You hear Mouraria before you categorise it — Bangla pop from a phone shop, fado from a window, Portuguese from the elderly women on the corner, Mandarin from the grocery at the foot of the hill. Martim Moniz square functions as the crossroads, its open expanse filled with food kiosks serving cuisines from a half-dozen countries, though recent redesigns have reduced the vendors and the square's identity is in flux. The climb from here toward the castle's back walls is steep and unforgiving, the streets narrowing as they rise, the walls covered in street art — Vhils's chiselled portraits carved into plaster, paste-ups, tags, and murals commissioned and uncommissioned layering over each other like geological strata.
Intendente, the adjacent square that was a byword for drugs and decay until its renovation in the early 2010s, now holds craft beer bars and boutique guesthouses alongside the surviving Cape Verdean and Chinese businesses, and the tension between authentic grit and encroaching gentrification is visible on every block. The smell of spices — cumin, turmeric, dried chilli — wafts from shops that are not Portuguese in any conventional sense but are entirely Lisboeta in their stubbornness and survival. This is fado's true birthplace, the neighbourhood of Maria Severa, and beneath the multilingual surface runs the oldest musical tradition in the city, born here among people the rest of Lisbon preferred not to see.