Walking tours, free or narrated

Free route, audio tour or a guide: how the three differ

A walking tour is a planned route through a city on foot, with its stops in a set order. You can follow it on your own with a map, hear the story at each stop as an audio tour, or join a professional guide who leads it in person on a fixed date.

One afternoon in Lisbon is enough to learn how the lanes of Alfama climb, fork and dead-end every fifty meters. Most of what any tour gives you is the order: someone has already worked out which lane leads to the viewpoint and which one sends you back down the hill. That part is the same in all three kinds of tour. What changes is how much you're told along the way, and whose clock you're on.

A self-guided route is the cheapest and the loosest. You start when you like and stop for lunch when you like, but you only learn what the signs on the walls tell you. An audio tour keeps that freedom and adds the story, which matters most at places that look like nothing until someone explains them, a plain doorway or an empty square. A guided walk is the only one where you can ask a follow-up question, and a fixed start time, a group and a higher price come with it.

In the Walk With Me app, the first two overlap. Start any of our tours without buying it and the whole route and every stop appear on the map, so it works as a free self-guided walk, and the narration is the part you pay for. Walks led by local guides show on the same map as gold pins. They're new and only run where a guide has scheduled one, so most cities don't have one yet.

Walk With Me is free on iPhone and Android, with more than 280 narrated tours in over 100 cities. In the app, every tour's introduction and first stop play free, and the rest is a one-time purchase with no subscription. On this page, the tour cards play a 30-second sample, so you can hear a narrator before you download anything.