Today is my first day back at work after a week’s holiday and what Bridget Jones would describe as a ‘mini-break’ in Lisbon.

My husband and I had two full days and two part-days alone, sans children, in a tiny stylish apartment in Alfama, the Portuguese capital’s equivalent of Brighton’s Lanes and its oldest district, one of the few areas to survive the catastrophic 1755 earthquake that saw most of old Lisbon destroyed.

Described by Simone de Beauvoir as “…steep streets where trams trundle along… a southern city at once scorched and fresh with the promise of the sea on the horizon”, Lisbon is one of those European cities my husband and I are particularly drawn to.

Along with Spain’s Santiago de Compostela and Chania on Crete, they all have in common an ancient hilly district with higgledy piggeldy streets so narrow in places that modern traffic doesn’t fit along it, and rising above them higgledy piggeldy buildings painted in a soft Farrow & Ball palette or covered in Lisbon’s famous tiles, and topped by terracotta roofs.

Despite Lisbon being a capital city, our apartment, with its spectacular view over rooftops to the shimmering blue waters beyond, and its surrounding streets were an oasis of calm, busy city traffic a whole district away.

There was just an occasional rattle from the next street, a winding road carrying single carriage yellow trams, the everyday vehicles that get people from A to B, and the green tourist trams, with their picturesque wooden interiors and a voiceover informing travellers that these vehicles date back to the 1930s.

We didn’t do the typical tourist thing of visiting Lisbon’s museums and gardens and churches and cathedrals.

We didn’t have enough time, for one thing, and for another, a schedule would have turned our ‘mini-break’into a mini-nightmare.

Rushing was not on our agenda. We woke at around 10am, drank tea, took in the view, wandered out into the bright sunshine to hunt for a leisurely brunch, wandered a bit more, returned to the apartment for a siesta, wandered about again to look for dinner and returned at around midnight.

It was perfect because we enjoyed a series of memorable experiences yet barely ventured outside the Alfama district, one of the seven hills upon which Lisbon is famously built.

Those hills are the perfect settings for a series of miradouros, or viewpoints; we discovered one of the most spectacular at the top of our hill, at the Moorish São Jorge Castle, the remains of a medieval fortified citadel.

We drank in the view by day and dined in its restaurant by night, watching the sun setting over the city for hours.

The following day, we found ourselves at another miradouro, a terrace outside a rather stunning white church, where people sat under pine trees with a coffee or a beer and listened to a live band playing ‘fado’, Portugal's national music ‘characterised by mournful tunes and lyrics’ played on Portuguese steel-stringed guitars.

That evening, we left dinner a little too late and began to panic as the restaurants told us one by one that they were closing.

We found a Latino one open down by the waterside and sat down at a table on a raised deck.

To our delight, four television trucks rolled up and parked, and as we ate, we watched the filming of scenes for a serial being adapted from a Portuguese novel called A Única Mulher (The Single Woman).

One waitress told me I look like the Hollywood actress Julianne Moore – in my dreams, but it made my day!

I loved Lisbon, more than I thought I would probably because I made the decision to do no research on it ahead of time.

I knew nothing about it, other than its history as the capital of one of the most powerful countries in the world during the Age of Discovery, and somehow it made my discovery of its charms all the more delicious to savour.