Lisbon [antikvár]

Introduction Many of the world's cities can be said to be full of contradictions, but Lisbon's claim is probably better than most. Here, medieval alleys where sitting tenants on controlled rents pay the equivalent of L20 a month can be found not much more than a mile away from gleaming office buildings where a shortage of good properties has pushed rents up to levels higher than those in Madrid. Black-clad widows who wouldn't look out of place in a remote hill village potter around the bairros populares, the city's older quarters, rarely going further afield than the nearest market. On summer nights, you might find the same streets crammed with groups of young people with drinks in their hands, generating the kind of atmosphere that in most European cities only comes with an organised street festival. There may not be more going on in Lisbon than there is in other European cities, but it can feel that way because it's more concentrated. After years languishing under the world's longest-lasting dictatorship (which won it an entry in the Guinness Book of Records), surviving the turbulent aftermath of the 1974 Revolution with a stable parliamentary democracy, and consolidating its membership of the European Union, the country is undergoing something of a renaissance. The arts world is buzzing, despite a chronic lack of funding in what is still one of the poorest countries in western Europe. The success of Expo 98 has given the Portuguese the confidence to think big, most recently by successfully bidding to host the Euro 2004 football championship finals. And renaissance it is for a people long in the habit of basking in the reflected glory of their forebears. In fact, projects on this scale haven't been undertaken since Portuguese caravels set out from Lisbon to 'discover' the rest of the world more than five centuries ago. Modernity may have its price, not least appalling traffic jams, but thankfully it hasn't ironed out all Lisbon's quirks. There are still lots of hidden corners waiting to be explored, Take the city's African live music venues, frequented not only by immigrants but by some of the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Portuguese retornados who 'returned' to Lisbon in the 1970s after Portugal's colonies gained independence. Lisbon's long experience of contact with other cultures, in the form of exploitation, exchange, or a messy combination of the two, has marked it deeply. Seen as a backwater for much of the last century, it was once a world city - perhaps the first of the kind - and is finally becoming one again.