The terrace that shows you two Lisbons at once

The backgroundA church of the Knights of Malta, and a terrace built for looking

The church the terrace leans against is the Igreja de Santa Luzia e São Brás, and its foundation runs back to the twelfth century, to the years immediately after Lisbon was taken from Moorish rule in 1147. It was long associated with the Order of St John — the Knights Hospitaller, later the Order of Malta — whose eight-pointed cross still appears around the building, and which maintained a presence on this slope for centuries. Like almost everything else in Lisbon, the church was wrecked by the earthquake of 1755 and rebuilt afterwards, which is why a twelfth-century foundation presents itself today as a modest post-earthquake structure.

The dedication is a small pleasure in its own right. Santa Luzia is Saint Lucy, traditionally invoked as the patron of eyesight and of the blind, which makes the siting of Lisbon's most photographed viewpoint against her wall either a very old joke or a very good coincidence. Nobody planned it that way; the church was here first and the terrace was arranged around it much later.

The miradouro as you find it now is a twentieth-century creation, part of the same municipal impulse that tidied, planted and railed a series of Lisbon's natural lookout points into formal public gardens. The pergola, the trellis, the benches, the ornamental pool in the lower garden and the azulejo panels all belong to that period of work rather than to the medieval city. The lower garden carries the name of Júlio de Castilho, the Viscount of Castilho, a historian who spent his life writing Lisbon's neighbourhoods into print, and whose bust sits below the terrace. It is an appropriate custodian for a place whose entire subject is the city looking at itself.

What survives around it is older and more important. Alfama is the one central district that came through 1755 substantially intact, because it sits on bedrock rather than on the river-edge alluvium that liquefied further west. That geological accident is the reason the view from this balustrade is a dense Moorish tangle of lanes and pantiled roofs rather than the rational Pombaline grid that was laid over the ruined Baixa afterwards. You are, in a real sense, looking at the part of the city that the earthquake missed, from a terrace attached to a church it did not.

The wall behind youTwo tile panels worth turning around for

Most visitors arrive, photograph the bougainvillea, photograph the roofs, and leave without ever looking at the wall. The two large azulejo panels on the church's south face are the reason to stay, and they are doing something specific rather than decorative.

The first shows the Terreiro do Paço — the great riverside square now called Praça do Comércio — as it stood before the earthquake, when it was not a square at all but the forecourt of the Paço da Ribeira, the royal palace on the waterfront. The palace, its tower, the ships at anchor and the tight-packed roofline behind it are all laid out in blue and white. On the morning of 1 November 1755 an earthquake, three tsunami waves and a fire that burned for days removed essentially all of it, along with the royal library and an archive of Portuguese exploration that has never been reconstructed. The panel is the closest thing to a photograph of what was lost, and it is mounted less than a kilometre from where the palace stood, in full view of the space it used to occupy.

The second panel goes back further, to the Christian assault on the Castelo de São Jorge during the 1147 siege of Lisbon. It is a crowded, energetic composition of ladders, crossbows and armour, and its central figure is Martim Moniz, the knight who, in the account Portuguese schoolchildren still learn, threw himself into the closing castle gate and held it open with his own body long enough for the attackers to pour through, dying in the process. Whether it happened that way is a matter for historians; that the story is told on this wall, at the foot of the castle in question, is the point. A downtown square and a metro station carry his name.

Take the two together and the panels are a compressed argument about the city: here is how Lisbon was won, and here is what Lisbon looked like before it was destroyed. They reward five minutes of actual attention, and the best light for them is soft and indirect — a bright midday sun bounces off the glaze and flattens everything.

What you are looking atNaming what is in front of you

The terrace faces roughly south-east over Alfama to the Tagus, and the view is more legible than it first appears once you have a few landmarks.

The immediate foreground is the roofscape: a steep cascade of terracotta pantiles, washing lines, satellite dishes and the odd roof terrace, dropping toward the water in a way that makes the district's density completely obvious. Alfama's street plan is Moorish in origin and was never rationalised, so what you are seeing from above is a system of lanes, stairs and dead ends that is genuinely difficult to navigate at ground level and perfectly clear from here.

To the left, two domes anchor the middle distance. The larger, brilliant white one is Santa Engrácia, now the National Pantheon, a church whose construction dragged on for so many centuries that unfinished work is proverbially called obras de Santa Engrácia in Portuguese. Beside and behind it, the twin bell towers belong to São Vicente de Fora, the monastery of Lisbon's patron saint, whose royal pantheon holds the Bragança monarchs. Between and below them, on Tuesdays and Saturdays, sits the Feira da Ladra flea market.

Straight ahead is the river, which at this point is so wide it reads as an estuary rather than a river — the Mar da Palha, the Sea of Straw. Container cranes work the far bank, ferries cross to Cacilhas and Barreiro, and cruise ships berth at the Santa Apolónia and Jardim do Tabaco terminals almost directly below the terrace. A large ship at the near quay changes the composition completely, which is worth knowing if you have a particular photograph in mind.

One honest correction to a widespread expectation. Santa Luzia is billed everywhere as a sunset viewpoint, and it is lovely in the late afternoon, but the sun does not set into the water in front of you — it goes down behind your right shoulder, over the Baixa and the far hills. What you get in the last hour of light is warm, low sun landing full on the terracotta and on the white church wall, which is arguably better than a sun-into-sea shot and is definitely not the same thing. For sun actually setting over water, Lisbon sends you west, to Santa Catarina or the Bica.

Timing it rightWhen to come, and how to handle the tram

This is a small terrace on the route of the city's most famous tram, which means the difference between eight in the morning and noon is the difference between a contemplative bench and a scrum.

Come early. Between sunrise and about nine the terrace is close to empty, the light is coming up the river toward you rather than down onto you, and the neighbourhood is doing ordinary neighbourhood things — deliveries on the stairs, radios, the first cafés opening. An hour before sunset is the other good window, busier but with the best colour. Between roughly half past ten in the morning and five in the afternoon the terrace runs at capacity, with a steady turnover of tour groups and a semi-permanent queue for the corner of the balustrade with the cleanest line on the domes.

The 28 tram passes directly alongside, and it is both the reason people come and the least pleasant way to get here. In season the eastbound cars leave Martim Moniz already full, the queue at the origin stop routinely runs past half an hour, and the tram is the single most reliable place in Lisbon to be pickpocketed — the crush, the open windows and the distracted passengers make it a professional's office. If you want the tram experience, ride it early in the morning, board at the start of the line, and keep your bag in front of you. If you simply want to be at the viewpoint, walk. It is about five to ten minutes uphill from the cathedral along Rua Augusto Rosa and Rua do Limoeiro, and the climb is short even by Lisbon standards.

Two more practical things. Santa Luzia has no kiosk, café or toilets of its own; you get a bench and a view. Portas do Sol, fifty metres uphill, has a permanent kiosk-bar with terrace seating, which is where you go if you want a beer with the panorama. And if you are here on 12 or 13 June, for the feast of Santo António, the calculus changes entirely: Alfama fills with grilled sardine smoke, paper decorations and an all-night street party, the terrace is nobody's quiet moment, and it is worth being there anyway.

Around itWhat to pair it with

Santa Luzia is a five-minute stop on its own and a natural hinge in a much better half-day, because almost everything worth seeing on this slope is within a few hundred metres of it.

Miradouro das Portas do Sol is the immediate neighbour, just uphill, and the two are routinely confused. Portas do Sol is larger and more open, with a wider panorama, the kiosk-bar, and a statue of São Vicente holding a ship with two ravens — the emblem of the city. Santa Luzia gives you the more intimate, framed, bougainvillea-shaded version of nearly the same view. See both; they take four minutes to compare and the difference is instructive.

On the Largo das Portas do Sol stands the Museu de Artes Decorativas, the Ricardo do Espírito Santo Silva Foundation, housed in a seventeenth-century palace. It holds Portuguese furniture, silver, textiles and Indo-Portuguese pieces, and it runs workshops in traditional crafts such as gilding, cabinetmaking and bookbinding. It is quiet, it is rarely busy, and it is one of the better wet-weather options in this part of the city.

Uphill is the Castelo de São Jorge, with the ramparts, the archaeological site and the widest view in central Lisbon. Downhill is the Sé, Lisbon's fortress-like Romanesque cathedral, begun shortly after the 1147 conquest and looking more like a keep than a church. Between them, Alfama itself is the attraction: go down the stairs rather than along the roads, accept that you will get lost, and let the fado houses, the tiled facades and the tiny garage-sized tascas present themselves.

The efficient sequence, if you want one, is to start at the cathedral, climb to Santa Luzia for the panels and the framed view, step up to Portas do Sol for the panorama and a coffee, continue to the castle, and then descend through Alfama's lanes to the river. That is a morning, it is entirely downhill after the castle, and it takes in the oldest continuously inhabited ground in the city.