Francisco Mouta Rúbio, writer and winner of two literary prizes who in 2025 launched the novel "Behind the Writing", tries to describe his search for a traditional tasca in Lisbon, where he could find home-cooked food at grandmother Casimira's price, an imperial beer and an affordable sweet. The author feels like an indigenous minority impossible to find in the old area of Lisbon, where the lights are more violent than on Broadway and the shows more Andalusian than in Seville.
The article argues that Lisbon has become a city that seeks to please others, forgetting to like itself. Lisbon hospitality has lost its face, with residents expelled from neighborhoods where TAP planes fly over young Germans with liberal professions, tuktuks and tourist guides seeking scraps. The author imagines a post-mass tourism future, when fuel becomes expensive, heat unbearable and air travel unsustainable.
Mouta Rúbio proposes that each hotel should give something back to the street where it's located, not just taxes and precarious jobs, but housing for workers, community facilities and transport. The tourist tax shouldn't promote the destination, but buy houses, support housing cooperatives, recover markets, fund collectivities and create vegetable gardens on land condemned to speculation. The author defends a right to remain in Lisbon based not on birthplace, but on who wants to take care of the city.
The article concludes that Lisbon will have to choose between hospitality based on reciprocity and an industry that calls hospitality the privilege of serving only those who can pay. A city is a daily practice for making common space, and when it stops doing so, it can conserve the name, the trams, the viewpoints and the light over the Tagus, but it will only be the memory of any other place.
