Explore Lisbon in Google Street View

On All Saints' Day in 1755 an earthquake, a tsunami and a fire destroyed most of Lisbon within a few hours. What followed was the first systematically planned rebuild in modern Europe: the Baixa was laid out as a grid of wide straight streets on a standardised plan, with buildings designed to a common facade and an early form of earthquake-resistant timber cage inside them. You can see the result in Street View as an oddly regular, oddly flat district in the middle of a city that is otherwise entirely hills.

Around that grid, the old neighbourhoods survived because they were on rock. Alfama is the one to wander: lanes too narrow for cars, stairs instead of streets in places, washing across the gaps, and a layout inherited from Moorish Lisbon. Google captured much of it on foot, which is the only way it could have been captured at all.

The trams are part of the geography rather than a novelty. Route 28 climbs through Alfama and Graça on gradients that no ordinary vehicle would manage, and the cars are 1930s stock kept in service because nothing modern fits the curves. You will see them constantly in the imagery, wedged into streets with centimetres to spare.

The miradouros are what make the city. These are formal viewpoints, dozens of them, built where a hill gives a view over the roofs, usually with a terrace and often a kiosk. Miradouro da Senhora do Monte is the highest, Santa Luzia has tiled panels, and each one changes what you understand about the shape of the city. They were captured on foot.

Belém, a few kilometres west along the river, holds the monuments from the period when Portuguese ships were mapping the world. The Tower of Belém sat in the water as a fortress guarding the harbour entrance; the river has since moved and it now stands at the bank. The Jerónimos Monastery opposite is late Gothic worked in a style so specific to this country that it has its own name.

One thing you will notice everywhere. Lisbon's buildings are faced in azulejos, glazed ceramic tiles, in patterns that change street by street and sometimes house by house. The imagery resolution catches them well, and following an ordinary residential street in Graça or Campo de Ourique with an eye on the facades is one of the more rewarding aimless things you can do here.