Is Lagos, Portugal Our Soul Place?

Some time ago, I came across the idea of a “soul place” - a place in the world where something inside you seems to settle almost immediately. You may not know exactly why. The landscape feels familiar even when you’ve never seen it before. Your body relaxes. You breathe a little differently. There’s an inexplicable sense that you belong.

I love that idea.

And in many ways, that’s part of what Carla and I have been doing on this journey.

We’re not simply looking for beautiful places. Thankfully, the world has supplied us with far too many of those to make the decision particularly easy.

We’re looking for somewhere that might eventually feel like home. Those are two very different things. A place can be spectacular and still not feel livable. You can stand in front of an extraordinary view, take fifty photographs, eat an amazing meal, and think, I’m so glad we came here.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you want to buy groceries there on Tuesday.

So as we travel through Portugal, we’ve been trying to look beyond the things that make a place wonderful to visit and pay attention to the things that might make it wonderful to live.

Which brings us back to Lagos. Lagos checks an awful lot of boxes for us. We love the climate. We love being within walking distance of that magnificent coastline. We love the scale of the town and the fact that most of our daily life can happen on foot.

That last one has become increasingly important. When we returned to the United States for several months, we were reminded very quickly how much time American life can involve getting into a car, driving somewhere, parking, doing whatever we came to do, getting back into the car, and driving somewhere else.

Then repeating the entire exercise.

Here, we walk. We walk to the market. We walk to restaurants. We walk for coffee. We walk along the marina. We walk to the cliffs. And quite often, we walk simply because walking through town is one of the nicest things there is to do.

There’s something wonderfully liberating about needing a good pair of shoes more often than a set of car keys.

And then there’s the ocean. Carla and I have learned that being near water isn’t simply something we enjoy. It seems to do something to us. We’re not particularly interested in spending eight hours lying on a beach. I think I would last about twenty minutes before becoming curious about what was happening somewhere else.

But walking beside the sea? That’s different. The sound of the waves. The changing light. The immensity of the horizon. The feeling that whatever was occupying your mind five minutes earlier suddenly isn’t quite as important as you thought it was.

We thrive near water. So any place we seriously consider calling home is going to have a much better chance if the sea is nearby. Lagos certainly passes that test.

We’ve also loved how safe and comfortable we feel here. There’s something easy about walking through town in the evening without giving much thought to whether we should be there. Of course, common sense travels with us wherever we go, but living somewhere where personal safety doesn’t occupy much mental space is a gift.

The people matter enormously too. Lagos is remarkably international, yet it still feels Portuguese. We hear languages from all over the world. Different ages, nationalities, cultures, and ways of life seem to coexist fairly naturally here.

That matters to us.

The longer we travel, the more convinced I become that one of the great pleasures of being alive is discovering how many different ways there are to be human. I don’t want to live somewhere where everybody looks like me, thinks like me, worships like me, or comes from the same place I do. That sounds terribly boring.

We’re drawn to communities where difference is simply part of the landscape.

Portugal’s generally tolerant social climate has appealed to us for the same reason. How a country treats people who have historically been marginalized matters to Carla and me. LGBTQ people, immigrants, refugees, people without much money - those things tell us something about the values of a society.

No country lives up perfectly to its ideals. Certainly ours doesn’t. But compassion matters to us, and when we imagine becoming residents rather than visitors, those questions become far more important than whether the sunset is pretty.

Although a pretty sunset certainly doesn’t hurt.

Then there’s the food. Lagos continues to make a very strong argument in that department. The seafood is wonderful. The markets are excellent. Because the town attracts people from all over the world, the restaurant scene is far more varied than you might expect for a place this size.

We have eaten exceedingly well here. Possibly too well. Thankfully, the cliffs provide miles of walking trails, so nature has thoughtfully created a system of checks and balances.

All of this leads to the question we keep asking:

Could we live here? Yes. Very easily, I think.

But that doesn’t mean Lagos is perfect. We’re not really expecting perfect anymore. I’m not sure such a place exists, and if it does, I suspect the housing market is already unbearable.

There are compromises. We want to continue traveling frequently throughout Europe, and Lagos isn’t quite as convenient for that as living near a major international airport. Faro is the closest airport, and getting there takes a little planning.

We also wonder whether Lagos might eventually feel too small. That’s harder to know. What feels charming and intimate during several weeks or months could someday begin to feel limiting. Would we still be discovering new things after a year? Would there be enough intellectual and cultural life? Would we occasionally want more than Lagos could provide? Maybe.

Every place involves a trade-off. Big cities offer endless activity but can become exhausting. Small towns offer ease and intimacy but occasionally leave you wondering whether anything new has happened since Tuesday. The trick, I suppose, is finding the set of compromises that suits you.

And Lagos comes surprisingly close.

What I keep returning to isn’t any particular feature on our list. It’s the feeling. We enjoy waking up here. We enjoy walking out the door. We enjoy the rhythm of the day. We enjoy being near the water and being surrounded by people from many different parts of the world.

We feel comfortable. And comfort, I’m learning, shouldn’t be underestimated when you’re thinking about where to spend your life.

So is Lagos our soul place?

I don’t know yet. That seems like something a place has to reveal slowly. But I do know that Lagos has moved beyond being somewhere we simply enjoyed visiting. It has entered that much smaller category of places where Carla and I can look at one another and say, with complete seriousness:

We could make a life here. And for now, that feels like a pretty wonderful thing to have discovered.