How Portugal Taught Me to Travel Slowly Again
By: Abby Harris
This trip has been a long time coming. My husband and I had our honeymoon derailed first by COVID, then again by Hurricane Helene, which damaged our home in Asheville. By the time we finally touched down in Lisbon this past April, we were ready for a much-needed mental break.
Portugal, it turns out, was exactly the right place for two people who needed to remember how to breathe.
Before we left, I did what any eager traveler does; I fell down Reddit and YouTube rabbit holes for weeks. One theme kept coming up in every forum, vlog, and comment section: don’t be surprised if your meal takes over two hours. The food will come when it comes. Your server isn’t ignoring you. The Portuguese simply move at the speed of enjoyment. For Americans wired to equate busyness with productivity, that can feel uncomfortable at first.
But somewhere between our second glass of vinho verde on a sunset sailboat tour and the warm glow of Lisbon’s cobblestones at dusk, I stopped checking my phone or letting my anxiety about what’s next take over my mind, and something in me released.
We stayed in Alfama, one of Lisbon’s oldest neighborhoods. This is a place that survived the Great Lisbon earthquake and fires in 1755 largely intact, its narrow alleyways still lined with iconic hand-painted azulejo tilework, intricate and colorful, centuries of stories pressed into ceramic.
We walked everywhere.
That’s always been our travel philosophy: if your feet can take you there, let them. Walking slows your perception of a place. You notice the old woman watering her window boxes, the smell of freshly baked pastel de nata (the famous Portuguese custard tart) before you’ve even rounded the corner, the way afternoon light filters through laundry strung between buildings.
One day, we took the train south to Sintra and spent hours wandering the grounds of Quinta da Regaleira—a mystical estate of garden paths, small waterfalls, and sweeping views of the Pena Palace above. The crown jewel was the Poço Iniciático, the Initiation Well, an inverted spiraling tower said to symbolize a passage through darkness before returning to light. Walking its spiraling stone steps down into the earth, in no particular hurry, I thought: this is the whole metaphor, isn’t it? Sometimes you have to go slow to find your way back up.
There were moments on this trip that I know I’ll carry for a long time.
Watching the Padrão dos Descobrimentos, the Monument of Discoveries, pass by from the deck of a sailboat at golden hour on the Tagus River, a structure you can only truly take in from the water. Walking the rugged cliff coastline in Cascais down to the Boca do Inferno, the Devil’s Mouth, where the Atlantic crashes through a gap in the sea cliffs with a force that reminds you how small and temporary everything is. Getting drenched in Porto on a rainy afternoon, popping in and out of shops, letting a local steer us toward the best francesinha in the city—that gloriously indulgent Portuguese sandwich that no Croque Monsieur could match.
And then there were the yarn shops.
I started knitting earlier this year, which I realize sounds like a non-sequitur, but stay with me. I sought out two shops I’d long admired from afar: Retrosaria Rosa Pomar in Lisbon and Lopo Xavier in Porto. Both work directly with Portuguese ranchers to produce breed-specific yarns from native sheep—fibers tied to land, to history, to a textile tradition that people are actively working to preserve. Walking through those shops, learning about the wool, the breeds, the people behind the craft—it was slow in the best way. Intentional and rooted. Knitting, I’ve realized, is just another form of slow travel. You can’t rush it. The work reveals itself stitch by stitch.
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to, which I think matters more than the beautiful photos, good food, and unforgettable places.
We live inside a system that champions the hustle. The non-stop. The optimized itinerary. And I get it. In our line of work, especially, there’s always another pitch to write, another deadline, another request from someone who needed it yesterday. The instinct when you finally get ten days away is to cram it full. To justify the time off with a full slate of landmarks checked and experiences logged.
Portugal gently, persistently pushed back on that instinct. It asked me topractice being somewhere instead of moving through it.
One afternoon, we found a small park in Lisbon and just…sat. Took our shoes off. Let the grass actually touch our feet. Watched people read, nap, and eat lunch without looking at their screens. No agenda. No next thing. Just the particular quality of light in a city we’d only just met.
That kind of presence doesn’t come from a packed itinerary. It comes from leaving space for it.
We spend a lot of time in this industry thinking about how to tell other people’s stories—how to place them, shape them, make them land. And that work matters to me. But I think we do it better when we’re also permitting ourselves to have experiences worth writing about. To be curious. To go somewhere and not immediately think about how to caption it.
Portugal didn’t just give me a honeymoon—though, yes, it was everything we had hoped for and more. It gave me back something I didn’t realize I’d misplaced. Some trips change your itinerary. This one changed my pace, and it’s a lesson I’m still working on bringing home.