That Month I Rented a Flat in Lisbon Changed How I Think About Holidays

Okay so here’s the thing. I used to be that person sprinting through airports with a colour-coded itinerary, panicking if we missed the 2pm cathedral tour because it would throw off the 4pm food walk which would mess up dinner reservations.

Exhausting. Genuinely exhausting.

Then my partner got a remote work contract and we thought, why not try a month somewhere instead of the usual week? Lisbon seemed sensible. English is widely spoken, decent wifi, not too far from home. We found a little flat in Alfama through a local Facebook group—€850 for the month, which already felt weird because that’s less than we’d spent on five nights in Barcelona the year before.

The Grocery Shop That Rewired My Brain

Third morning there, we walked to a neighbourhood market because the flat had a kitchen and I figured we should actually use it.

I cannot stress enough how different buying fish from a Portuguese grandmother is compared to reading about Portuguese cuisine in a guidebook. She didn’t speak English. I don’t speak Portuguese beyond “obrigado” and pointing hopefully. Somehow we established that the sardines were fresh this morning, that I should grill them simply with coarse salt, and that her daughter was getting married next month.

We spent about €12 on enough food for three dinners. That same money would’ve bought two coffees near the tourist spots.

But the money wasn’t really the point. The point was that for the first time on a trip, I felt like I lived somewhere rather than visited it. No rush to see everything. No anxiety about missing attractions. Just… being there.

Why Tourist Mode Backfires

There’s this weird phenomenon where you save up for a holiday, fly somewhere gorgeous, and then spend the whole time stressed about maximising it. Every hour needs to justify the expense. Every meal needs to be Instagram-worthy. By day five you’re more tired than when you left home.

I’ve talked to loads of people who come back from two-week trips and can barely remember which church was in which city. It all blurs together when you’re moving too fast.

Staying put for longer flips that dynamic completely. You stop trying to consume a place and start just existing in it. Some days you do nothing particularly notable—grab a coffee, read in a park, wander without a destination. Those end up being the days you remember most clearly.

The Practical Bits Nobody Mentions

Finding a monthly rental takes more effort than booking a hotel, obviously. A few things I learned:

Local language Facebook groups are gold. Search “apartments [city name]” or “rentals [city name]” in Portuguese/Spanish/Italian/whatever. The listings there run 30-50% cheaper than anything on English sites because they’re aimed at locals, not tourists with foreign salaries.

Bars and cafés are weirdly useful for finding places. Staff in hospitality move around constantly and always know someone whose cousin is subletting something. We found our second long stay—six weeks in Porto—by chatting with a bartender who mentioned his flatmate was leaving.

The start date thing catches people out. In lots of countries, you might pay rent from the first of the month even if you’re moving in on the fifteenth. Just how it works. Budget accordingly.

Not Everyone Can Do A Month

I know that. Most jobs don’t hand out four-week breaks. Kids have school. Life has obligations.

But even a long weekend is handled differently. One neighbourhood instead of three. An apartment with a kitchen instead of hotel breakfast buffets. Walking the same streets twice and noticing what you missed the first time.

My mate tried this in Edinburgh—booked a flat for four nights instead of hopping between B&Bs in different areas. She said by day three she had a favourite coffee shop, knew which bakery did the best pastries, and could give directions to confused tourists. Four days and she felt like she belonged there a little bit.

It Changed What I Write About

Before Lisbon, I didn’t think much about lifestyle stuff. Work was work, travel was escape from work, home was recovery from travel. Neat little boxes.

Slow travel blurred those boxes in ways I didn’t expect. Started noticing things about daily routines, rituals, how people structure their time differently in different cultures. Got curious enough to write about it.

There’s a growing appetite for that kind of content, apparently. Personal experience pieces about wellness, intentional living, travel that’s actually restorative instead of performative. I pitched a few essays to travel platforms accepting guest contributions – TheAzmip has a write for us travel page that specifically mentions travel and wellbeing topics. Got published after a couple of rejections elsewhere. Not life-changing money or anything, but satisfying to see those observations land somewhere.

The Real Shift

Coming home from Lisbon, I didn’t have the usual post-holiday crash. No sense of needing a holiday from my holiday. Just… gratitude, I suppose, and a slightly different relationship with time.

We’ve done it three more times since. Six weeks in Porto. A month in Krakow. Five weeks split between Chiang Mai and a smaller town up north whose name I’m still not pronouncing correctly.

Each time the pattern repeats. The first few days feel strange—too much unstructured time, vague guilt about not sightseeing harder. Then something shifts. The pace of wherever you are starts feeling natural. You stop counting days and start just living them.

Last trip, we found a flat above a bakery. Every morning the smell of fresh bread drifted up through the floorboards. We’d buy pastries still warm, eat them on a tiny balcony watching people head to work.

That’s it. That’s the whole memory. Nothing dramatic happened. Nobody proposed or had an epiphany or discovered a hidden temple.

Just warm bread and morning light and nowhere particular to be.

Turns out that’s enough.