Tourists are skipping the castle for this

The hottest new tourist attraction is, apparently, the supermarket. It's Friday, 25 September. Twenty-eight degrees. Air quality: 60 (Moderate). Here's what you need to know.

🗞️ THE SUPERMARKET IS NOW A TOURIST ATTRACTION

Here is a travel trend that will make anyone who lives here smile: tourists are increasingly skipping a landmark or two to go and browse the local supermarket. It even has a name now, "grocery tourism", and it is a genuine phenomenon. A 2026 travel report found that 77% of tourists enjoy visiting supermarkets abroad, and Condé Nast Traveller named it one of the travel trends of the year.

The logic is better than it sounds. A supermarket is a snapshot of how a country actually lives, the brands, the snacks, the packaging, the things that never make it home. Tourists in Tokyo hunt down the egg sandwiches at 7-Eleven; visitors to Barcelona wander the aisles of Mercadona to see what Spaniards really buy. Psychologists quoted by the BBC put it down to a hunger for something authentic, a chance to picture yourself living somewhere without booking a tour. An Oxford professor adds a nicer wrinkle: a snack discovered on holiday gets bound up with the weather and the mood of the trip, which is why it never tastes quite the same back home.

It has gone far enough that in Finland, a K-Supermarket became the first supermarket chain listed on TripAdvisor as a tourist attraction, one Helsinki branch has beehives on the roof and sells its own honey. And it has the same overtourism problem as everywhere else: a Lawson convenience store in Japan, with a perfect view of Mount Fuji behind it, drew such crowds that the town put up barriers and security.

If you are reading this, you are almost certainly ahead of the curve, because you do not visit a Portuguese supermarket on holiday. You do your weekly shop in one. You already know that the tinned-fish aisle at any Continente is a genuine cultural experience, that the wine can cost less than the water, that there is a pastel de nata at the till of a Pingo Doce that has no business being that good, and that "just popping to the supermarket" here is one of the small daily pleasures of the place. The tourists are only now discovering what you worked out in your first week.

Bottom line: grocery tourism is real, a little ridiculous, and completely understandable. Next time a visiting friend wants to see "the real Lisbon", skip the queue at the castle and take them down the tinned-fish aisle. They will thank you.

⚡ QUICK HITS

AIMA workers have called a national strike for 6 October. The migration technicians' union has announced a nationwide stoppage at AIMA, the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum, after the government ignored its request for an urgent meeting following the agency president's sudden departure this week. Workers want a dedicated career path and a pay supplement matching the one given to PSP and GNR police officers in border control, arguing their document-checking, fraud-detection and case-processing work is just as specialised. For anyone with AIMA business around that date, expect disruption, and note there is a separate public-sector strike already called for 2 October, so early October is shaping up to be a difficult stretch for anything requiring a government office.

The heat finally breaks on Monday. After a punishing run of near-record September heat, IPMA, the national weather institute, says temperatures will drop significantly from Monday as autumn finally arrives, with rain likely from 28 September and on and off through much of next week. Nights cool too, down to 17 to 18 degrees on the coast and as low as 12 inland. Some interior spots may still nudge 30°C early in the week, but the worst of it is over. After the week Lisbon has had, a bit of rain will feel like a gift.

30,000 sterile mosquitoes have been released over Lisbon, on purpose. In an experimental public-health project, tens of thousands of sterile male mosquitoes are being released in the parish of Alvalade to fight the invasive Asian tiger mosquito, which can carry dengue, zika and yellow fever. The males do not bite (only females do) and, being sterile, they compete with wild males without producing offspring, the hope being that the population shrinks. It is backed by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the city council, has been used successfully on fruit flies, and if this first phase works, a bigger trial follows next May. File under: sentences you did not expect to read this morning.

Hypno Summit Portugal — Tired of Getting in Your Own Way?

We all have the pattern we wish we could break. The anxiety that takes over. The fear you know is irrational but cannot shake. The habit of sabotaging things just as they start going well. A difficult relationship with your body, money, or success. Or simply the maddening sense that, however much you know better, you keep getting in your own way.

Those very human struggles are the whole subject of Hypno Summit Portugal, in Lisbon on 3 and 4 October. Billed as Europe's boutique hypnosis experience, the two-day event brings together eight internationally recognised experts in hypnosis, psychology, trauma recovery and human behaviour, and the programme is built squarely around the things people most want to change.

The line-up is the draw. Adam Cox, whose podcast The Hypnotist is the most listened-to in the field with over 18 million downloads, takes on the psychology of wealth and the unconscious patterns that quietly cap your financial potential. Psychotherapist Cristodora Buiculescu turns anxiety, phobias and fear into something you can work with rather than around. Breathwork pioneer Anthony Abbagnano teaches a practical way to regulate your own nervous system, and Gila Zak, known as "the hypnotist's hypnotist", explores confidence, influence and body image. Anthony Jacquin, a world-renowned hypnotist and bestselling author, runs a hands-on introduction to self-hypnosis, so you leave able to do it yourself.

There is real local weight on the bill too. Portuguese hypnosis pioneer Mário Rui Santos digs into self-sabotage in a session called The Invisible Handbrake, and Cascais-based clinical hypnotherapist Maria João Dias looks at rewiring old mental programming into new possibilities. Summit founder Ronia Fraser, the Lisbon-based trauma recovery expert, closes the faculty with a session on recovery after narcissistic abuse, one of the more complex and timely subjects on the bill.

It is worth saying plainly: a faculty of this calibre, gathered in one intimate room right here on our doorstep, is a genuinely rare thing. This is not a distant stage and a crowd of thousands. It is kept deliberately small, with real access to the speakers, and the point is to walk away with tools you can actually use, whether you work in therapy, coaching or health, are curious about how the mind works, or simply have something in your own life you are ready to change.

Exclusively for Lisbon Letter readers: €333 with the code LISBONLETTER at checkout, until 30 September (the standard price is higher, and rises again after the deadline). The summit is capped and filling up, so if you are even half-tempted, this is the week to decide.

→ Find out more and book your place

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🍽️ SPOT OF THE DAY

VOLTA COFFEE (ALFAMA)

If your idea of a good morning is a properly made flat white somewhere with actual character, Volta is the one to walk to. It is a small specialty coffee shop on Rua dos Remédios, down in Alfama, and it is good enough to have earned a place in the European Coffee Trip's Lisbon guide, which is not a list that hands out spots lightly. If it is not the best flat white in the city, it is firmly in the conversation.

The coffee is the focus, espresso, filter and cold brew, all taken seriously and there are homemade cakes to go with it, plus vegan options, free wifi and a couple of tables outside on the narrow Alfama street. It is the sort of small, unhurried, in-the-know place that the tourist crowds grinding up to the castle a few streets over walk straight past, which is part of its charm.

Worth knowing before you go: it is genuinely small, so it is a grab-a-table-if-you-can spot rather than somewhere for a group, and it is at its best in the morning before it fills.

→ Find them here ←

Insider tip: take your coffee to go and walk it down to the river at Campo das Cebolas, or up into the Alfama backstreets. The space is too small to linger in, so the move is a good flat white in hand and Alfama to wander.

📅 WHAT'S ON

See you tomorrow morning.

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