We've spent sixteen years telling you about Lisbon's contradictions one tour at a time. This year, we decided that wasn't enough. So we put it in writing.
The Disenchantment of Lisbon: A Reality Guide is a 160-page anti-itinerary, published in collaboration with Inchas Editora, written by Alfredo Isaías — a name we should probably tell you upfront is a pseudonym, and a brilliant one. The book itself describes him better than we ever could: less a writer and more a professional pedestrian, a terminal observer of the city's slow-motion collision with its own marketing brochure. He's the composite voice of every neighbour who's watched their street get rebranded — the auntie still hanging laundry over the balcony of a boutique hotel, the native who stayed behind to watch the performance, patiently waiting for the curtain to fall on the spectacle of his own disappearance.
This is not a guidebook that tells you where to eat. This is a guidebook that asks why the place you wanted to eat at closed last year.
What the Book Actually Says
The foreword sets the tone immediately, and it doesn't soften anything. This is an inventory of the wounds opened in the city's body over the last fifteen years, documenting the transformation of identity into commodity and history into product. The argument is precise: the intrinsic beauty of Lisbon's hills is, ironically, the engine of its own destruction — a landscape so desirable that the cost of inhabiting it has become a luxury unattainable for the people who actually live there.
From there, the book walks the city neighbourhood by neighbourhood — Chiado, Príncipe Real, Bairro Alto, Cais do Sodré, Alcântara, Belém, Alfama, Mouraria, Graça, Marvila — cataloguing what's been lost in each, with chapter titles that don't pretend to be neutral: A Eulogy for the Living. Bairros of Resilience: Stubborn Residue. Where to Eat (and Not Be Seen): A Culinary Resistance.
It names names, gently and not so gently. The closing of a seventy-year-old shoemaker in Mouraria, replaced by trinket shops. The vital Eléctrico 28, transformed into a congested spectacle inaccessible to those who actually rely on it. It draws a hard line between two kinds of newcomer: the opulent aristocracy of the Golden Visa, who acquire residency through real estate transactions that function as a kiss of Judas, taking the soul and the housing stock without any genuine civic responsibility — and the digital nomads, luxury emigrants who raise the price of the bica and the rent through a brutal disparity in purchasing power, searching for an authenticity that their very presence annihilates.
An Anti-Itinerary to be read with suspicion and sorrow.
And Then It Gets to Us
There's a chapter in the book about We Hate Tourism Tours. We didn't write it. We didn't ask for it to be flattering. It isn't, exactly — it's something better than flattering. It's understood.
Alfredo calls us the most necessary and philosophically compelling paradox to have materialized from Lisbon's economic ruins — not merely a tour company, but a profound philosophical gesture, an institution that addresses the poison by offering the antidote. He traces it back to where it actually started: founded in the suffocating inertia of the global financial crisis, the pragmatic outcome of necessity and profound disillusionment, by a cohort of unemployed journalists, engineers, teachers, artists, and rebel rousers who did not seek to enter the established tourism market — they sought to reclaim their agency by sharing their local knowledge, their critical perspective, and their intellectual integrity.
He clocks exactly what we refuse to do — no megaphones, no matching hats, no obedient lining up — and exactly why we instruct guests not to geotag the places we take them: a profound act of digital counter-insurgency designed to fight algorithmic monetization, a firewall against speculative capital.
He's also honest about why the model works at all, in a line that might be the most accurate thing anyone has ever written about us: their endemic sarcasm and open declaration of "sometimes hate" is the very feature that validates their sincerity.
A Book That Doesn't End Nicely. On Purpose.
The epilogue doesn't offer false comfort, and it doesn't offer despair either. It calls Lisbon a place that has a peculiar, almost irritating habit of surviving its own funerals — a city that has survived the literal collapse of the earth in 1755, the fading of global empires, and the long, grey suffocating silence of twentieth-century dictatorships.
And it makes a point of telling the reader — you, presumably, reading this in a café that used to be something else — that you are not the villain of the story. Without the curious gaze of the outsider, no city truly knows its own beauty, and there is a profound, honest way to walk these hills that honors the grit rather than just the view.
That's the whole argument of the book, really. Not that you shouldn't come. That you should come differently.
Featured In
The book has already been picked up by La Stampa and Revista Visão, who saw what we saw — that Lisbon needed a guidebook willing to say the uncomfortable part out loud.
Get the Book
The Disenchantment of Lisbon: A Reality Guide is available now, published by Inchas Editora in collaboration with We Hate Tourism Tours, and can be found in Palavra de Viajante bookshop in Lisbon.
We love all books. But if you hate this one, the publisher's own instructions are simple: please gift it to someone you (dis)like.
Travel responsible. Or stay home.