Lisbon etiquette: the unwritten rules that mark you out as a tourist

Greet the room, and get the thank-you right

The single biggest tell is walking into a shop, bakery or lift without saying anything. In Lisbon you greet the space: bom dia until roughly lunchtime, boa tarde through the afternoon, boa noite after dark, said to the room rather than any individual. It applies in a pharmacy, a butcher, a small grocer, a doctor's waiting room and often a lift shared with a stranger. Skipping it is not a crime, but it reads as brusque, and the difference in warmth you get back for two syllables is out of all proportion to the effort.

Then get obrigado right, because it is gendered by the speaker, not the listener. A man says obrigado, a woman says obrigada, regardless of who is being thanked. And do not say gracias. Portugal is not Spain, Portuguese is not a Spanish dialect, and defaulting to Spanish is the one linguistic habit that visibly irritates people here, particularly older Lisboetas. If you have no Portuguese at all, English is widely spoken in the centre and perfectly acceptable, but open with bom dia and desculpe, fala inglês, and you have already done the polite thing.

Counter culture: how coffee actually works

Lisbon coffee is a standing ritual, not a sitting one. You walk in, say bom dia, order at the marble balcão, drink your bica in three sips while reading the football headlines, pay and leave, all inside four minutes. It costs €0.80 to €1.10 that way and up to €4 on a square terrace, because the price is for the chair, not the coffee. Ordering a large takeaway cup to walk around with is a foreign habit that exists in Lisbon now but still marks you; ordering an espresso and nursing it for 40 minutes at the counter marks you more.

Vocabulary saves confusion. Um café or uma bica is an espresso. Uma meia de leite is a coffee with milk in a cup, um galão the same thing taller in a glass, um abatanado a longer black coffee, um pingado an espresso with a dash of milk. Cappuccino exists for visitors and is usually disappointing. In most cafés you pay at the counter after drinking rather than before, and if you sit down at a table, a waiter will come to you and the price quietly changes. Neither is a trick; both are the system.

Take a ticket, and let people off

Portugal runs on the senha, the numbered ticket. In pharmacies, post offices, bank branches, phone shops, most bakeries with a deli counter, and public offices, there is a small dispenser by the door and an electronic display above the counter. Standing in what looks like a queue without a number means you will be served last, and people will let you, with the mild pleasure of watching someone learn. Look for the machine before you look for the line. In smaller shops with no dispenser the queue is informal but real, and the correct move is to ask quem é o último, who is last.

On transport the rules are conventional and firmly enforced by fellow passengers. Let people off the metro before boarding, stand on the right on escalators and walk on the left, and give up priority seats to older passengers on the trams without being asked, especially on the 28 where locals are commuting through a carriage of holidaymakers. Validate your ticket on the yellow reader every time you board, even if the driver waves you on; the inspection teams work in pairs at Baixa-Chiado and Cais do Sodré and fines start well above €100.

Noise after midnight is the one thing that genuinely angers people

Alfama, Mouraria, Bairro Alto and Graça are residential neighbourhoods where people get up at six, and the buildings have single-glazed windows onto lanes four metres wide. Drinking on the street is legal and normal in Bairro Alto, and nobody minds a busy Friday, but a group of six shouting at 02:30 in a stairwell canyon amplifies to every bedroom on the street. The city has run repeated noise campaigns and residents will call it in. If you take a drink outside, keep the volume at conversation level after midnight and move on rather than settling in a doorway.

The same applies inside your accommodation. Many rentals sit in old blocks above families, floors are wooden, and the rule of thumb locals use is silence between 23:00 and 07:00: no suitcases wheeled across floorboards, no music, no gathering on a shared terrace at 01:00. Slamming the heavy street door rather than easing it shut is the classic offence. If you are the group that gets the building complaint, you may also be the group that finds a formal notice under the door on day two, because this is now heavily policed in the historic centre.

Fado is listened to in silence

In a proper fado house the lights drop, someone calls silêncio, que se vai cantar o fado, and the room stops: no talking, no cutlery, no phones raised, no flash. This is not theatrical fussiness. Fado is sung without amplification in rooms of 30 people and one conversation at the back ruins it for everyone, including the singer, who can see you. Sets run in blocks of three or four songs with breaks between, and the breaks are when you talk, order and go to the bathroom. Applaud at the end of a song, not between verses.

Practical consequences: arrive before the set starts rather than in the middle, and if you have a young child who will not sit through 20 minutes of silence, choose an earlier session or an open-air performance instead. In the fado vadio houses of Alfama and Mouraria, where amateurs and neighbours take turns, the etiquette is if anything stricter, because the person singing may be the fishmonger from down the road and the room is protective. A drink and a small food order is the expected minimum, usually €15 to €25 a head.

Dress, churches and the beach

Lisbon dresses more neatly than most southern European capitals and considerably more neatly than its summer visitors. Shorts and vests are fine on the street in July when it is 33 degrees, but they look off in a decent restaurant at dinner, where locals will be in shirts and dresses, and they are genuinely inappropriate in churches. The Sé, Jerónimos and São Vicente de Fora expect shoulders and knees covered; a light scarf in a bag solves it. Walking through the city bare-chested, common near the docks in August, is both frowned on and technically finable.

The beach rules are different from the city rules and specific. Topless sunbathing is unremarkable on the Costa da Caparica and the Cascais line beaches; full nudity is only for the signposted naturist stretches south of Caparica. Swimwear stays on the sand: walking into a Cascais café in a bikini is the sort of thing that gets a comment. If you take the train from Cais do Sodré to Carcavelos with wet swimwear, put something over it. And carry cash for beach bars, several of which still do not take cards for a €2 imperial.

Conversation, football and small favours

Two subjects to handle with care. Comparing Portugal to Spain, favourably or not, lands badly; so does treating Lisbon as a discount version of somewhere else, which is exactly the frame behind a lot of well-meaning praise about how cheap everything is. Housing costs and tourism pressure are live political arguments here, and residents of Alfama and Graça have watched their neighbours priced out, so the joke about how you could buy a flat with your savings is not a joke to them. Football, by contrast, is safe ground provided you know Benfica, Sporting and Belenenses are three different loyalties.

The rest is small stuff that adds up. Do not haggle, including in flea markets like Feira da Ladra where a modest counter-offer is fine but bargaining hard is not. Do not photograph people, especially older residents on their doorsteps in Alfama, without asking. Give up your seat, hold the lift, and let the person with two items go ahead of your trolley. And leave the tip in cash rather than on the card machine: rounding up at lunch, 5 to 10 per cent after a good dinner, which is what people who live here actually leave.