Everyone in Lisbon says that, considering Portugal’s extraordinary age of exploration, the town has regarded a long way out to sea. It took a hand-written listing of pratos de dia out of doors a bit eating place at the Rua das Janelas Verdes – Street of Green Shutters – to feature spice to that truism for me. Today’s specials? “Tandoori chook, red meat saag, chook dansak, red meat biryani”.

The red meat dishes inform the tale on a plate. In 1497, Vasco da Gama’s first day trip to the Malabar coast inaugurated Portugal’s quick heyday as a maritime superpower and started an affair with India (in particular in Goa, Portuguese till 1961) that persists till now. António Costa, Portugal’s top minister, comes from a part-Indian own circle of relatives that also has an ancestral residence withinside the south Goan city of Margao.

Costa helped clean the direction for the recent, and boldest, challenge to repair the hyperlinks among the town’s hilly, labyrinthine vintage quarters and the waterfront that runs alongside the river Tagus to the sea. By the river at Belém, now no longer a long way from the exuberant Jerónimos monastery constructed to have a good time Vasco da Gama’s return, the brand new Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) will open on five October with a 12-hour jamboree of exhibition launches, track and performance.

Visitors already besiege Belém (take the No 15 tram) to gasp on the show-off splendour of Jerónimos. Its outsize rebellion of late-Gothic ornament bears witness to the country’s short-lived burst of boundless confidence. Hordes additionally descend for a flavor of the sensitive pastel de nata (custard tart) served considering 1837 on the prettily tiled Antiga Confeitaria de Belém. A takeaway queue constantly snakes out of doors this cult bakery, however after ready in line you could locate safe haven close by withinside the seldom-visited Jardim Botânico Tropical. Luxuriant and overgrown, this almost-secret garden, patrolled with the aid of using lazily sauntering peacocks and wildfowl, gathers the timber and flora of Asia, Africa and the Americas.

If this riverside boasts an imperial heritage, it additionally has a gritty commercial past. The MAAT web website online lies round the corner to the Central Tejo, a hulking, good-looking electricity plant-turned-exhibition space, already Lisbon’s solution to Tate Modern. Together, those dual centres will shape a 38,000-rectangular metre artistic “campus”. Central Tejo deserves a go to in itself. In evaluation to the Tate, its gargantuan generators and pipes take a seat down proudly intact inside a red-brick cathedral of electricity.

Alongside, MAAT seems slinky and welcoming in this adorable however long-omitted stretch of waterside. “It’s as aleven though you simply glide into the building,” says its British architect, Amanda Levete, selected for the challenge after a string of high-profile commissions which includes the V&A growth in London (due early subsequent year) and the transformation of Galeries Lafayette in Paris. The museum’s 15,000 creamy, crackle-glazed ceramic tiles soar daylight off the river from its cantilevered frontage and down into the principle galleries. The roof slopes up toward a vast terrace that rewards you with epic perspectives each returned toward the town, and out toward the ocean.

Container ships go with the flow slowly below the 25 April Bridge – named the Salazer Bridge after the Portuguese dictator, till his overthrow on that date in 1974. For an awful lot of the 4km among the Cais do Sodré station and the flowery Belém Tower, traumatic dual-carriageways, railways and tramlines conspire to sever town from river. MAAT will quickly be related to crucial Belém with the aid of using a pedestrian bridge, presenting a valuable lifeline.