The Alfama stair lane at 7:40, before the tram starts
Ninety-five minutes on a folding stool halfway up a stair lane that Getúlio's laundry and about forty tourists an hour both use as a corridor. I drew the top landing first and got the whole page for it.
Place card — Escadinhas de São Miguel, Alfama
| Kind | Spot sketch |
|---|---|
| Coordinates | 38.7119, -9.1300 |
| Country | Portugal |
| Medium | Ink |
| minutes on site | 95 min |
| Tools in the bag | Sakura Pigma Micron 05 · Sakura Pigma Micron 025 · Stillman & Birn Alpha A5 · folding stool · 0.5 mechanical pencil |
| First published | 24 Aug 2026 |
Why this corner and not the miradouro
Everyone draws the viewpoints. The miradouros above Alfama are wide, comfortable and completely solved: you sit, you get a skyline, you go home. The stair lanes underneath them are harder in every way that matters. The perspective runs uphill and downhill at the same time, the shade line moves across the steps roughly a metre every eleven minutes in August, and every few minutes someone has to get past you with a shopping trolley.
Escadinhas de São Miguel is a good one because it is short. Four flights, a bend at the top, and the whole thing fits inside one page held vertically. I counted the flights on the way up: 14 steps, 11, 15, and a final 8 that turn left toward the church.
The four flights, and what you can actually see from each
| Flight from the bottom | Steps | What is in frame | Worth drawing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lower | 14 | Blue-and-white azulejo dado on the left, a doorway with a granite lintel | Yes, as foreground |
| Second | 11 | The first arch of laundry lines, window boxes | Only as a texture |
| Third | 15 | The bend, where the lane turns out of sight | Yes, this is the picture |
| Upper | 8 | Church wall, a tiled bench, no through traffic | Yes, if you still have ink |
I set the stool on the second landing and pointed it uphill. That put the bend in the upper third of the page, which is where the eye wants it anyway, and left the lower two-thirds for the azulejo dado and the paving.
The first twenty minutes decide the page
There is exactly one thing to get right here: the two edges of the lane. They converge faster than they look, and if the left edge is drawn even slightly shallow the whole staircase reads as a ramp. I block both edges in pencil first, check them by holding the book at arm's length, and only then commit to ink. On this page the left edge was corrected twice before the pen came out.
The shade line is the second thing. At 07:40 the sun clears the roofline on the right and the shadow edge sits about six steps up from the second landing. It climbs at roughly a metre every eleven minutes, so by 09:15 the whole lower flight is in sun and the drawing is a different drawing. The shadow on the page is therefore the 07:40 shadow, and I wrote the time in the margin so I would remember which one it is.
What went in with the pen
Hatching does all the work on a lane like this. The left wall takes tight diagonal hatch at roughly 1.5 mm spacing because it faces away from the sun; the paving takes a much looser hatch that follows the fall of the steps rather than any consistent angle, which stops the ground from looking like a tilted plane.
The laundry lines are drawn as single unbroken strokes with weight only at the ends, because every attempt to draw the pegs individually turned into a row of small dark blobs. The one brick-red accent on the page is the doorframe at the bend — a real painted frame, and the only warm thing in an otherwise grey-green drawing.
- Total time on site: 95 minutes, of which 26 were pencil and layout and 69 were ink
- Stool position: second landing, facing uphill, back against the wall
- Interruptions: four, three of them asking for directions to the castle
- Light lost: the drawing was finished about twenty minutes before the shade line reached the stool
What I would do differently
Start thirty minutes earlier. At 07:10 the lane is in full shade, which is worse for the drawing but better for the drawing *of* the shadow — you get the whole staircase as a single tonal shape and can carve the light out of it afterwards, which is closer to how the lane feels at that hour. Drawing it in sun gives a prettier page and a less honest one.
The other change: bring the 0.25 liner from the start. I switched to it for the azulejo dado twenty minutes in and the difference in the tiles between the upper and lower halves of the page is visible if you look for it.