255 Years Ago Today: The Lisbon Earthquake

On this morning 255 years ago, Lisbon was one of the richest cities in the world. Wealth had been flowing in from Portugal’s colonies ever since the great wave of Portuguese exploration began in the 1400s. A new palace and opera house had recently been completed, and the 300,000 or so residents were observing one of the biggest feasts of the church calendar, All Saints Day.

Then disaster struck in the form of a massive earthquake, estimated to be about 9 on the Richter scale of intensity (by comparison, February’s Chilean quake measured 8.8 while Haiti’s one a month earlier was 7.2). Fires and a tsunami followed, and by the time fires had burned themselves out, the waterfront and much of the sumptuous new construction was gone.

But the city was rebuilt quickly, under the guidance of a man who was, in effect, probably the greatest urbanist of his day, the Marquês de Pombal. Evidence of his leadership can be seen still in the lovely centre of Lisbon.

After the Great Fire of London in 1666, a portion of London’s centre was rebuilt along lines suggested by Christopher Wren. In the early part of the 1700s, Turin had also been expanded beyond the city walls, following plans which featured squares and streets laid on grids. Pombal, acting as the king’s right hand man, and his engineers looked to both these major changes in urban structure for ideas, but in the end forged ahead to plan a new city center that was the largest urban reconstruction project ever undertaken until Napoleon III hired Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann to remake Paris more than 100 years later.

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Elevador da Bica

Lisbon

Every Street is a Mosaic

Even the most ordinary street in Lisbon is a mosaic. The stones may be simply-hewn blocks of some kind of gray rock, or elaborate black and white designs, as found in the praças. Obviously putting them in place and maintaining them is labour-intensive, but they have the advantage of providing an easily-repaired surface that also allows rain water to percolate into the ground.

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Saudade

Lisbon is an unexpectedly quiet place. It is unexpected because, stereotypically at least, large Latin cities are supposed to be brash, chaotic and teeming with life. Rome certainly has perfected the art of chaos and Madrid is nothing if not lively, but Lisbon is comparatively reserved, almost secretive. As you wander up and down its many hills, you keep thinking that maybe it’s an off day—maybe everyone has gone away for the weekend—but I have a feeling that Lisbon is always like that: always slow, always melancholy, a city of fado and saudades. This is something that Lisbonites seem to cherish: when my friend Rossana visited the city last year, she came across a piece of graffiti stencilled on a wall. “Tourists: Cherish the Portuguese silence or go to Spain,” it read.

Lisboa: Up, Down, Around

The geography of Lisbon bends pespectives – up, down, and around its seven hills. Beyond the occasional slow-swooping streetcar, the dramatic undulations of the city’s streets are broken only by its graffiti, which boldly explodes against pastel-painted houses, or grafts messages – somehow both timely and timeless – deep into centuries-solid walls.

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Summer Nights In Shadowy Streets

Prazeres 28

As dusk falls on Lisbon, the number 28 tram rattles into the Largo do Chiado, past crowds gathering for an evening in cafés, bars, shadowy streets. It stops at a red light. The conductor looks down, his face inscrutable. Then, with a lurch, the tram is off again. It disappears down a bend in the road.

The Hills of Lisbon

View from the Santa Justa elevator

Stumbling down the Calçada do Sacramento

Dinertime in the Calçada do Duque

Alley Cats

“Princess,” Rua do Duque, Lisbon

“Don’t feed the cats,” Macau