3 Best Sights in Lisbon, Portugal

This Italianate dwelling is one of Alfama's most distinctive buildings. It was constructed in 1523 for Brás de Albuquerque, the son of Afonso, who became the viceroy of India and conquered Goa and Malacca. The name translates as "House of Spikes," and it's not hard to see why—it has a striking facade studded with pointed white stones in diamond shapes. The top two floors were destroyed in the 1755 earthquake, and restoration did not begin until the early 1980s. Since 2012 the building has housed the José Saramago Foundation, a cultural institute set up in memory of the only Portuguese-language winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, with two floors dedicated to his life and works.

Writer Fernando Pessoa spent his last 15 years (1920–35) living in this house. Visitors can see Pessoa’s personal items, including the typewriter where he wrote many of his last works and his personal library, with more than 1,000 handwritten notebooks and a collection of Portuguese and international poetry. The site is also a cultural center that organizes literary debates and exhibitions.

The former home of renowned 20th-century doctor and art collector Anastácio Gonçalves was turned into a museum in 1980 and houses around 3,000 of his most prized pieces. Those include paintings by major Portuguese artists like Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro and José Malhoa, ancient Chinese porcelain, and 19th-century furniture from around Europe. The building is an art nouveau mansion from 1904, which was just one of several in the neighborhood at the time. The others are now gone, leaving Gonçalves’s home dwarfed by the tall office buildings and hotels that surround it.