Memmo Alfama

Everything in Alfama is small, says Rodrigo Machaz, who co-founded Memmo, and so the rooms are small as well. Ours, a Double Room, was, and it did not matter. A first visit to Lisbon leaves little time for a bedroom, and this one was a place to rest our heads on a comfortable bed. Machaz puts six pillows on every one, so the economy of space stops short of the pillows. The rooms look out over the city to the water, and the rest of the building was good enough that ours was only ever for sleeping in.

The building is nineteenth-century and once made shoe polish. In 2013 the architect Samuel Torres de Carvalho turned it into 42 rooms on a back street in the lanes below the castle, for no one under sixteen. We thought the design brilliant, and cleverest where it is shared: there are so many places to sit, each with its own view across the inside of the building, that the choice of chair changes the room. The library is in what was a bakery and keeps books on Lisbon's history. Breakfast, included in our rate, is in the Living Room, lit from the terrace through a light well and laid out beautifully along large communal tables. It was as good as it looked.

The pool is on the roof, an infinity pool tiled in red, which Machaz wanted to blend into the scenery. Against the terracotta of Alfama it nearly does, and it is still something to behold. In November it was too cold to swim, so the pool was for looking at, and the terrace beside it for an aperitif in the afternoon sun, over red roofs running down to the Tagus. That terrace is also the hotel's one bar, pouring wine with Portuguese tapas. There is no restaurant, and with Alfama's own a couple of hundred metres off, it hardly needs one.

As a base for Lisbon it was hard to fault, and we would go back without a second thought. The Sé is two minutes' walk from the door and São Jorge Castle about ten up the hill, and Tram 28 stops two minutes away for the ride on into Chiado and Bairro Alto. The hotel's complimentary walking tour of Alfama is for anyone who would rather be shown the lanes than lost in them. The Fado Museum, a walk away, keeps the history of Lisbon's music; on Mondays and Thursdays the terrace has the music itself, with dinner.