The Art of Listening to a City
How Audio Tours Deepen Travel
There’s something I’ve always loved about walking alone in a city with my headphones on - whether it be listening to music, a podcast or just using them to filter out the sounds of the city chaos. It’s like slipping into a secret world, a slightly altered state where everything feels more intimate and more mine.
As someone who is highly sensitive to sound and to large groups, I use my headphones to keep me calm and grounded. That’s why I fell in love with self-guided audio tours. Especially in a city like Lisbon, where the past doesn’t sit behind glass, but spills out (somewhat chaotically and whimsically) into the streets. There's a kind of magic in wandering on your own terms and letting the stories find you as you go. No group to keep up with, no one bothering you. Just you, the rhythm of the city, and a voice in your ear that brings the city and its stories to life.
What I love most is the space it creates. You get to move at your own pace. If something moves you—a view, a poem, a random ruin you might not have otherwise noticed—you can stop. Breathe. Listen again. There’s no pressure to keep up. I think that’s part of what makes it so intimate. The experience feels like yours alone, even if thousands have walked the same route before you.
VoiceMap is one of the platforms that really understands this and I think their model is simple, but brilliant. Tours written and narrated by locals, storytellers, historians, artists—people who really know the heart of a place. It feels like being shown around by a friend who wants to share not just the facts, but the feeling of a city. The texture. The ghosts in the corners. So when I discovered that I could write, design and record my own tours and use Voicemap as a platform, I was on board from day 1.
Lisbon lends itself to this kind of travel. There’s so much you can miss if you’re only looking. On Tram 28, for example: how many people ride it without ever knowing the deeper history they’re gliding past? The Lisbon literary tour that we are working on - that loop through Alfama or Bairro Alto is going to open up layers of myth, resistance, poetry through the words of Portugal’s most famous writers themselves...we’re excited for that one!
And there’s a quiet pleasure in learning this way. I think of it less as being taught, and more as being invited. You don’t need to memorize dates or names. You just need to listen. To let the words and sounds settle around you and guide your gaze toward things you might’ve otherwise walked past.
More and more, I think travelers are craving this kind of experience. Something slower, deeper, more grounded. And it’s not about giving up spontaneity—it’s the opposite. With a self-guided audio tour, you’re actually more free to follow your curiosity. You can pause for a pastry. Step into a church. Replay a story. Skip ahead. Walk backwards. Ride the tram twice. No one’s watching. You’re writing your own story of your own experience of the city. Forming your own special relationship with it…
For me, this is what modern-day pilgrimage looks like. Not a checklist of must-sees, but a series of small encounters with place, memory, myth. Guided not by a map or a schedule, but by voice and intuition.
And in a city like Lisbon—layered, lyrical, humming with stories—it just makes sense to listen.
