Researching Lisbon for wintering with a boat

As today is the final football match between Portugal and France, I figured it would be a perfect time to finally write a bit about our time in Lisbon. Better late than never – here is a post about this great city and our findings on marinas for wintering with a boat.

We had heard lots of great things about Lisbon and that in recent years many of creative people have gathered to live and work there. So with its growing tech scene, enjoyable climate and culture, this city has the potential for becoming Europe’s prime nomadic destinations (basically next Berlin). You could say we had quite high expectations and we weren’t definitely disappointed in the city.

We took an Uber ride from the airport and arrived to our Airbnb flat around 10pm. Being tired from the flight we basically went straight to bed to regain strength for the next day of exploring the city.

Lisbon is a very lively city with lots of people and things going on all the time. And if that wasn’t enough, somehow we ended up in Lisbon at the time of their biggest celebrations, so the neighborhoods were filled with people selling home-made food and drinks from their stalls.

As the goal was to find more information about the co-working spaces, marinas and the overall vibe of the city, the first place we visited was LX Factory. It’s an old manufacturing complex which was turned to a creative island occupied by corporations and professionals of the industry and serves also as a stage for a diverse set of happenings related to fashion, publicity, communication, fine arts, architecture, music, etc, according to their website. If you’ve ever been to Tallinn then I would say it’s basically the Lisbon equivalent of Telliskivi area with some fancy cafes and design shops. For me the vibe of the place was a bit too hipstery and expensive, but overall a cool place to visit. The next place we checked out was called Village Underground which is composed of maritime containers and disabled buses and acts as a co-working space and a venue for cultural events. It’s definitely a hip place to work in when you’re living in Lisbon.

After that we went to explore the newest part of the city – Parque das Nações, a neighborhood built at the end of the 1990s mostly because of the Expo ’98. It was supposed to be one of the most expensive areas to live in, although it’s quite far away from the city center. The thing that caught our eye was the brand new 600-berth marina. The facilities were great and the prices quite reasonable. Would definitely be an interesting marina for wintering with a boat. The other ones we checked in the city were all taken by locals and the marina guys weren’t very optimistic about us finding a place there. This took quite a few points down from Lisbon being the city to live in ’cause there weren’t a lot of options to take our boat with us.

And it’s chilly in the winter. I mean it’s okay when you live in a flat but for boat people 5 degrees is just too cold. It would mean to have some sort of heating turned on all the time and even then you would have to put your clothes on like a ninja. Trying to find a place for wintering with a boat is not only looking for some nice cities and marinas, but to keep in mind that the place has to be in certain latitude to even qualify for it.

The next days we just wandered around the city, ate some super good food (if you’ve ever in Lisbon then go to Time Out!), drank some Sangria and took a train ride outside of Lisbon to Sintra for a hike in the forest. The nature of Lisbon and Portugal is fantastic and the old town is similar to Tallinn but way bigger. And they have cool old trams there.

One thing surprising was that the prices in restaurants were quite high. As I was craving for some fresh fish and salat (healthy food in general) after eating all those pizzas and wraps in Malta and Italy, I hoped to eat everything that fit the criteria. But you couldn’t really get good stuff below 13 euros or so… Maybe we were in the wrong places.

Lisbon is definitely becoming one of the most visited cities in Europe and there were a lot of tourists to prove it. Actually the amount of people in the old town was often a bit too much for us. The positive side of it was that almost everybody spoke English and even if they didn’t they understood it, which made it really easy to get around in the city.

Time to wrap it up – Lisbon is a super cool place to visit and definitely a tourist dream, but was missing the x-factor for us to actually move there and maybe not ideal for wintering with a boat. We are happy that we went to check the city out, but we’ll going to keep on looking and thinking about other options.

– – – Ronaldo just injured his knee and is out of the game.