Oh! My Cod food tours and experiences started with an idea to share with travelers what I was already doing with friends.
Oh! My Cod compiles all the experiences I designed for you, in order to share my enthusiasm about Lisbon and Portugal, its uniqueness and hidden secrets, the food, the wine, the inner richness of the people who we cross and who welcome us, the important contrasts between the cosmopolitan regions and the traditional ones but also the geographical and the cultural ones as well.
Being a local myself, born and raised in Lisbon (Alfama), I was fascinated by the city and then Portugal in general. Gastronomy and local people were my guides. Through them, I was constantly creating opportunities to explore the country and to share it with my closest friends.
I can feel myself traveling, in the deepest sense, in my own country. I can become, for a while, a ‘foreigner’ with all the good things that it implies. This momentary external gaze, this decentered position, and genuine curiosity is not always easy to foster in a local native, but it’s essential to ‘really see’ what we have in front of us, and to nurture the admiration and the passion for something (or someone!) you are in touch with every day, sometimes since the day you were born.
Why not open these personal experiences to travelers and the curious, I asked myself? I could be doing what I love and sharing it with endless cultures and people.
So, I started this journey in 2016 and, step by step, it grew naturally.
I was inspired to merge my background in anthropology and my love for Portugal and food, with this conscious travel mindset to create impactful traveler experiences to other people.
Now we are a small team of food experts and cultural mediators and we’ve welcomed over 15,000 guests. And, yes, we remember all of you! We have one of the world’s Top Rated Gastronomic Experiences on Airbnb with more than 5000 lovely five-star reviews.
We started in Lisbon, but we can take you abroad, to some of my favorite regions in Portugal!
Slow food travel in Portugal. Our model of travel and food experiences is made up of meetings and exchanges. Small-group food and cultural traveler experiences. Connecting authentically with locals, working with locally own business only, promoting sustainable travel experiences and food biodiversity and keeping a diverse and inclusive perspective.
Be eclectic, act, and think accordingly. This is reflected in the way we design our experiences, but also through the members who comprise of our team, with diverse cultural and professional backgrounds. We always aim to have an eclectic team, with personal interests and ideas, ‘outside’ from Oh! My Cod Tours. Because this is what an interesting and happy host is.
Be sustainable and glocal as a host and as a traveler. By glocal we mean to stress the urgency of going beyond the expired dichotomies of local and global but also tradition and modernity, native and foreign.
Our contemporary world is best addressed and seen when you replace the gap between those concepts with connections. Local communities are best understood if we locate them in a more global context. The classical native perspective, or the ‘native legitimacy’ of being the best representation and the truth of a specific culture or a community, is outdated. There isn’t such a thing. We are no longer exclusively defined by geographical borders or traditional and folkloric traditions. Instead, while traveling and living in a certain place, we understand better what we experience, observe, eat and see, through a combination of perspectives and positions and the interplay between an “insider” and an “outsider” perspective.
This is true regardless if we are in contemporary Lisbon, or in the Portuguese countryside or anywhere else in the world. By doing this we built sustainable and meaningful experiences and encounters.
Critical thinking. Applied to everyday life but also to history and culture. Be sensitive to multiple perspectives around the same content.
The best way to learn and be transformed is through experience. As my clinical and therapeutic work shows and, as many scholars demonstrated, we need to experience something first hand to truly connect with it in order to relate, to incorporate and be transformed by it. We learn through experience.
Traveling changes us. To live local impactful and meaningful experiences with a glocal perspective and sharing different perspectives makes all of us change for the better.
Only the best will do. We will take good care of you and we will help you to find our favourite hidden gems in a safe, sustainable, local and engaged tourism model.
All these pretty faces are unique, as well as their personalities, energy, tastes, fantasies, and also their caprices, shyness, and vulnerabilities. And we love it!
This is what makes us richer and what enhances the relationships and encounters we have by making them authentic, dynamic, unpredictable, creative, and alive!
This is our philosophy. This is what we believe in! This is what we do.
Besides, we were all strangers once but became connected in one way or another. And in some cases, even friends.
We build invisible bridges.
How do we do this?
- Having some of the best and most passionate hosts you can meet. Open, fun, empathic, genuine, sensitive but assertive, adventurous but responsible, knowledgeable but curious, and open to learning from every encounter!
- Keeping our groups small and our experiences meaningful, informative and fun.
- Having delicious food and wine.
Whether you come with friends, family, or alone, this experience is tailored to you!