Lagos has fed itself from the same stretch of coastline for seven hundred years, and the town's food map still follows the medieval grid laid down when Dom Manuel I chartered the fishermen's guild in 1504. The auction hall at the western harbor opens before dawn; by mid-morning, octopus and bream are already laid across ice in the municipal market on Praça Infante D. Henrique, where vendors speak a Portuguese thick with Arabic loan-words inherited from the Moorish occupation that ended here in 1249. The town's culinary identity was forged by necessity: salt cod from Newfoundland arrived in the holds of caravels returning from the New World, olive oil came overland from Alentejo, and almonds — planted by North African farmers in the eighth century — still carpet the inland hills each February. Today, Lagos sustains a food culture that resists the flattening pressure of resort tourism. The classic Lagos food tour routes thread through the Rua 25 de Abril and the narrow lanes behind Igreja de Santa Maria, connecting family-run tascas, century-old bakeries, and tile-fronted wine merchants whose cellars stock amphora-aged reservas from the Alentejo and Douro. These are not reconstructions: the same ovens that baked ship's biscuit for Vasco da Gama's fleet now turn out bolo de mel and folar de Lagos, a saffron-tinted loaf still baked to Easter recipes transcribed in the 1600s. The tour format — part walking seminar, part tasting relay — emerged in the mid-2010s as chefs and cultural guides sought a structure that could hold both history and flavor without devolving into either lecture or pub crawl. The culinary walk sits at the intersection of place and palate. Participants move through the town's historical core, pausing at sites where food and architecture overlap: the Moorish-era granary vaults beneath a pastelaria on Rua da Barroca, the nineteenth-century market ironwork commissioned after the 1755 earthquake, the azulejo panels in a family-run adega depicting the cod trade's Atlantic triangle. Each stop layers context — how a dish traveled, who cooked it first, why it survived — onto the act of tasting. The result is a record of Lagos that exists nowhere else: not in museums, not in guidebooks, but in the unbroken practice of people who have cooked the same recipes in the same kitchens for generations.