You live in the world's happiest city, apparently

Turns out you live in the happiest place in the world, at least to visit. It's Friday, 18 September. Twenty-seven degrees. Air quality: 42 (Good). Here's what you need to know.

🗞️ LISBON NAMED THE WORLD'S HAPPIEST TRAVEL DESTINATION

Lisbon has been named the happiest destination in the world for travellers, top of a global ranking picked up this week by Travel + Leisure. The city beat Helsinki, Orlando, Athens and Edinburgh to first place, scoring highest on what the study called "feel-good factors."

The things it was measured on will not surprise anyone who lives here: more than 2,800 hours of sunshine a year, a compact, genuinely walkable centre, panoramic viewpoints that reward an aimless wander, generous green space, and a glut of restaurants classed as "healthy." Put like that, the case makes itself. On a good day, Lisbon does feel like one of the most pleasant places on earth to simply be.

Worth being clear about where the ranking comes from, though. It is drawn from a 2025 study by BookRetreats, a company that sells wellness holidays, so this is a wellness brand's index rather than an academic or official one, and "happiest to visit" is doing a lot of work. The measures are real, sunshine, walkability, green space per person, noise and light pollution, healthy restaurants, but they are a traveller's-eye view of a city, the version you experience on a sunny long weekend, not the one you live in.

That distinction is the whole story. The things that make Lisbon a joy to visit, the light, the hills, the miradouros, the slow lunches, are genuinely here, and it is worth remembering to enjoy them rather than only fighting the traffic and the paperwork. But readers of this newsletter also know the parts a happiness index does not capture: the high rents, the AIMA queues, the fuel prices, the summer of protests. A city can be both the loveliest place to spend three days and a hard place to build a life, and Lisbon is proof of exactly that.

Bottom line: enjoy the ranking for what it is, a well-earned nod to what makes this city special, and a nudge to actually savour the sunshine and the viewpoints.

⚡ QUICK HITS

easyJet's Portugal cabin crew have voted to strike, including right before Christmas. The crew's union, SNPVAC, has called two walkouts: one from 2 to 6 October, and a second, more disruptive one from 19 to 23 December, in the thick of the Christmas travel rush. The first strike alone is expected to ground around 500 easyJet flights to and from Lisbon, Porto and Faro, before any minimum-service requirements are set. The crew cite unstable rosters, overtime pressure and worse treatment than pilots; easyJet calls the demands "unworkable" and says talks are ongoing. If you are flying easyJet over either window, especially at Christmas, watch for schedule changes and build in a backup plan.

Lisbon is getting ten fully electric ferries on the Tagus. Transtejo, the public ferry operator, is rolling out a fleet of ten all-electric boats to connect the city with the south bank, cutting not just carbon emissions but the fine particles and soot that dirty the air along the river. Its president calls it the world's largest operation of electric vessels of this kind, no small thing given the Tagus behaves more like the sea than a river. For the many readers who commute from Cacilhas, Seixal or Montijo, it means a cleaner, quieter crossing, and one more reason the ferry beats the bridge.

A Russian man wanted by Interpol since 2013 has been detained at Lisbon airport. The PSP arrested the 62-year-old at Humberto Delgado airport after he arrived on a flight from Tel Aviv travelling under a false identity that matched an alias on the international wanted register. He is sought over a 2013 shooting in which, according to the warrant, he fired three shots at a victim and left them in a life-threatening condition, an offence carrying up to ten years in prison. He is due before the Lisbon Appeal Court, which will handle the extradition process. Neither the man nor the country that issued the warrant has been named.

VocaSpark - When Portuguese Grammar Finally Sticks

You have put in the hours. You have sat through the classes, filled the notebooks, maybe worked through an app or two. And still, the moment you need the right verb ending in a real conversation, it is gone. If that sounds familiar, the problem probably is not you. It is that almost nothing is built to make Portuguese grammar actually stick in an adult's head.

That is the gap Gabriel Antunes set out to close. A native tutor with a degree in Languages and Culture, he had spent years teaching Portuguese to expats and hearing the same complaint: the grammar would not stay put, no matter the effort. The flashcards that existed were made for children, or for memorising nouns, nothing for the hundreds of conjugations and the tenses that genuinely trip people up. So he built VocaSpark: physical decks that teach grammar in context through active recall, the method that actually works with how memory holds on.

Two years on, there are eight Portuguese decks covering the things that matter most, irregular verbs, the past tenses, prepositions and more, now used by over 5,000 learners across 23 countries.

Lisbon Letter readers get an exclusive 15% off the entire order with the code thelisbonletter15 at checkout.

→ Get the decks, make it stick

We only partner with businesses we think genuinely help our community. If this is useful to you, or if you know someone whose Portuguese grammar just will not stick, every click and every share goes a long way to keeping this newsletter free every morning.

🍽️ SPOT OF THE DAY

COME PRIMA (LAPA)

If you want to eat the Italian food that Lisboetas book weeks ahead for, this is the one. Come Prima has been running in Lapa since the late nineties, holds a 4.9 across more than ten thousand reviews, and sits inside TripAdvisor's top ten of the city's five-thousand-plus restaurants, which for an Italian place in a Portuguese city is a genuine feat.

Behind it is chef Tanka Sapkota, a Nepalese-born, Italy-trained cook who runs four Lisbon restaurants and holds the title of Knight of the Truffles and Wines of Alba, one of only twenty people in the world with it. Truffle is the house obsession, the restaurant is a national reference for it, and the signature dish is the angel-hair pasta with fresh truffle, sage and Azores butter, which reviewers routinely call the best truffle pasta they have eaten anywhere, Italy included.

Beyond that the kitchen makes its own fresh pasta daily and turns out slow-cooked ossobuco, risottos and wood-fired pizza, the last of which just landed Come Prima on a list of the 70 best pizzeria restaurants in the world. Finish with the tiramisu, which regulars treat as non-negotiable.

It serves dinner Monday to Saturday and is closed Sundays; hours can shift, so it is worth checking before you go, and booking is wise given how full it gets.

→ Find them here ←

Insider tip: if you are here in truffle season, order the angel-hair pasta with truffle, it is the chef's signature and the dish the restaurant built its name on.

📅 WHAT'S ON

See you tomorrow morning.

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