The 7 best markets in Lisbon, ranked

How Lisbon markets work

There are three kinds. Municipal mercados are covered halls with fish, meat, fruit and flower stalls, open early, dead by 14:00, closed Sundays and usually with no fish on Mondays because the boats do not land on Sunday. Feiras are open-air markets on fixed days, from serious flea markets to clothes and household goods. And then there are the converted halls where the produce side shrank and food kiosks took over. All three are worth your time for different reasons and this ranking mixes them, because ranking a flea market against a food court on the same scale is the only honest way to do it.

Timing rules everything. For fish and produce, be in a municipal hall between 08:00 and 10:00; by noon the good stuff is gone and the traders are packing. For the flea market, early is for dealers and late is for bargains, since sellers discount rather than carry things home. Take cash: many stalls still refuse cards or apply a minimum, and the flea market is cash only in practice. Bring a bag. And learn two words: quanto custa, and the essential quantity request, um quarto, a quarter kilo.

1. Feira da Ladra, Campo de Santa Clara — Tuesdays and Saturdays

Lisbon's flea market has run in some form since the 13th century and now spreads across the sloping square beside Sao Vicente de Fora and down the surrounding streets, from about 09:00 to 18:00 on Tuesdays and Saturdays. The top end has proper dealers with furniture, brass, silver and colonial-era ephemera; the bottom end is blankets on the cobbles with mobile phone chargers and single shoes. In between is the good hunting: old azulejos of dubious provenance, 1960s Portuguese ceramics, army surplus, vinyl, cutlery, ships' fittings and postcards of a city that no longer exists.

How to work it: walk the whole thing once without buying, then go back. Haggle, but modestly, a third off an asking price is normal and half is rude. Expect €5 to €15 for the small ceramics, €2 to €8 for records, €20 to €60 for decent brass. Avoid loose antique tiles offered from a blanket, because those come off buildings. Keep your bag zipped and in front of you in the dense sections. Combine it with Sao Vicente de Fora next door and lunch in Graca, and you have the best Tuesday in Lisbon.

2. Mercado de Campo de Ourique, 3. Mercado de Arroios

Campo de Ourique got the food-hall treatment more than a decade ago but kept its fishmongers, butchers and greengrocers at one end, which is exactly the balance the bigger conversions lost. It sits in a residential neighbourhood up behind Estrela, reached by tram 28 in about fifteen minutes from Baixa, and it feeds locals as well as visitors: a plate of grilled fish or a steak sandwich costs €8 to €14, a glass of wine €3 to €4. Open daily until late. Go for lunch on a weekday and you will hear more Portuguese than English, which is the whole point.

Mercado de Arroios, three minutes from Anjos metro, is the one Lisbon market that shows you the city as it is now: Nepali, Bangladeshi, Indian, Chinese and Portuguese stalls in the same hall, a produce section with vegetables you will not find elsewhere, and cooked-food counters doing a full plate for €6 to €9. It is small, scruffy, cash-friendly and closes early afternoon. If you want a cheap, genuinely local lunch and are bored of bacalhau, this is where to spend €8.

4. Mercado 31 de Janeiro, 5. the Time Out hall at Cais do Sodre

The Mercado 31 de Janeiro near Saldanha is an unreconstructed working market: a big hall of fish counters, butchers and fruit stalls with old-fashioned prices, and a mezzanine of small cafes where market workers eat at 09:00. This is where you go to see what the Atlantic actually delivers, whole sardines in summer at a few euros a kilo, spider crab, percebes when they are in. Nobody is performing for tourists. Mornings only, closed Sundays. Ten minutes from the centre by metro and worth it if food shopping is your idea of a good time.

The Time Out hall in the Mercado da Ribeira at Cais do Sodre deserves an honest verdict. It is a well-run food court with two dozen kiosks curated from Lisbon restaurants, dishes at €10 to €18, open until midnight, and at 13:30 on a Saturday it is a scrum with nowhere to sit. It is genuinely useful when a group cannot agree, when you arrive late, or when it is raining. It is not where locals eat, and the fresh-produce half of the same building next door, open in the morning, is more interesting and half the price.

6. LX Market on Sundays, 7. the Principe Real organic market

LX Market fills the lanes of the LX Factory complex in Alcantara every Sunday from about 11:00 to 19:00 with vintage clothing, records, prints, secondhand books and craft stalls, wrapped around the permanent shops and restaurants. Prices are higher than the flea market and the quality is more curated: €15 to €40 for a decent vintage shirt, €5 to €20 for prints. It is the pleasant version of market shopping, with coffee and a converted printworks bookshop as backup, and it fills a Sunday when the municipal halls are shut.

The Saturday organic producers' market in the Principe Real garden is small, expensive and excellent: farm cheeses, sourdough, seasonal fruit from the Lisbon hinterland, honey, and cured meats, roughly 09:00 to 14:00. Budget €12 to €20 for a picnic for two, then walk 200 metres and eat it on the garden benches under the great cedar. It pairs perfectly with the antique and design shops along Rua Dom Pedro V and Rua da Escola Politecnica, which is the best browsing street in the city on a Saturday morning.

What to buy, and what it should cost

Edible things worth carrying home: tinned sardines and mackerel from a proper grocer at €2 to €5 a tin rather than €8 from a souvenir shop with a fancy wrapper; queijo de Azeitao, the soft sheep's cheese you eat with a spoon, at €5 to €8; ginjinha, the sour cherry liqueur, at €8 to €14 a bottle; flor de sal from the Setubal or Alentejo pans; and Portuguese olive oil, which is very good and half the price of the Italian equivalent at home. Vacuum-packed presunto travels; fresh cheese in a hot suitcase does not.

Non-edible: Bordalo Pinheiro ceramics, the cabbage-leaf plates and swallow figures, sold as factory seconds in some markets for a third off; cork goods, which are genuinely Portuguese rather than a tourist invention; hand-embroidered linen from the north on the better flea-market stalls; and old enamelled kitchenware. What to leave: mass-printed cork postcards, tin sardines in decorative boxes at €9 each, and any rooster of Barcelos, which is from the far north and has nothing to do with Lisbon.

Which market for which day, and what to skip

Tuesday or Saturday morning: Feira da Ladra, then Sao Vicente de Fora. Any weekday morning: Mercado 31 de Janeiro for the fish, or Arroios for lunch. Saturday: Principe Real organic market, then the design shops. Sunday: LX Market, when almost every other market in the city is closed. Any evening, especially a wet one: the Time Out hall, accepting exactly what it is. Late spring adds the Feira do Livro, the enormous book fair that takes over Parque Eduardo VII from late May into June, and Christmas brings craft markets to several squares.

Skip the huge Thursday clothes feira at Carcavelos unless you specifically want cheap socks and counterfeit sportswear; it is a serious local institution and a total waste of a visitor's day. Skip the souvenir stalls that colonise Rua Augusta and Praca do Comercio at weekends, where the same three printed items repeat for 400 metres. And skip buying fresh fish unless you have a kitchen: the fishmongers at 31 de Janeiro will clean and fillet anything you point at, and there is no sadder purchase than a whole robalo you cannot cook.