Key takeaways
- Lisbon airport carried 36,126,000 passengers in 2025 (+2.9%, VINCI Airports), a record, but the slowest growth of Portugal's large airports; Porto grew 6.3% and Madeira 12%.
- Declared capacity at Humberto Delgado is 38 movements an hour, and ANAC says 93% was in use by 2023; commercial movements rose only 0.8% in 2025 and fell 0.2% in H1 2026.
- The new Luís de Camões airport is scheduled by ANA to open in mid-2037 (late 2036 if accelerated) at €7.9–8.9bn; ANA's financing proposal (≈€7bn debt, concession to 2092) is not approved.
- INE recorded 15,740,364 overnight stays in Lisbon municipality in 2024, 19.6% of Portugal's total; Grande Lisboa took 23.9% of national stays in 2025, 81.4% of them by non-residents.
- Grande Lisboa RevPAR fell to €98.8 in January–July 2026 from €102.6, as occupancy dropped 2.2 points to 68.4%; July accommodation revenue fell 2.0% while national revenue grew 5.3% over seven months (INE).
- Lisbon cancelled 6,765 alojamento local registrations for missing insurance in February 2026, leaving 11,779 active; containment thresholds were halved to 10% and 5% from 6 December 2025 (CML).
- Port of Lisbon cruise passengers fell 8% to 705,437 in 2025 while turnaround passengers rose 20% to a record 206,226; UK passengers were 34%, not the 40% reported in press (APL).
- No official figure exists for Lisbon visitors or Lisbon tourism receipts: Banco de Portugal does not regionalise receipts, and claims such as '10.4 million visitors' or '€11bn, 45% of national' are unsourced.
Lisbon airport handled 36.1 million passengers in 2025, the most in its history. It was also the slowest-growing large airport in Portugal: up 2.9%, against 6.3% at Porto, 5.8% at Faro and 12% at Madeira. In the second quarter of 2026 it carried fewer passengers than a year earlier.
The reason is physical, not commercial. Humberto Delgado is declared at 38 aircraft movements an hour, and the national aviation regulator says 93% of that capacity was already in use in 2023. Commercial flights rose 0.8% in 2025. Everything else the city's tourism economy does in 2026, from hotel pricing to the short-term rental purge to the cruise mix, happens inside that ceiling.
This article sets out what the official record says about Lisbon tourism: the airport series from VINCI Airports, overnight stays from INE, the port authority's cruise reports, the city council's rental and tax data, and monument attendance from Museus e Monumentos de Portugal. Where a widely repeated figure fails against that record, we say so. Eight of them do, including one from our own research plan.
The capital at its capacity ceiling
Lisbon's passenger series has two shapes. From 2017 to 2019 it grew 7–9% a year, reaching 31.2 million. After the pandemic collapse to 9.3 million in 2020, it recovered faster than almost anyone expected: 28.3 million in 2022 and 33.6 million in 2023, already 7.9% above 2019. Then growth slowed to 4.3% in 2024 and 2.9% in 2025.
The slowdown is in flights, not passengers. Commercial movements rose from 222,753 in 2023 to 226,990 in 2025, an increase of 1.9%, while passengers rose 7.4%. On our arithmetic the average commercial movement now carries about 159 passengers, up from about 143 in 2019. Airlines are putting bigger aircraft into a fixed number of slots and filling them better. That works until the aircraft stop getting bigger.
The constraint has been stated plainly for years. ANA's chief executive said in December 2022 that the company would have to turn away more than 730,000 seats the following summer. In January 2026 the president of ANAC told Lusa that use of the airport's declared capacity had risen from 65% in 2015 to 93% in 2023. The night-flight rules allow 91 movements a week between midnight and 6am. ANAC fined operators about €8.8 million for slot and night breaches in 2024 and about €3.5 million in 2025.
The 2026 data shows the ceiling holding. VINCI reported 17.44 million passengers in the first half of 2026, up 1.3%, with commercial movements down 0.2%. INE's January–July figure is 20.8 million, up 1.0%. Over the same months Porto grew 7.1%. Lisbon's share of all passengers at Portuguese airports fell from 49.0% in 2025 to 48.4% in January–July 2026. On a per-resident basis the airport still dwarfs the city: 36.1 million passengers is about 55 per resident of the municipality on INE's revised 2025 population of 658,236, or 66 on the 2021 census count of 544,851.
Relief comes in two stages. At Humberto Delgado, ANA submitted an environmental impact study in June 2026 to raise declared capacity from 38 to 40 movements an hour, with works from early 2027, and plans a second study for 42. The government's target is 45, set by the Council of Ministers in May 2024; no date for reaching it has been published. A new 10-gate south pier at Terminal 1, contracted at €233 million, is due at the end of 2027. Terminal 2 has had €20 million spent on it since 2020.
The permanent answer is the Luís de Camões airport at the Campo de Tiro de Alcochete, chosen by the government on 14 May 2024. ANA's July 2026 plan describes two runways of 4,000m and 3,700m, 64 contact gates and capacity for 56 million passengers at opening, at a construction cost of €7.9–8.9 billion in 2024 prices. ANA's proposed financing, about €7 billion of debt and a concession extended from 2062 to 2092, has not been approved, and the government has publicly criticised the lack of financial detail. The financial report is due on 17 January 2027 and the complete application in January 2028. ANA's own schedule puts opening in mid-2037, or late 2036 if accelerated. The government wants it about three years sooner. Until then, Lisbon's air capacity grows by a few movements an hour at a time.
Two other access stories will shape the next decade. The TAP privatisation is in its final round: Air France-KLM and Lufthansa submitted improved offers on 30 September 2026, and a government decision is expected in mid-October. TAP held 46% of Lisbon's seat capacity in 2024, so the buyer's hub strategy matters more to Lisbon than to any other Portuguese airport. On rail, the Alfa Pendular takes just under three hours to Porto. The Porto–Lisbon high-speed line targets about 1h15 around 2032, and the first public-private partnership was signed in July 2025. There is no direct Lisbon–Madrid passenger train today; the 2025 Portugal–Spain agreement targets about five hours by 2030.
How much tourism Lisbon actually has
The single most misquoted number about Lisbon is how many tourists it gets. INE does not count visitors. It counts guests checking in to tourist accommodation and the nights they stay, so one person who moves between two hotels counts twice, and day-trippers, cruise passengers and people staying with friends do not count at all. Any figure described as "visitors to Lisbon" is either a model or a misreading.
On INE's figures, the municipality of Lisbon recorded 15,740,364 overnight stays in 2024, 19.6% of all stays in Portugal and 12.5% more than in 2019. The average stay was 2.3 nights, which implies about 6.8 million guest check-ins. Hotels took 81.4% of those nights. On an average night in 2024, about 43,000 tourists slept in the city. The municipality had 73,957 beds in 2024, roughly 8,800 more than in 2019, across 656 establishments in 2025.
The wider NUTS II region of Grande Lisboa had about 19.45 million stays in INE's main accommodation series in 2024, so the city accounts for roughly 81% of its region's nights. In 2025 the region's share of national stays was 23.9%. Eurostat's broader series, which adds campsites, counts 20.03 million regional nights and 8.53 million arrivals in 2025. One structural fact sets the region apart: 81.4% of its stays are by non-residents, the highest dependence on foreign markets of any Portuguese region.
The direction in 2025 was flat. In Eurostat's series, Grande Lisboa's non-resident nights moved from 16.22 million in 2024 to 16.19 million in 2025, a fall of 0.2%, while total nights rose only 0.7%. Growth came from Portuguese residents. In June 2026 resident stays in the region rose 11.3% while non-resident stays rose 0.5%. Over January–July 2026 the region recorded 11.29 million stays, up 1.6%.
Lisbon is also the least seasonal region on the mainland. INE's 2025 seasonality rate, the share of a year's stays that fall in July–September, was 30.3% for Grande Lisboa, the lowest of any region, against a national 36.4%. In practice the capital is busy for nine months, not three.
Its market mix differs sharply from the rest of Portugal. The United States is the largest foreign market in Grande Lisboa, at 16.8% of non-resident stays in 2025 according to INE. Turismo de Portugal's TravelBI data shows how concentrated some markets are in the capital: 48.9% of all American nights in Portugal and 52.3% of all Brazilian nights are spent in Grande Lisboa, but only 12.7% of British nights. More than half of British nights go to the Algarve. American and Brazilian demand is a Lisbon story; British demand mostly is not.
Prices held in 2025. Occupancy is now giving way
Lisbon earns more per available room than anywhere else in Portugal. INE put Grande Lisboa's RevPAR at €106.7 in 2024, with an average daily rate of €150.4, both the highest of any region. In 2025 RevPAR was about €106, still the highest, against a national €72.4.
2026 has turned that position from growth to pressure. For January–July 2026 INE reports a regional RevPAR of €98.8, down from €102.6 a year earlier, even though the average daily rate rose 1.9% to €144.4. Room occupancy fell 2.2 percentage points to 68.4%. July was weaker still: occupancy 74.1%, down 4.3 points, the average rate down 2.0% to €154.6, and total accommodation revenue down 2.0%. Over the same seven months national revenue grew 5.3%.
The airport cap explains part of this. Hotel supply keeps arriving: Savills counted 19 new hotels with more than 1,500 rooms opening in Greater Lisbon in the first nine months of 2025, and JLL expects about half of Portugal's 7,520 pipeline rooms to 2028 to be in the Lisbon metropolitan area. If seats into the city cannot grow faster than about 1–3% a year, more rooms mean lower occupancy. The July 2026 fall in American nights nationally, down 3.1% and only the second fall since the pandemic, adds to it.
The short-term rental reset
Alojamento local, Portugal's registered short-term rental, grew in Lisbon from a few hundred units in 2010 to about 19,000 by 2019, according to city councillors. In May 2024 there were 19,259 active registrations. The city's first containment rules, in force from November 2019, capped new registrations where AL reached 20% of permanent homes.
Three things changed between late 2025 and spring 2026. A new municipal regulation was approved by the Municipal Assembly on 2 December 2025, published in the Diário da República on 5 December and in force on 6 December. It halved the thresholds: absolute containment where AL reaches 10% of permanent-residence dwellings, relative containment from 5%, measured monthly by parish and by neighbourhood. If the whole city reaches 10%, all of it goes into containment automatically. The city-wide ratio at approval was 7.2%.
Then the city enforced an insurance requirement that had applied since March 2025. In early February 2026 it cancelled 6,765 registrations that had never shown proof of insurance, about 40% of the inactive registrations on its books by its own description. The mayor told the Municipal Assembly that 11,779 registrations remained active on 1 February, and that no new licences had been issued since. Santa Maria Maior and Misericórdia each lost more than 1,000 registrations.
Third, the map changed. Because cancelled registrations no longer count in the ratio, Arroios, Estrela and São Vicente dropped from absolute to relative containment in April 2026, and Avenidas Novas left containment altogether. The historic core did not move. At approval, Santa Maria Maior's ratio was 66.9% and Misericórdia's 43.8%; no clean-up of dormant licences brings those anywhere near 10%.
Since 20 May 2026 EU Regulation 2024/1028 has also applied. Platforms must display a valid registration number on every listing and send activity data to the authorities, monthly for the largest platforms. For the first time Lisbon will be able to see which registrations are actually trading. Nationally, municipalities had cancelled 10,324 registrations by June 2026, and more than 37,000 were still without insurance.
Two cautions on the numbers. Our planning research carried a figure of "18,539 registrations, 11,774 active" that we could not find in any source; the arithmetic does not reconcile either. And no official annual series of Lisbon AL registrations is published in an accessible form. The figures above are what the city has stated, with dates.
Cruise: fewer passengers, more valuable ones
The Port of Lisbon's own annual reports give a different picture of 2025 from the headlines, which focused on record turnaround numbers. Both are true.
| Indicator | 2019 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total passengers | 571,259 | 758,328 | 763,752 | 705,437 |
| Total calls | 310 | 347 | 369 | 335 |
| Turnaround passengers | 72,830 | 204,004 | 171,956 | 206,226 |
| Transit passengers | 498,429 | 554,324 | 591,796 | 499,211 |
| Transit calls | 211 | 211 | 229 | 188 |
| Turnaround share of passengers (derived) | 12.7% | 26.9% | 22.5% | 29.2% |
Total cruise passengers fell 8% in 2025, to 705,437, and calls fell from 369 to 335. Transit passengers, who arrive for a day and leave, fell by 92,585. Turnaround passengers, who start or end a cruise in Lisbon, rose 20% to a record 206,226. APL's own estimate of spending makes the point: €573 per embarking passenger against €39 per transit passenger, for a direct impact above €80 million in 2025.
Our research plan read this as Lisbon "shifting toward homeporting". The data supports a shift in mix, not a substitution. Total traffic fell, and 2024 turnaround had itself fallen 16% from 2023, so one year is thin evidence of a trend. The first half of 2026 grew in both segments: 302,496 passengers and 165 calls, up about 5%, with June the busiest June on record. Press coverage that put British passengers at 40% of the 2025 total is also wrong on APL's figures, which give 239,709, or 34%. Americans were 22.7%.
Transit passengers aged 13 and over have paid a €2 municipal disembarkation tax since April 2024; the city expected about €1.2 million a year. A shore-power project for the cruise terminal, with phase one costed at €18–20 million, is due around 2027. No source we found reports it operating yet.
Monuments under quota
Lisbon's landmark sites are now rationed. From January 2025 the Jerónimos Monastery ticket rose from €12 to €18 and the Belém Tower from €8 to €15, with Portuguese residents given 52 free days a year; the head of Museus e Monumentos de Portugal said both sites were exceeding their capacity. Jerónimos then moved to timed slots with a reported cap of 3,000 visitors a day from September 2025. The Belém Tower closed for about a year of works and reopened in May 2026 with 30-minute slots and roughly 900 visitors a day.
Even so, Jerónimos drew 1,040,203 visitors in 2025, up from 946,014, the most of any state-run monument in Portugal. The Belém Tower fell from 387,379 to 127,791 because it was shut for most of the year. The Museu Nacional do Azulejo reached 335,255. The city-run Castelo de São Jorge, the most visited monument in Lisbon itself, had about 1.7 million visitors in 2024, of whom only 19,896 were residents using free entry.
The pressure is greater one train ride away. Parques de Sintra recorded 3,656,479 visitors across its sites in 2024, and Pena alone about 1.9 million in 2025, under a slot system capped at about 5,100 a day. Tourist coaches were banned from Sintra's Volta do Duche from July 2026, and operators have gone to court. Our Sintra destination page covers how to plan around the slots.
Lisbon's UNESCO listings are precise and fewer than often implied: the Monastery of the Hieronymites and Tower of Belém (World Heritage, 1983, reference 263bis), the Cultural Landscape of Sintra (World Heritage, 1995, reference 723) and Fado (Intangible Cultural Heritage, 2011). "Pombaline Lisbon", the rebuilt Baixa, has been on the Tentative List since 2017. Alfama, azulejo, Tram 28 and the city as a whole are not UNESCO-listed.
Eight claims tested
Lisbon attracts confident numbers. These are the ones we tested against primary sources for this article.
Two other claims are true with caveats. Livraria Bertrand is certified by Guinness World Records as the world's oldest operating bookshop, founded in 1732, with the record dated 19 April 2010, not 2011 as often stated. It has not been in continuous premises: the 1755 earthquake destroyed the original shop and it reached Rua Garrett only in 1773. And Lisbon is one of Europe's most attractive city destinations on Euromonitor's 2023 index, where it ranked 20th, but not one of its most visited by arrivals; Mastercard's destination index, still quoted, has not been published since 2019.
Environment and risk
The 1755 earthquake remains the risk that matters most for a city of Pombaline masonry, but no current national loss estimate is published in an accessible form. The often-quoted line that Lisbon is Europe's second-highest seismic-risk city after Istanbul traces to one engineer's 2017 newspaper interview, not to a study. The city's ReSist programme had assessed 1,593 municipal residential buildings by June 2025, and a support scheme for private buildings is due in 2026.
Water arrives in bursts. On 13 December 2022 the Lisboa/Instituto Geofísico station recorded 120.3mm of rain in 24 hours, an absolute record, and the Baixa flooded. The city's €250 million drainage plan finished boring its 5km Monsanto–Santa Apolónia tunnel in July 2025; the second tunnel, Chelas–Beato, is now expected in 2029. Heat is the newer pressure: 2025 was mainland Portugal's fifth-warmest year, with six heatwaves and a national June record of 46.6°C at Mora.
Lisbon has no published carrying-capacity study. The council approved one in February 2019; a councillor's formal request in February 2026 recorded that it was still being prepared. The tools in use are blunter: a €4 nightly tourist tax since September 2024, slot systems at monuments, containment zones for rentals, and coach bans in Sintra. The tax raised €49.9 million in 2024, more than half of all tourist-tax revenue in Portugal, and €38.3 million in the first half of 2025 alone.
What this means for travelers, businesses and analysts
Travelers. Lisbon is least crowded and cheapest per room outside July–September, and because it is the least seasonal region on the mainland, spring and autumn lose little. Book Jerónimos, the Belém Tower and Pena as timed slots before you travel; walk-up entry is no longer reliable. Budget €4 per person per night in tourist tax, for up to seven nights. Expect the airport to be full at peak hours for at least the next decade, and leave margin on connections. Our Lisbon travel guide has neighbourhoods, prices and what has changed for 2026, and our Porto destination page covers the faster-growing alternative gateway.
Tourism businesses and investors. The binding constraint on Lisbon is air seats, not demand. Passenger growth of 1–3% a year meeting a hotel pipeline of several thousand rooms implies continued pressure on occupancy, and the January–July 2026 RevPAR fall is the first sign of it. Watch three thresholds: declared airport capacity reaching 40 movements an hour (works from 2027), the TAP buyer's hub decision in October 2026, and any parish in the historic centre approaching the end of its containment status. Underwriting Lisbon on 2023–24 growth rates assumes capacity that does not yet exist. The AL purge removed dormant licences more than trading ones, so do not read the 6,765 figure as supply removed from the market. The EU platform data from mid-2026 will show what is actually trading.
Journalists and analysts. Safe to cite: 36,126,000 airport passengers in 2025 (+2.9%, VINCI) and 35,093,000 in 2024; 226,990 commercial movements in 2025; 38 declared movements an hour; 15,740,364 overnight stays in the municipality in 2024 (INE); Grande Lisboa at 23.9% of national stays in 2025 and 81.4% non-resident; the US as the region's top market at 16.8%; 6,765 AL registrations cancelled and 11,779 active at 1 February 2026; 705,437 cruise passengers in 2025 (APL); 1,040,203 visitors at Jerónimos in 2025. Do not repeat: a Lisbon visitor count, a Lisbon share of national receipts, "36.1 million in 2024", "€110 million a year" for Web Summit, "40% British" for cruise, or "sunniest capital in Europe". The finding this article adds to the series: Lisbon publishes far better municipal data than the Greek destinations in our sister series, yet still has no regional receipts figure, no visitor count, no line-level tram ridership and no carrying-capacity study. The Lisbon region page links the destinations around the capital that this article's comparisons draw on.
Data & sources
Period covered: 2017–2025 annual series, 2026 to July/August
- VINCI Airports / ANA Aeroportos de Portugal · Annual and half-year passenger and commercial movement figures for Lisbon and the ANA network, 2020–H1 2026 Accessed 2 Oct 2026.
- INE – Statistics Portugal · Overnight stays, guests, RevPAR, ADR, occupancy, seasonality and airport passengers (via INE releases, Pordata and press reproductions) Accessed 2 Oct 2026.
- Pordata – Retratos dos Municípios (Lisboa) · INE municipal tourism data: 2024 overnight stays, beds, accommodation mix, tourists per day Accessed 2 Oct 2026.
- Eurostat (tour_occ_nin2, tour_occ_arn2) · Regional nights and arrivals for AML (PT17) and Grande Lisboa (PT1A), 2019–2025 Accessed 2 Oct 2026.
- APL – Administração do Porto de Lisboa · Cruise traffic activity reports 2019–2025: passengers, calls, turnaround and transit, nationality Accessed 2 Oct 2026.
- Câmara Municipal de Lisboa · AL registration cancellations, containment monitoring, tourist tax Accessed 2 Oct 2026.
- Turismo de Portugal – TravelBI · Regional distribution of overnight stays and card spending by source market (US, Brazil, UK, Spain, Germany, France) Accessed 2 Oct 2026.
- Banco de Portugal (via ECO) · National travel receipts 2025 (€29.13bn) and H1 2026; confirms no regional breakdown Accessed 2 Oct 2026.
- Museus e Monumentos de Portugal (via Renascença/Lusa) · 2024 and 2025 visitor numbers for Jerónimos, Belém Tower and national museums Accessed 2 Oct 2026.
- Parques de Sintra – Monte da Lua · 2024 annual report: visitors, revenue and Pena slot system Accessed 2 Oct 2026.
- Diário da República / PLMJ · Lisbon municipal AL regulation (Aviso n.º 29926-A/2025/2), thresholds and dates Accessed 2 Oct 2026.
- Governo de Portugal – Council of Ministers · 14 May 2024 decision on the new Lisbon airport and the 45–47 movements/hour target for Humberto Delgado Accessed 2 Oct 2026.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre · Inscription details for the Hieronymites and Belém Tower (263bis), Sintra (723) and the Pombaline Lisbon Tentative List entry Accessed 2 Oct 2026.
- ECO – capacity and airport reporting · ANA environmental study for 40 movements/hour (June 2026); INE January–July 2026 airport data Accessed 2 Oct 2026.
- Presstur (INE regional releases) · Grande Lisboa RevPAR, ADR, occupancy and revenue, January–July 2026 Accessed 2 Oct 2026.
- Observador – TAP privatisation · Improved offers from Air France-KLM and Lufthansa, 30 September 2026 Accessed 2 Oct 2026.
Methodology
Sources consulted: VINCI Airports traffic releases (AMF filings) and the GEE/Ministério da Economia airport series; ANAC statements via Lusa; INE monthly and annual tourism-activity releases, reproduced through Pordata, Presstur, ECO, RTP, Postal and Barlavento; Eurostat regional tourism datasets tour_occ_nin2 and tour_occ_arn2; Turismo de Portugal TravelBI market pages; Banco de Portugal travel receipts via ECO and Portugal Global; APL cruise activity reports 2019–2025; Câmara Municipal de Lisboa news releases and the Diário da República notice for the municipal AL regulation, with PLMJ and Cuatrecasas legal notes; Museus e Monumentos de Portugal figures via Lusa; Parques de Sintra's 2024 annual report; UNESCO inscription records; the Council of Ministers communiqué of 14 May 2024; ANA's new-airport reporting via DN, idealista and Postal.
Limitations: (1) INE's own website was not directly reachable during research, so INE figures were taken from Eurostat, Pordata and press reproductions that quote INE releases; each is labelled. (2) INE's main accommodation survey excludes AL units with fewer than 10 beds, which are most of Lisbon's short-term rentals. (3) Grande Lisboa (NUTS 2024) starts in 2023 and excludes the Setúbal peninsula; 2019 comparisons use the old Área Metropolitana de Lisboa and are not like-for-like. (4) INE revised population estimates in June 2026, which changes any per-resident ratio; we state both denominators. (5) No regional tourism receipts, visitor counts or carrying-capacity studies exist for Lisbon.
Contested and unverified claims are reported with both values and the source we favour, not resolved silently. Derived figures (guest check-ins, passengers per movement, per-resident ratios, shares) are computed by us from labelled source figures and marked as derived. Claims that failed verification, including two from our own planning research, are named in the corrections panel and the disclaimer.
Notes on the data
No Lisbon-level figure exists for visitors, tourism receipts or carrying capacity. We used INE overnight stays and guests, TravelBI card-spend shares and accommodation revenue instead. Contested figures: Lisbon airport 2024 traffic (35.09M per VINCI; some pages wrongly give 36.1M); Lisbon municipal population (544,851 census 2021 vs 658,236 INE revised 2025 estimate); active AL registrations (11,779 at 1 Feb 2026 per CML statements vs ~12,235 per Idealista in April 2026); Parques de Sintra 2024 visitors (3,656,479 annual report vs 3.4M Lusa); new-airport cost (€8.5bn first report vs €7.9–8.9bn July 2026 plan); South Pier cost (€233M contract vs >€250M vs >€300M for the wider plan); 2025 cruise calls (APL total 335; '121' in press is turnaround calls). Failed verification: '36.1M passengers in 2024'; '~31% of Europe–Brazil seats' and '18,539 registrations / 11,774 active' (both from our own planning research); '10.4M visitors / 18 tourists per resident'; 'sunniest capital in Europe'; 'older than Rome'; 'Web Summit €110M a year'; 'Lisbon €11bn = up to 45% of national receipts'; 'UK 40% of cruise passengers'; 'second-highest seismic risk in Europe' (single expert opinion); load factor 85.5% (no primary source). Derived figures: ~6.8M guest check-ins (nights ÷ average stay); 2019 commercial movements (~217,650); passengers per movement; passengers and nights per resident; turnaround share of cruise passengers; Grande Lisboa 2025 INE nights (~19.6M from a 23.9% share); city share of regional nights (~81%). Organiser- or self-reported: Web Summit attendance and impact; APL's €80M cruise impact and per-passenger spend; the Jerónimos 3,000-a-day cap (reported by Time Out; no MMP notice found).
Frequently asked questions
How many tourists visit Lisbon each year?
No official visitor count exists. INE recorded 15,740,364 overnight stays in Lisbon municipality in 2024 at an average 2.3 nights, which implies about 6.8 million guest check-ins; on an average night about 43,000 tourists sleep in the city. Grande Lisboa had about 20 million nights in 2025. Figures such as '10.4 million visitors' are modelled estimates, not INE data.
How many passengers does Lisbon airport handle?
Humberto Delgado handled 36,126,000 passengers in 2025, up 2.9%, and 35,093,000 in 2024 (VINCI Airports). Pages that give 36.1 million for 2024 have the year wrong. January–July 2026 traffic was 20.8 million, up 1.0% (INE).
Is Lisbon airport at capacity?
Effectively yes at peak times. Declared capacity is 38 movements an hour and ANAC reported 93% utilisation in 2023. Commercial movements grew 0.8% in 2025 and fell 0.2% in the first half of 2026, while passengers grew only through larger, fuller aircraft. ANA has applied to raise capacity to 40 movements an hour, with works from early 2027.
When will the new Lisbon airport open?
ANA's July 2026 plan for Luís de Camões at Alcochete schedules opening for mid-2037, or late 2036 if accelerated; the government wants about three years sooner. The plan has two runways and 64 gates, costs €7.9–8.9bn, and still needs a financial report (due 17 January 2027) and a full application (January 2028).
How much is the Lisbon tourist tax?
€4 per person per night since 1 September 2024, charged for up to seven nights (€28 maximum), with children under 13 exempt. Cruise passengers in transit pay €2 on disembarkation. The tax raised €49.9 million in 2024.
How many short-term rentals (AL) are there in Lisbon?
The city said 11,779 alojamento local registrations were active on 1 February 2026, after it cancelled 6,765 that lacked mandatory insurance. New rules in force since 6 December 2025 block new registrations in parishes where AL exceeds 10% of permanent homes; Santa Maria Maior was at 66.9% when they were approved.
How many cruise passengers visit Lisbon?
705,437 in 2025 on 335 calls, down 8% from 763,752 in 2024 (Port of Lisbon). Transit passengers fell to 499,211 while passengers starting or ending a cruise in Lisbon reached a record 206,226. The first half of 2026 grew about 5%.
What is the most visited monument in Lisbon?
Castelo de São Jorge, with about 1.7 million visitors in 2024. Among state-run monuments, the Jerónimos Monastery had 1,040,203 visitors in 2025, the most in Portugal. Pena Palace in nearby Sintra had about 1.9 million. All three now use timed tickets or daily caps.
Where do most tourists in Lisbon come from?
The United States is Grande Lisboa's largest foreign market, with 16.8% of non-resident overnight stays in 2025 (INE). Nearly half of all American nights in Portugal (48.9%) and over half of Brazilian nights (52.3%) are spent in the Lisbon region, compared with 12.7% of British nights (Turismo de Portugal TravelBI).