Lisbon, drawn from its own streets.

Lisbon on paper

The Tagus fills the bottom of the frame — not a river so much as an inland sea at this point, several kilometres across, so a Lisbon print has more open water in it than almost any other city on this list. The docks and quays notch its northern shore, and the long bridge crosses at the western edge of the frame as a single determined line.

Above the water the city is two things at once. The Baixa was rebuilt on a strict rectangular grid after the earthquake, and it prints as a small, perfectly ordered block of streets running straight back from the riverfront squares. Immediately east of it, Alfama survives from before — a mesh of lanes and stairs winding around the hill, so tight and so irregular that the two patterns sit side by side like different cities. On the map you can see exactly where the rebuilding stopped.

Elsewhere the streets follow the hills. The Avenida runs north from the Baixa as a wide straight axis to the park at its head, and either side of it the roads hairpin and switchback up the slopes, with stairs and lanes filling the gaps. The print draws no height, so those hairpins are the only clue to how steep the ground is — which, for anybody who has walked it, is the joke of the thing. Seven kilometres across holds the river, both cities and the avenues between them.