We landed in Lisbon on the kind of soft May morning that smells like espresso and warm stone. My daughter, who slept exactly thirty-seven minutes on the flight, woke up the second the wheels touched the runway and announced — with the gravity only a five-year-old can summon — that she was ready to see Portugal.
The thing nobody tells you about traveling with a small person is how much they will slow you down, and how much you will love them for it. We took the long way from the airport. We stopped for a pastel de nata before we even reached the apartment. We let the suitcase sit by the door for an hour while we watched the swallows turn circles over the rooftops.
Where we stayed
I’d booked a small apartment in Alfama — three flights of tiled stairs, a balcony the size of a coffee table, and a view of the river that made every morning feel borrowed from somewhere finer. The host left us a paper bag of oranges and a hand-drawn map with her favorite bakery circled twice.
“We took the long way from the airport, and we let the suitcase sit by the door for an hour. That, more than anything, is how I know we are on holiday.”
If you’re traveling with a child, a small apartment in an old neighborhood will almost always beat a hotel. You get a kitchen for the inevitable scrambled-egg-at-five-in-the-morning, a door you can close, and — if you’re lucky — neighbors who wave from their windows by the second afternoon.
What we did, slowly
Three days is not enough for Lisbon, which is why we didn’t try. We picked one thing a day and let the rest happen. Here is the entire itinerary, more or less:
- Tram 28 from one end to the other, then back again because she asked.
- A morning at the Gulbenkian gardens, where the ducks are tame enough to share your bread.
- An hour at the LX Factory — bookshops, ice cream, and the small joy of letting a child pick a postcard.
- The aquarium, because no trip with a five-year-old is complete without an aquarium.
- One quiet dinner in a tiny tasca where the owner brought her a paper plane he’d folded himself.
The small things I’d do again
Pack one stuffed animal and one book — no more. Buy fruit at the market on day one and let her pick. Take the funicular, even though you could walk. Sit at the same café two mornings in a row; by the third, the waiter will know how she takes her hot chocolate, and that is a small kind of magic worth chasing.
We left on a Sunday, both of us a little sun-tired, a little wiser about which streets are worth getting lost in. On the plane home she fell asleep with a paper plane in her hand. I sat with my coffee and thought, as I often do, that we are very lucky and the world is very kind, when we let it be.