Ginjinha, Salt Cod and Custard Tarts: A Lisbon Food Walk from the Baixa to Cais do Sodré

Sour-cherry liqueur in a doorway bar, the king cake that outlived a king, Roman fish tanks under a bank, Pessoa's café and the old market by the river: Lisbon's history told through what it eats and drinks

Lisbon · 11 stops · 27 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Rua das Portas de Santo Antão & the Casa do Alentejo

   Rua das Portas de Santo Antão 58, 1150-268 Lisboa, Portugal

   You are standing on Rua das Portas de Santo Antão, a pedestrian street of menus on easels, tables spilling onto the cobbles and waiters calling out to everyone who passes. Find the plain doorway at number 58 and climb the stairs inside. Nothing on the façade prepares you for it: a courtyard that seems to have been lifted out of Granada, all horseshoe arches, carved plaster and glazed tiles.

   The building began as a seventeenth-century palace, home to noble families for generations. In the early twentieth century it was given its Moorish-revival makeover, the height of fashion for anything exotic, and for a few years it housed a smart club with gaming tables. Since the 1930s it has belonged to the association of people from the Alentejo, the vast, hot country of wheat, cork oaks and olive groves south of the Tagus, whose sons and daughters came to Lisbon looking for work and wanted a home away from home.

   That makes it the perfect first stop on a food walk. Alentejo cooking is a poor kitchen that became a national pride. Açorda, a bread soup with garlic, coriander, olive oil and a poached egg. Migas, fried breadcrumbs with pork. Black pork from pigs that fatten on acorns under the cork oaks. Nothing was ever thrown away, least of all stale bread, and the dining rooms upstairs still serve that food under painted ceilings.

   Now think about the name of the street. Portas de Santo Antão means the Gates of Saint Anthony, after a gate in the city wall that King Fernando built in the 1370s. For centuries this was the edge of town, where the road from the north arrived... and where travellers wanted a meal and a drink before going in. A little further up stands the Coliseu dos Recreios, a concert hall opened in 1890, so this street has been feeding hungry audiences for well over a century.

   So the habit of eating here is older than the touts and the laminated menus. Walk south to the end of the street, where it spills into a small, busy square beside a church. Look for a doorway barely wider than a wardrobe, with a little crowd in front of it, every one of them holding a very small glass.

2. 2. A Ginjinha: The Sour-Cherry Bar on Largo de São Domingos

   Largo de São Domingos 8, 1100-201 Lisboa, Portugal

   Join the little crowd at the doorway and watch the man behind the counter pour a dark red liquid into a tiny glass, with just one question for each customer: com ou sem? With or without? He means the cherries. There is no room inside to sit, and nobody wants to. This is a drink you take standing in the street.

   This is A Ginjinha, and it has been pouring since 1840. Its founder, Francisco Espinheira, was a Galician, one of the many men from north-western Spain who came to Lisbon to work in taverns and carry water. The story goes that a friar from the church across the square gave him the idea: soak ginja, the small sour morello cherry, in aguardente with sugar and a touch of spice, and wait. Whether or not the friar ever existed, the drink took hold of the city.

   Ginjinha is sweet, strong and warming, roughly as strong as a port wine, and Lisboetas drink it at any hour. A builder knocks one back on his way to work, an elderly lady takes one for her digestion, students order them in rounds. Ask for it com elas, with them, and you get a cherry or two at the bottom of the glass. Dispose of the stone discreetly... this square has seen far worse.

   Because this square has a dark memory. In April 1506, in a time of drought and plague, a crowd gathered at the church of São Domingos turned on the New Christians, Jews who had been forced to convert a few years earlier. Over three days, somewhere between two and four thousand people were murdered in these streets. A memorial with a Star of David was placed here in 2008, and a wall nearby carries a message of tolerance in dozens of languages.

   Today the same square is one of the most welcoming corners of Lisbon, a meeting place for people from Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Cape Verde and beyond, who gather under the trees to talk as they have for decades. Finish your glass, hand it back, and walk a few steps south-east into Praça da Figueira. On its corner, behind old gold lettering, a pastry shop has been waiting for you since 1829.

3. 3. Confeitaria Nacional: The King Cake of Praça da Figueira

   Praça da Figueira 18B, 1100-241 Lisboa, Portugal

   Stop at the window of the Confeitaria Nacional, on the corner of Praça da Figueira, and give your eyes a moment to adjust to the gold. Mirrors, carved wood, glass cabinets stacked with sweets the colour of egg yolk, and, around Christmas, ring-shaped cakes studded with candied fruit like the jewels on a crown.

   This shop opened in 1829, founded by Baltazar Roiz Castanheiro, and it is one of the oldest pastry shops in Lisbon. Its great claim to fame is that crown-shaped cake, the bolo-rei, the king cake. The idea came from France, where a gâteau des rois is eaten at Epiphany, and the family adapted it here in the second half of the nineteenth century. Lisbon fell for it, and before long every pastry shop in the country was baking its own.

   Then politics got involved. When Portugal became a republic in 1910, a cake named after a king was suddenly a little awkward, and the story goes that some bakers tried calling it the president's cake. The name never stuck. Kings come and go; cakes stay. Tradition says that whoever finds the dried broad bean baked inside must buy next year's cake, so Portuguese families slice it very carefully indeed.

   Now turn around and look at the square. Before 1755 much of this ground was taken up by the Hospital Real de Todos-os-Santos, the great royal hospital of Lisbon, and the earthquake and the fires that followed left it in ruins. On the cleared ground the city put a market, and in 1885 an iron and glass hall rose over the whole square, the belly of Lisbon, piled with fruit, poultry and vegetables from the farms around the city. It was pulled down in 1949.

   The king on horseback in the middle is João the First, set up here in 1971. He founded the dynasty whose sons launched the age of the sea voyages... and those voyages brought home the cinnamon and the sugar that every pastry in this window depends on. Now walk south down Rua dos Correeiros, the saddlers' street, for a few blocks. Under a bank, something much older than any cake is waiting.

4. 4. Rua dos Correeiros: Roman Fish Tanks Under a Bank

   Rua dos Correeiros 21, 1100 Lisboa, Portugal

   Stop outside number 21 on Rua dos Correeiros, a straight Pombaline street of shops and offices, and try to imagine what lies a few metres under your feet: Roman fish tanks, still lined with the waterproof plaster their builders laid nearly two thousand years ago.

   In 1991, when the bank that owns this building started work on its new headquarters, the diggers hit history. Archaeologists found layer upon layer of the city: Pombaline foundations, medieval walls, and at the very bottom a Roman industry. Here, close to what was then the shore of the Tagus, the people of Roman Olisipo salted fish in big rectangular vats. The remains were preserved beneath the building and are shown on guided visits.

   What were they making? Salted fish, and very probably garum, the famous Roman fish sauce. Small fish and fish guts were layered with salt and left to ferment in the sun for weeks, until a clear, fierce, salty liquid could be drawn off. Romans put it on almost everything, much as we use soy sauce today, and the finest garum sold for the price of perfume. This province, Lusitania, shipped its salted fish and sauces across the empire in clay amphorae.

   So Lisbon's love affair with preserved fish did not begin with salt cod or tinned sardines. It is two thousand years old. Salt from the flats of the Tagus and the Sado, fish from the Atlantic, a sheltered harbour, ships to carry it away: the recipe for a seafood economy was already here long before there was a Portugal.

   And notice the street name. After the earthquake of 1755, the Marquis of Pombal's planners gave the streets of the new Baixa to the trades: the goldsmiths to Rua do Ouro, the silversmiths to Rua da Prata, and this one to the correeiros, the makers of leather straps and harness. Now carry on down toward the river end of the Baixa and turn left, east, toward the Alfama, to a street named quite simply after the men who sold salt cod.

5. 5. Rua dos Bacalhoeiros: The Street of the Salt Cod Merchants

   Rua dos Bacalhoeiros, 1100 Lisboa, Portugal

   Walk a little way along Rua dos Bacalhoeiros, a long, straight street of old shopfronts heading east toward the Alfama, and breathe in. Somewhere nearby, if you are lucky, you will catch it: the sharp, salty, unmistakable smell of dried cod.

   Bacalhoeiros means salt cod merchants, and this was their street, close to the old riverbank where the ships unloaded. And here is the great paradox of Portuguese food: the national fish does not swim in Portuguese waters. Cod lives in the cold North Atlantic. Portuguese fishermen were already sailing to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland in the 1500s, and cod salted and dried on board kept for months, perfect for a seafaring nation, and for a Catholic one with so many days a year without meat.

   Its hardest chapter came in the twentieth century. Under the Estado Novo dictatorship, cod became a matter of national policy, and every spring the White Fleet sailed for Newfoundland and Greenland. The men fished alone from tiny flat-bottomed dories, lowered from the mother ship at dawn, handlining for hours in fog and freezing water. Some never found their way back. A hospital ship, the Gil Eannes, sailed with the fleet to care for them. That way of fishing ended only in the 1970s.

   Out of all that hardship came a cuisine. The Portuguese like to say there are three hundred and sixty-five ways to cook bacalhau, one for every day of the year, and some insist there are a thousand. Bacalhau à Brás, shredded with matchstick potatoes and egg, said to be named after a tavern keeper in the Bairro Alto. Pastéis de bacalhau, little fried cakes. And on Christmas Eve, simply boiled with cabbage, potatoes, eggs and plenty of olive oil.

   At the far end, the palace whose façade bristles with diamond-pointed stones is the Casa dos Bicos, built in the 1520s for the son of Afonso de Albuquerque. Just beyond it lies Campo das Cebolas, the Onion Field, once a riverside market. Every name around here reads like a shopping list. Now turn back west toward the great riverside square, and look for the arcades in its north-east corner.

6. 6. Martinho da Arcada: The Snow House and Pessoa's Table

   Praça do Comércio 3, 1100-148 Lisboa, Portugal

   Walk under the arcades in the north-east corner of the great riverside square until you reach a café with an old wooden front and the name Martinho da Arcada above the door. Inside, beyond the counter, there is a small table with a marble top that nobody quite treats like any other table.

   This café opened in 1782, and it is often called the oldest in Lisbon. At first it was the Casa da Neve, the Snow House, because what it sold was cold: iced drinks and sorbets, a real luxury in a hot city with no refrigerators. In winter, snow was packed into pits in the hills north of the city and brought down later in the year, wrapped in straw. Later the café took the name of one of its owners, a man called Martinho, and of the arcade it sits under.

   That table belonged, in a sense, to Fernando Pessoa, Portugal's greatest modern poet. Pessoa earned his living writing business letters in English and French for trading firms in the Baixa, and for years he came here almost every day to drink coffee, smoke, write and argue with friends. He wrote not only as himself but as a whole crowd of invented poets with their own lives and styles: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos. You could say several of them drank here.

   Pessoa died in November 1935, at forty-seven, still little known to the public. Only one book of his Portuguese poems, Mensagem, had come out in his lifetime. The trunk he left behind held more than twenty-five thousand pages, and scholars are still working through them. The café kept his table and his photograph on the wall, a small shrine for the readers who come looking for him.

   Order a bica at the counter, which is what Lisboetas call a short, strong espresso. Legend says the word comes from a sign in a Chiado café, beba isto com açúcar, drink this with sugar... a story nobody can prove and everybody repeats. Then cross the square diagonally toward the river and turn right along the waterfront, toward the old royal shipyard.

7. 7. Ribeira das Naus: Spices, Sugar and the Royal Shipyard

   Avenida Ribeira das Naus, 1100 Lisboa, Portugal

   Walk down onto the wide stone steps of Ribeira das Naus, where the riverbank slopes gently into the Tagus and people sit with their shoes off watching the boats. The water here is salty, almost sea, and the river is so wide that on a hazy day the far shore looks like another country.

   This was the royal shipyard, the Ribeira das Naus, the Shore of the Ships. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the caravels and the great naus of the India fleets were built and fitted out right here, beside the royal palace that stood where the big square is now. Inside that palace a royal office, the Casa da Índia, handled what came back: pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger. For a few decades Lisbon was one of the great spice markets of Europe.

   Taste a Portuguese dessert and you taste that history. Cinnamon on rice pudding, cinnamon on the custard tart. Sugar came first from Madeira, then from Brazil, and the convents of Portugal turned sugar and egg yolks into an astonishing range of sweets. The traditional explanation is that egg whites were used to starch clothes and clear wine, leaving mountains of yolks that had to go somewhere.

   That sweetness had a terrible price. The sugar plantations of Madeira, São Tomé and Brazil were worked by enslaved Africans, and Portuguese ships carried millions of people across the Atlantic over more than three centuries. The sugar in Europe's cakes was grown by people in chains, and Lisbon has only recently begun to speak about that openly.

   Food travelled the other way too. The story goes that Portuguese missionaries and merchants in sixteenth-century Japan ate battered fried vegetables on fast days, the ancestor of Lisbon's peixinhos da horta, the little fish of the garden, which are really green beans, and that the Japanese turned the idea into tempura, from the Latin word for the fasting seasons. Now walk west along the river and step up into Rua do Arsenal, a street of old grocers where the cod is stacked at the door.

8. 8. Rua do Arsenal: Cod at the Door and Fish in Tins

   Rua do Arsenal, 1100 Lisboa, Portugal

   Stop in front of one of the old grocery shops along Rua do Arsenal, and you may have to step around the stock. Stiff, flat, greyish-white slabs of salt cod are piled up like firewood, beside sacks of dried beans, strings of sausages and shelves of wine and olive oil climbing to the ceiling.

   The street is named after the Arsenal da Marinha, the naval arsenal that took over the old royal shipyard behind you after the earthquake of 1755 and went on building and repairing warships there for generations. Sailors, dockers and clerks had to be fed, and the mercearias, the old-fashioned grocers, lined up to supply them. Some of these shops have barely changed: wooden counters, big scales, and a smell of salt, coffee and dried fruit.

   Watch how cod is bought here. A serious customer chooses by thickness, because the fat loins are for roasting and the thin tails are for shredding. The shop cuts it to order on a heavy blade that looks like a guillotine. At home it then soaks in cold water for a day or more, with the water changed again and again, until the salt is gone and the flesh falls into big pearly flakes.

   Then look at the tins. Portugal's canning industry took off at the end of the nineteenth century, and soon canneries lined the coast, from Matosinhos in the north down to Setúbal and the Algarve. Sardines, mackerel, tuna and octopus were packed in olive oil, very often by women working long shifts timed to the arrival of the fishing boats. During the world wars, demand for Portuguese tinned fish soared, and whole towns lived from it.

   Tins have come back into fashion now, in bright retro wrappers, and Lisboetas eat them as petiscos, little dishes with bread and a glass of wine, without a trace of embarrassment. A good tin, they will tell you, gets better with age, like wine. Keep walking west along Rua do Arsenal, past the railway station at Cais do Sodré, to the long market hall that faces the riverside avenue.

9. 9. Mercado da Ribeira: The Market of the Varinas

   Avenida 24 de Julho 49, 1200-479 Lisboa, Portugal

   Go in through the main doors of the Mercado da Ribeira and choose your side. One half is a buzzing food hall of long shared tables. The other, if you come in the morning, is still a real market: fish on ice, crates of fruit, flower stalls, and traders who have done this all their lives.

   There has been a market here since 1882, on a strip of land reclaimed from the Tagus when the riverside avenue was built. It was called the Mercado da Ribeira Nova, and almost everything Lisbon ate passed through it: fish from the boats, vegetables from the market gardens around the city, fruit from the Algarve and the Oeste. For much of the twentieth century it was also the city's wholesale market.

   The great characters of this market were the varinas, the fishwives. Many of their families came originally from Ovar, in the north, and the word varina comes from that town. Barefoot, in dark skirts and gold earrings, they carried flat baskets of sardines on their heads and walked the steep hills of Lisbon calling out their wares. Painters, photographers and poets adored them, and they became a symbol of the city itself.

   In 2014 half of the hall was turned into a food court, with stalls run by well-known Portuguese chefs, and it quickly became one of the busiest places in Lisbon. Purists grumble, but there is a certain symmetry: the market is still feeding people from all over the world, just as the port once did. And in June, when the sardines are at their fattest and grilled on every street for the feast of Saint Anthony, the whole city still smells of them.

   Look at how the fruit and vegetables are labelled by origin: Rocha pears from the Oeste, cherries from Fundão, oranges from the Algarve. Portuguese shoppers buy by place the way the French buy wine. Now step back outside and cross toward the bridge that carries Rua do Alecrim. Underneath it runs a short street whose roadway has been painted a very bright pink.

10. 10. Rua Nova do Carvalho: Pink Street and the Sailors' Quarter

    Rua Nova do Carvalho, 1200 Lisboa, Portugal

    Walk under the bridge that carries Rua do Alecrim over your head, and you are on Rua Nova do Carvalho, better known as Pink Street. The roadway is painted a shameless shade of pink, and bar signs crowd both sides, one on top of the other.

    By day it is sleepy. By night it is one of the busiest drinking streets in Lisbon. But while the paint is new, the reputation is old. This was the sailors' quarter of the port. Ships from Britain, Scandinavia and northern Europe tied up nearby, and their crews came ashore with wages in their pockets and only a few days to spend them.

    Look at the old signs. Some bars still carry the names of distant ports, a way of telling homesick crews that this was their place. Behind those doors there were dance halls, cabarets and brothels, and the quarter had a hard reputation that the respectable city on the hill above preferred not to mention. A few of today's bars have kept the red velvet and the tarnished mirrors of that era.

    And sailors had to eat. This was a world of tascas, small taverns serving cheap, hot food at almost any hour. Fried fish. Iscas, thin slices of liver in wine and garlic. A bifana, the garlicky pork sandwich. And a bowl of caldo verde, the kale and potato soup with a slice of chouriço, which still ends many a long Lisbon night. Late-night eating is a Lisbon instinct, and it grew in places like this, where the clock followed the tides and not the church bells.

    In the early 2010s the city set out to clean up the quarter, and painted the street pink, partly as a wink at its red-light past. The crowds that followed have made it lively, noisy, and a sore point for neighbours who need to sleep. Now walk down toward the river, across the square with the statue of the Duke of Terceira, to the waterfront beside the ferry terminal. The last stop is the water itself.

11. 11. Cais do Sodré Riverfront: The River That Fed Lisbon

    Cais do Sodré, 1200 Lisboa, Portugal

    Walk out to the edge of the river beside the ferry terminal at Cais do Sodré and let the wind hit you. Ferries churn across to Cacilhas on the south bank, the great red suspension bridge hangs over the water to your right, and on the far shore the statue of Christ opens its arms over the river.

    For centuries this waterfront was where Lisbon met its food. Fishing boats landed sardines; barges brought wine, wheat and vegetables from the south bank; ships came in with salt cod from the north and spices from the east. Across the water, Cacilhas still lives from the sea, with fish grills smoking along its quay.

    Now look downriver, past the bridge. About six kilometres that way lies Belém, and in Belém stands the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, where the most famous Portuguese sweet of all was born. The monks, so the story goes, made custard tarts from the yolks left over from starching. When the liberal government closed the religious houses in 1834, the recipe passed into the hands of a local businessman, and in 1837 the shop of Pastéis de Belém opened next door. The recipe is said to be known to only a handful of people, and made in a locked room.

    Everywhere else in Lisbon the tart is called pastel de nata, and it is the city's everyday fuel. Puff pastry so thin it shatters, a custard blistered almost black in a blazing oven, eaten warm, with cinnamon and powdered sugar if you like, standing at a counter with a bica. For many Lisboetas, a nata and a coffee is still the definition of a short break.

    So think back over what you have tasted along the way. A cherry liqueur born on a church square, a French cake that outlived a monarchy, Roman fish sauce under a bank, Pessoa's coffee, the cod of the Grand Banks, the spices of India, the market of the varinas and the sailors' taverns. Every one of them arrived by water. Lisbon has always eaten what the river brought... and it still does. Find a bench, watch the ferries cross, and if you can, end your walk with something sweet.