Christmas Alone in Lisbon: A Quiet Account of Solo Travel Through the Holidays

I spent Christmas in Lisbon, twice, solo and by choice. The first time I felt guilt towards my family back home. The second time, I knew what I was doing and it was as smooth as.

A reality check for solo travel over the holiday season, that’s what this piece is. It’s not for people who want to bash those who spend their holidays alone with their family, but for those who, against their will, are traveling solo over the holidays, or for those who are even considering it, and want to get a feel for what this experience really is like. It works.

The shape of the holiday week

In terms of the amount of people around, and prices, Lisbon in December is a much more manageable place to be than in the Summer. As ever, it has the same wonderful light, but it’s a more ‘lived in’ feeling place with fewer tourists around.

The structure of my week: Confirm twice.

I would often have breakfast at the same local cafe near my apartment. I would often have pastel de nata and a galao there, and the owner would on occasion sit with me for up to 10 minutes. Late mornings walking. It was a treat to see the summer neighborhoods with their usual lack of crowded streets, decorated with Christmas lights and also to come across a couple of small markets which had been missing in my summer explorations of Lisbon. Afternoons spent reading books or writing in the apartment. It’s December. A proper winter with long dark evenings. The evenings began to grow dark around 5pm but were illuminated and warmed up in the apartment. The evenings were spent in a tiny bar near my apartment, with a handful of regulars where we would have the odd glass of wine and chat. Dinner varied between a home-cooked meal with products from the market and some restaurants that remained open throughout the holidays. The choice of venues was smaller than in summer, but bigger than I had expected.

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day

The hardest two days of the Holidays are generally Christmas and NYD. Most restaurants will be closed for Christmas and New Year’s and on these two days the town takes on a melancholic air as you connect with family back home. A couple of hours on the phone with your parents every now and then on Christmas Day for example can become a big deal as your isolation is alleviated only to be rediscovered as you put the phone down. Likewise, there are moments of great comfort, like making a small roast chicken and eating it in your holiday rental apartment. Other moments are more disturbing and need to be dealt with head on. As I’ve said before, it’s not about ignoring the pain of loneliness, it’s about dealing with it rather than hiding from it.

What did work:

A scheduled video call with my parents at the time they would have sat down for dinner. We chatted for an hour or so while they were eating their Christmas dinner, and I was sitting in a café in Lisbon. They put me on speaker phone and we sat around the table to listen and chat to me. One small comforting event. When I was alone, I roasted a small chicken and served it with a few potatoes that I bought in the market, along with a good glass of wine. I knew that if I’d been at home, that’s the sort of dinner I’d have made. In this strange foreign town it felt oddly familiar and therefore more than a little comforting. A long walk on Christmas Day afternoon was more interesting. I had wandered through a number of almost empty streets and now found myself on a viewpoint above the river with a thin and gold light. For a moment or two I felt a sob rise to my lips and it was a clean and brief cry and I felt better for it. Christmas Evening was spent at a small bar in the area of the apartment that actually stayed open on Christmas Day. I met a nice couple (with their baby) from the local area whose families lived elsewhere in the country and a bunch of individual travelers also stranded in Lisbon for Christmas, like myself. There were all sorts of conversations in the various groups of 2-3 people around the bar, none of them at all forced or weird, so I chatted to different people at different times.

The New Year part is easier

It is so much easier to be alone during New Year’s Eve in Lisbon than during Christmas in Lisbon. I think there are fireworks over the river, people go to Praca do Comercio to celebrate and it is a huge, huge crowd. And there are even more informal parties, usually with music, in side streets. It is like the whole city is celebrating together. In those conditions it is hard not to get absorbed by the rest of the crowd. And this has happened both in 2024 and 2026, as recorded in my other travel diaries.

My “trick” for finding people to spend the evening with was to bring a small bottle of port to the bar where I was having a last snack before going out to watch the fireworks. I made my way down to a nice spot to watch the display with the port and a few other people I had met at the bar and we spent an hour or so watching the fireworks together. We then went our separate ways for the night. It had been a pleasant evening with other people but I hadn’t had to spend the whole evening with them in order to feel that I had had a good night.

The quiet middle week

The third week is slightly strange though. So many businesses close down for the whole of the New Year period. It does mean that every so often you get the city to yourself and it has a half-asleep feel. Some travelers depart for home and others dive deep into their own reading/writing etc. I used these holidays to get a huge amount of reading and writing done. In 2024 I finished two books, and for 2026 I had written 8,000 odd words of notes that went to form the entire structure of next years big writing project.

I read and wrote a lot more that week, taking advantage of the slack in business as usual and the unstructured nature of time alone days in unfamiliar locations. I finished 2 books and jotted down 8,000 odd words, that were to form the basis of next years writing projects.

The phone strategy

The worst time for solo travelers is holidays – the time of year when all your other family and friends are off too, and seemingly having the time of their lives in each other’s company. It’s a particularly terrible time for people who spend the rest of the year scrolling through social media in envy of everyone else’s fun, because on holidays that’s all there is – social media full of photos of delicious meals and fun times with other people.

Another thing was that I kept my phone for scheduled calls, for checking for flight changes or for getting the odd location sorted. The social media apps were shut for the duration of the holiday week. I’m not that brave to go on holiday alone and then spend the time scrolling through family and friends’ photos of fun on the holiday that you’re not on. Reading them on return is just fine. Watching them roll in live however is much harder than the feeling of loneliness that I’d felt before.

The financial side

Additionally, holiday solo travel is, for many, the cheapest kind of travel. Since many families travel during the holidays, December flights and hotels tend to be cheaper for solo travelers outside of peak travel times (for example, during the last week of December and the first week of January, versus the 22nd to 26th of December and the 30th of December to the 1st of January). As well, even when a solo traveler does happen to end up in a packed restaurant, booking ahead of time is easier than during busier times of the year. As I said, for myself, a week’s travel in Lisbon cost around 1400 dollars for flights, a apartment, meals, and museum visits. That same week back home with family would have easily cost double, or even triple that.

My travel failures follow a predictable pattern. I try to outline the potential for this below.

I was able to travel to Lisbon for the week for around $1,400 for the flights, apartment, food, and a few cultural events. This would likely cost more if I estimated around $2,000 for a similar week of holiday celebrations at home, with dinners out, gifts, and the various other costs of being a good host or guest.

Who this is for

For people whose family holidays are wonderful and something that they would miss by traveling alone, then there is no reason to even think about traveling alone during the holidays. The trip would not replace what they were missing. For the people for whom the holidays are more of an obligation than a burden or something that they just don’t get or haven’t gotten in the past, then traveling alone can be a wonderful way to reboot or to start fresh.

The type of solo travel is for people who already have permission to opt out. If your family is small enough that staying home would be boring, then don’t go. But for people whose families are spread across the world, or who have families but who don’t really celebrate holidays, or even people who celebrate holidays but are traveling solo for the first time after a divorce or after the loss of a loved one, this kind of travel can be very restorative. It is a way to press the reset button on holiday celebrations and really think about what they mean to you.

What I would tell someone considering it

I expected to be very sad on the first day of my solo trip but I wasn’t. It was really difficult but in a good way. The second day was worse and I think because I expected it to be easier. But by the third day I was starting to settle into my holiday and was really looking forward to the rest of my time in Lisbon. By the end of the week I had a really clear sense of whether or not I wanted to do this kind of thing again in the future. Whether or not I needed to do it this time.

Both answers are good. The trip is an experiment. What you get from it is up to you.