In Lisbon, you’re never far from a pastel de nata, the city’s iconic egg tart. While Pastéis de Belém, the 1837 pastry shop that invented the modern version of the pastry, still draws streams of diners out to its the city’s western edge, the center has become crowded with places selling golden, palm-sized custard treats.
Beginning in the early 2010s — as Lisbon emerged as a heavyweight of global tourism and visitors poured into the city — new chain shops like Nata Lisboa, Manteigaria, and Fábrica da Nata collectively opened dozens of locations focused on pastéis de nata in the capital and across Portugal. Today, you’ll find pastéis in hip cafes, restaurants, airport souvenir shops, Starbucks, and even Zara.
If you’ve never tried a pastel, you should do exactly that, without a shred of shame. But for some locals, the sweet pastry now comes with a bitter afternote: The once-humble custard tart is a marker of a broader economic and cultural transformation that has displaced residents and other food businesses.
“There’s nothing but pastel de nata shops around here,” says Fernando Portelada, who has been working for 43 years at A Ginjinha, a shop in the central Largo São Domingos neighborhood dating back to 1840 that specializes in Portugal’s traditional sour cherry liqueur. He points out that on Rua Augusta around the corner, there are eight pastel de nata shops crammed into a hundred-meter stretch. “It’s overwhelming,” he adds.
Over the last decade, Lisbon reinvented itself to cater to foreign tourists. Especially following the COVID-19 pandemic, which sparked a sense of desperation in the visitor-dependent city, international tourism has come roaring back, even as historic restaurants and neighborhood bakeries shutter under the weight of soaring rents, hotel expansions, and aggressive foreign investment. Protestors have taken to the streets over unchecked gentrification.
“Lisbon has been taken over by tourism, for better or worse,” Portelada says. “There’s nothing left to be done.”
All the while, pastel de nata shops have multiplied on nearly every corner, spreading in step with (and feeding off) rampant gentrification, as investors cash in on Portugal’s most recognizable, and most commercially exploitable, pastry. In a city now populated by vacationers, the pastel de nata has transformed from an expression of Portuguese taste into an expression of capital. All over Lisbon but especially in its center, a sweet scent hangs in the air and lines of visitors snake down the historic blocks, daily sensory reminders of a tourist capital on the brink.
“The [pastel de nata] recipe dates back to the 16th century, when the confections, like many other Portuguese sweets, were made by nuns in convents,” Miguel Andrade wrote in 2017 for the Eater Guide to Lisbon. “Now, locals eat pastéis de nata at breakfast, in the midmorning, after lunch, or in the evening — any time they’re craving a snack.”
Following the 2008 global financial crisis, Lisbon threw open its doors to international tourists, using the pastel de nata to attract attention. In 2009, the city launched the O Melhor Pastel de Nata (Best Pastel de Nata) competition, celebrating the best egg custard tarts the way Paris does with its baguettes. Then Manteigaria opened in 2014, focusing entirely on pastel de nata at a time when single-product pastry shops weren’t really a thing in Portugal; after the shop proved successful, more brands launched similar concepts, doing for the pastel what Ladurée did for the French macaron.
Visitors and food media (Eater included) globbed on, transforming the photo-ready tart from everyday foodstuff to national icon. Soon enough, the pastel’s image was splashed on souvenir fridge magnets and socks; a giant pastel was welcoming visitors to the Lego shop in the downtown Armazéns do Chiado mall; and travel influencers were gobbling up pastéis faster than Emma Stone in Poor Things. These days, some locals say they don’t eat pastéis at all — it’s just something for the tourists.
Castro Atelier, part of the Plateform restaurant group, started selling pastéis de nata in Porto in 2018, before opening three more locations in Lisbon in the years that followed. Plateform CEO Rui Sanches says the brand was born from a desire to honor the original pastel de nata recipe while elevating its technical and aesthetic standards. Each Castro shop produces around 2,000 tarts a day, with strict controls over size, temperature, and baking time (each weighing about 24 grams and baked at 400 degrees celsius) using only the highest-quality ingredients. The strict protocols ensure the pastéis come out of the oven at just the right temperature, making them crisp without burning, and the filling (which is less sweet than some competitors) cooks through completely (not so runny it drips on your hands, not so firm it loses its velvety texture).
“Today, we [as travelers] are all ambassadors of the cuisines we’ve experienced around the world,” Sanches says. “That’s what we want the pastel de nata to be for Portugal’s gastronomy.”
Sanches sees Castro’s approach as necessary progress for the pastel de nata to effectively serve as both a global calling card for Portuguese gastronomy and a gateway for tourists to explore the country’s rich and varied food culture — even if that means taking over spaces once occupied by older businesses. Tourism demand, he says, can breathe new life into city spaces that might otherwise have stayed empty.
“We opened in an old grocery store that was about to close,” he says. “We didn’t take anyone’s place. We revived something that was no longer working.” He’s also critical of the nostalgia surrounding old pastry shops that no longer maintain standards as high as Castro’s and small cafes serving frozen egg tarts. “We can’t romanticize something that’s badly made,” he says. “If we’re going to show the world what we have, it has to be the best we can offer. Even tradition has to evolve.”
“The pastel de nata has helped Lisbon a lot,” says Mairton Souza, general manager of Fábrica da Nata. “It created jobs and boosted the economy. Today, it’s an asset for the city.” When Souza arrived in Lisbon from his native Brazil two decades ago, he says, people avoided going through the city’s historic central Baixa district, which was rundown and plagued by safety issues; now the neighborhood constitutes the city’s economic engine, and Fábrica da Nata employs a staff of 150 employees to sell thousands of pastries each day.
But, he adds, “all our employees live in peripheral areas like Almada, Amadora, and Odivelas. No one can afford to live here anymore.”
The highest concentrations of pastéis shops are in Lisbon’s most expensive neighborhoods: Chiado, Santa Maria Maior, Campo de Ourique, Avenidas Novas, Belém. Where rental prices peak at 21.8 euros per square meter (a historic high in 2025) and sale prices surpass €6,000 per square meter, brands like Manteigaria, Aloma, and Castro cluster. Of Manteigaria’s eight shops, not one is in a neighborhood with below-average housing prices.
The pattern is hard to miss: Where tourists line up on the sidewalk for warm egg tarts, rents are climbing and residents are moving out.
These trends aren’t the doing of a single brand, but the broad ripple effects of the pro-tourism recovery plan Portugal launched in 2008. That strategy was a “familiar neoliberal formula,” according to University of Lisbon research fellow Agustín Cocola-Gant. The government relaxed rental laws to make evictions easier while offering golden visas and tax incentives to foreigners and investment funds. In the years since, Lisbon has turned into a textbook case of urban planning gone awry, “a city that welcomes foreign wealth but excludes many of its own citizens.”
Cocola-Grant goes on to cite several powerful statistics: Over the past decade, housing prices in Lisbon have soared, up 176 percent citywide and more than 200 percent in the historic center. In a ranking of housing unaffordability across the European Union, Portugal once sat near the bottom at 22nd out of 27 countries; today, it’s first. In the tourist-heavy center of Lisbon, 70 percent of homes hold a short-term rental license, and 200-square-foot rentals go for 1,000 euros a month, more than the monthly earnings of 60 percent of taxpayers. From 2019 to 2021, more than 56,000 Lisbon residents left the city — most of them young people, priced out by housing costs that far outstrip local salaries.
There’s also been a rise in homelessness driven by rental prices, which now affects thousands of people in Lisbon. “It’s right under our noses, on every corner; it’s impossible not to see [the increase],” Souza says.
These changes have created huge problems for restaurants. Last October, chef Hugo Brito closed his restaurant, Boi-Cavalo, after nearly a decade in Lisbon’s historic Alfama neighborhood, an area now dominated by Airbnbs.
“When we opened Boi-Cavalo, we felt Alfama was going to be reinhabited by young Lisboetas. Today, it’s a neighborhood completely geared toward tourism,” says Brito, who believes Lisbon is an exponential version of what other cities have already gone through.
Boi-Cavalo’s closure came amid a wave of others across the Portuguese capital that affected not only long-established Portuguese spots, like the decades-old Bota Alta (whose rent increased tenfold), but also international kitchens like Izcalli, a pioneer of Mexican cuisine in the city. And it has affected traditional bakeries, which have been muscled out by newer entrants; with help from Castro, Zara launched its branded pastéis shop in the Rossio neighborhood in the exact spot where the cherished local pastry shop, Pastelaria Suíça, once served the community for 92 years.
The pastel’s story can’t be entirely told in data, though. As sociologist Joshua Sbicca puts it, food offers a “visceral entry point” into the politics of gentrification; it’s not just about housing prices, but what gets eaten, by whom, and in what context.
“The Portuguese pastry has become disconnected from its roots,” says design critic and curator Frederico Duarte, co-author of the seminal Fabrico Próprio: The Design of Portuguese Semi-industrial Confectionery. “Pastel de nata brands have been created with strategies of expansion and franchising, detached from the local context of the neighborhoods.”
While plenty of dishes around the world have become internet sensations, pastéis de nata are especially easy to replicate, package, and sell, making it easy for brands to turn the pastries into a standardized tourist product, Duarte says. Brands have also experimented with wildly unorthodox flavors (pistachio, Nutella), different pastel sizes, and clickbaity desserts to attract customers.
As shops have exported the pastel de nata around the world, opening in London and New York, they’ve developed a minimalist, globalized style to make their products legible abroad, leaving behind the look and feel of Lisbon’s historic bakeries. While that style might be great for selling pastéis abroad, it has also rebounded to Lisbon, where shops have begun to look streamlined and homogenous.
“There are many places that are in Lisbon but could just as easily be in Copenhagen or Paris. There’s very little that ties them to the city,” Brito says. “It’s a kind of cultural whitewashing, a depersonalization of Lisbon’s identity.”
The pastel de nata, once an everyday treat for locals, now sits behind polished glass counters in sanitized, tourist-friendly cafes designed for Instagram feeds and international brunch culture, where visiting customers pair their pastries with iced lattes instead of a bica (as Lisboetas call their cup of coffee).
This isn’t just a problem for locals. Tourists also lose access to Portugal’s wealth of pastry when pastry shops making other treats can’t compete.
The pastel de nata “works like a monoculture of pastry: It overshadows everything around it,” Duarte says. His treatise on Portuguese sweets highlights some of the more than 200 types of delicacies that bakers still prepare according to their historic, original recipes. But, “the pastel de nata has come to represent the synthesis of all Portuguese pastry, obscuring regional diversity and artisanal production,” he says. On Rua Áurea, Duarte points out, two historic pastry shops that once offered other traditional sweets have recently closed; today, the street is lined with shops selling pastéis de nata.
“There are still excellent pastry shops making unique sweets in Lisbon,” Duarte says, “but you have to look beyond the sanitized facades, seek out other sweets, and step outside the tourist zone.”
In Lisbon today, the pastel de nata tells two stories: one about a pastry perfected over centuries since its origin in Santa Maria de Belém Monastery, and another about a city increasingly reshaped to please those eager for a bite of a viral food emblem. It’s likely impossible to disentangle the two at this point. The sweet has gone beyond iconic to become integral to the city’s fortunes, attracting tourists who are both the lifeblood and a menace to many local businesses and residents.
Or, as Souza puts it, “The gears that keep Lisbon’s economy turning are greased with custard.”
