I’ve explored 104 countries, but there’s only one destination I’ll never get tired of returning

I’ve learned that novelty is a sugar rush.

Put enough stamps in a passport — mine sits at 104 countries and counting — and your brain starts to crave the next hit before you’ve even swallowed the last one.

But there’s one place that never turns into noise for me, one city that keeps widening instead of wearing out. I test new countries like a curious diner sampling the specials; I return to this one like a kitchen I know in the dark.

 It’s Lisbon—the city that rewrites the script every time I land, and somehow keeps teaching me how to move through the world with a little more grace.

The city that grows up with you

My first Lisbon was all spectacle: azulejos that looked like someone tiled the sky, the clang of Tram 28, a miradouro sunset that made strangers talk like old friends. I came back a few years later and fell for a different city entirely.

Alfama in the off-season smelled like rain and orange peel; Mouraria’s stairways traded selfies for laundry lines; the river wore winter steel instead of summer sparkle.

Lisbon doesn’t insist you love it in one particular light. It ages with you. When I felt restless, it sent me uphill—past São Vicente, to a rooftop where the wind was a personality.

When I felt fragile, it handed me a quiet café in Campo de Ourique with a worn wooden counter and a server who slid over a pastel and a tiny glass of water without making a speech of it.

Some places ask you to perform your best self. Lisbon lets you bring the draft version.

It’s a city of contradictions that don’t cancel out:

• Steep hills rolling down to a long, forgiving river;
• Heartbreak music cradled in warm rooms;
• Crumbling facades sheltering smart studios where someone is building something new.

Each return lets me tune into a different frequency. The city doesn’t change to please me; it changes, and that invites me to notice where I’ve changed, too.

The rituals that reset me

Every return starts with the same choreography.

I take the metro because it feels like reading the city’s pulse. I surface in Baixa-Chiado and let my suitcase rattle over stones that were here before my great-grandparents were born. Then, I order an espresso and stand at the counter like I belong — because in Lisbon, belonging is something you do, not something you ask for. And I walk until the jet lag gives up.

Lisbon rewards walkers who don’t treat hills like punishment.

You climb for five minutes and the perspective repays you ten-fold: a tiled wall that looks hand-washed by the afternoon, a window box with basil and a clothespin, a neighbor calling down to a kid who’s turned the street into a stadium.

There’s a bakery I never name aloud because secrets keep their taste longer.

I eat the warm thing, burn my tongue a little, and feel my shoulders drop a notch. Then I buy fruit from the person whose hands explain which figs are ready and which want a day on the counter. I stop at a stationery shop because Lisbon understands that the right notebook can change a week.

On good days, I run along the river toward Belém, dodging families and fishermen; on tired days, I sit on the steps and let the ferries punt back and forth like metronomes.

These rituals aren’t content. They’re calibration.

They remind me that the aim of travel—of living—isn’t to collect, it’s to attune.

The taste of time (and why I eat slower here)

In some cities, I graze. In Lisbon, I dine.

Lunch here is an argument for civilization: bread that earns its crust; sardines that taste like the line between salt and sun; caldo verde that wears simplicity like a crown; a carafe of vinho verde that reminds your jaw to unclench.

I’ve had transcendent tasting menus in other capitals, but Lisbon’s genius lives in its Tuesday food.

The market tomatoes are loud enough to quiet a table. A grilled fish the size of your forearm arrives, blistered and lemon-shy, and you understand that minimalism isn’t an aesthetic — it’s trust.

Eating this way changed how I move through the afternoon. The 3 p.m. crash is less dramatic when lunch had real grammar: fat, fiber, protein, pleasure. I don’t sprint toward a snack; I stroll toward a coffee.

I make better choices, not because I’m virtuous, but because I’m steady. That steadiness spills into everything else.

I am kinder to strangers. I reread a paragraph instead of refreshing a feed.

Lisbon slows me down without scolding me, which turns out to be the only way I learn.

The art of ordinary days

It took a few returns to realize my favorite Lisbon hours aren’t the museum ones. They’re the laundry cycles and grocery runs, the Tuesday chores that put a traveler in conversation with a city’s systems.

I love the laundromat that smells like soap and radio; I love the neighborhood grocer who slices queijo with the authority of a surgeon; I love the hardware store where the owner fixes my busted suitcase handle while telling me where to find the best bifana (and then reminds me, with a grin, that I don’t eat pork).

I love Prazeres cemetery in late afternoon when the cypresses stand at attention and time feels both heavy and kind.

There’s a small park in Príncipe Real where kids negotiate soccer rules and retirees negotiate the news. I sit under a jacaranda when it’s flowering and under nothing when it’s not.

The sky in Lisbon wears clouds the way some people wear jewelry — sparingly, with intent. I watch the way locals use benches; they don’t perch like they might be leaving. They sit.

When I copy them, my mind finally stops narrating. I notice the scratch of a tram, the perfume of roasted chestnuts in winter, the gulls that squabble like melodramatic cousins.

The city teaches me how to be a person, not a camera.

The creative friction I keep coming back for

Every time I think I’ve mapped Lisbon, it hands me an alley that redraws the legend. Alcântara’s old bones holding bright studios. LX Factory’s industrial edges softened by plants and paper stores.

A fado night that begins as melancholy and ends as communion because someone at the next table sings the chorus and everyone else is brave enough to join.

I wander into a tiny gallery with a show about the river and leave with the feeling that water is not a border here—it’s an argument for connection.

Lisbon’s economy of effort suits my temperament: it asks you to go uphill, but it gives you a view; it asks you to sit a while, but it gives you a conversation; it asks you to wait for the light, but when it arrives, the city looks like it meant to surprise you all along.

As a writer, I chase juxtapositions that spark. Lisbon is a generator.

Old women in housecoats gossiping on a stoop as a kid zips past on an electric scooter. A façade held together by vines across from a café where every laptop hums with a start-up’s dreams.

The Atlantic is reminding everyone that geography is destiny and invitation, depending on the day.

How to return without repeating yourself

People ask how I can love a place this much without getting bored.

The trick is to treat a return not like a rerun, but like a new season with familiar actors. I pick one neighborhood to live inside of, not a dozen to sample.

I choose one daily anchor — a swim at a river beach in summer, a morning run, a late coffee with the same saucer—and let the rest of the day decide itself. I leave something undone on purpose.

The monastery I keep skipping isn’t a failure — it’s a thread I’m saving so the tapestry stays open.

I spend for ease where ease will create memory: a room with a balcony instead of a second dinner out, a tram ride uphill so my legs have gentleness left for wandering downhill.

I talk to people whose work keeps the city intact—the cobbler, the baker, the florist—because they are the custodians of place.

Most importantly, I plan less and read more: plaques, menus, faces.

Returning well is an art form. It requires humility (the city doesn’t need your performance), curiosity (no neighborhood is finished with you), and a willingness to be changed again.

Final thoughts: on love that doesn’t expire

I’ve loved many places with a heat that cooled when the plane took off.

Lisbon is the rare love that settles into the bones and keeps the door unlocked. I return because the city refuses to be a single story. It lets me be jet-lagged and ambitious, melancholy and hungry, ancient in my routines and brand-new by the river.

It is the only destination where my first hour and my last hour feel like cousins instead of strangers.

I’ll keep exploring new countries because wonder is a muscle and maps are invitations. But I’ll keep coming back to Lisbon because it’s the place that reminds me that travel, at its best, is not about escape.

It’s about relationship — between a person and a place, between appetite and time, between who you were when you first climbed that hill and who you are now, pausing at the top, grateful for the wind.