail
The House on Pink Street may sit on the main vein of Lisbon’s rowdy nightlife, but its thoughtfully designed apartment-style rooms manage to block the noise, part of what made it an incredibly comfortable stay. The staff at the hotel, and at its sister hotel, the Corpo Santo (where House visitors can enjoy the 24-hour self-serve ice-cream machine), set new standards for hospitality, too. housepinkstreet.com, rates start at €198 ($296).
Two employees of the Juliana Penteado pastry shop take a break in the São Bento neighbourhood.Adrian Lee/The Globe and Mail
In a city full of wine bars, Uva Livre’s market advantage is its gregarious sommelier, Justin O’Hanlon, who is, based on how he knew just about everyone who walked by, the apparent mayor of Lisbon’s hip São Bento neighbourhood. Sit at the buzzing communal table that is his fiefdom, enjoy a customized and insightful tasting of wines from Portugal and beyond, and take a hard-to-find bottle to go. Then stumble five minutes down the road to Copa, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nook and try Justin’s favourite cocktail: a roast-banana cachaça old-fashioned, served with a big hand-stamped ice cube. I still think about that drink. @uva.livre @copalisboa
Every other Saturday, the Feira da Ladra – Lisbon’s open-air flea market – takes over a few Alfama intersections as vendors lay out all manner of trash and treasure. While you’re there, don’t miss the ceramics store Campo Sta Clara Cerâmicas, whose owners clearly put their hearts into their bright, traditional-with-a-twist dishware. @campo_santa_clara
Blending influences from South America and Asia, as well as from Portugal’s tasca taverns, Trinca’s little kitchen turns out big flavours in Lisbon. The steak-and-turnip pica-pau and the black ceviche were highlights from a creative, ever-evolving menu. @restaurantetrinca
A couple looks out from the balcony of a building along Porto's Douro River harbourfront.Adrian Lee/The Globe and Mail
After a hot afternoon of shopping at vintage stores and galleries in Porto’s Arts Quarter (we loved Cor Propria), stop at nearby Genuino, a natural-wine bar run by a Brazilian couple who’ve instilled the cozy, stylish space with the energy of their home. Standout small plates include a risotto socarrat and fried potatoes on bisque you could lick off the plate. Cozy means small, though, so get a reservation (a good idea everywhere, actually). Cor Propria, @genuino.porto
The sun sets over Lisbon, as seen from the panoramic top-floor terrace of Chapitô à Mesa.Adrian Lee/The Globe and Mail
Garrafeiro do Carmo, in Porto’s Miragaia neighbourhood, will reward any wine lover who suspects that the cabal of port producers glutting the Douro waterfront is hiding the best stuff. Talk to Jorge, one of this snug shop’s warm, patient experts, and he’ll give you an honest opinion (without upselling!) about what to bring home – and for less than most other stores, too. garrafeiracarmo.com
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the caption describing the second photo from the bottom. The building sits along the Douro River harbourfront.