Lisbon: Fado, Tiles & the Seven Hills

But more on that in a moment. First, look at the river. The Tagus here is so wide that the opposite bank seems like a foreign country, and from this quay, for much of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it effectively was. Vasco da Gama departed from near here in fourteen ninety-seven and returned fourteen months later having found the sea route to India, making Portugal overnight the wealthiest nation on earth. Pedro Álvares Cabral departed from here in fifteen hundred and accidentally discovered Brazil. Bartolomeu Dias sailed from this river and became the first European to round the Cape of Good Hope. The ships that left from these docks came back laden with spices, silk, gold, and ivory. Lisbon was the pivot on which the early modern world turned.

At the centre of the square stands an equestrian statue of King José I, cast in bronze in seventeen seventy-five. He is riding triumphantly on a horse that tramples serpents underfoot — the serpents representing the enemies of Portugal. José I is not actually remembered as a particularly remarkable king; he is remembered mostly for being on the throne when everything went wrong and then right again. But the statue is magnificent, and the pigeons have taken a democratic approach to it.

Walk toward the riverfront arcade for a moment and look back at the square. The formal grandeur, the perfect proportions, the sense that you are standing in a room with the roof removed — this is all deliberate. After the earthquake, a man named Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, the Marquis of Pombal, rebuilt Lisbon from scratch, and this square was his masterpiece. He made it face the river so that ships arriving from the Atlantic would see the might of Portugal before they even docked.

There is one darker footnote to this square. On the first of February, nineteen hundred and eight, King Carlos I and his son were assassinated here by republican conspirators as their carriage crossed the square. The king was shot twice in the head. His son, Prince Luís Filipe, was also killed. The second son, Manuel, was wounded but survived and became king. Two years later the monarchy was abolished. The square that was built to project eternal power witnessed the beginning of the end of eight centuries of Portuguese monarchy.

Look back at the river one more time before you move. On a clear day you can sense the Atlantic beyond the bend. This is where the world began to shrink.

Then the river withdrew.

Survivors standing on the waterfront watched the Tagus pull back, exposing the muddy riverbed. They had perhaps fifteen minutes of confused silence before the first tsunami wave arrived. Three waves in total struck the Baixa, the lower city. And then, because every candle in every church had toppled when the earthquake struck, fire broke out across the ruins and burned for five days. Somewhere between thirty thousand and sixty thousand people died. A city of two hundred thousand was destroyed in a single morning.

The arch you are looking at was built to celebrate the reconstruction. It was not completed until eighteen seventy-three, more than a century after the earthquake — which gives you some sense of the scale of the rebuilding project. The figures on top represent Glory, flanked by the Tagus and the Douro rivers, with Vasco da Gama and the Marquis of Pombal below. Pombal's face here is the face of a man who, when the king asked him what was to be done after the earthquake, replied: 'Sire, bury the dead and feed the living.' Then he got to work.

What Pombal built was revolutionary. The Baixa — the lower city between this arch and the hills — was rebuilt in a strict grid pattern, which you are about to walk into. The streets all intersect at right angles, the buildings are identical in height and facade, and the whole neighbourhood is what urban planners now call the Pombaline Baixa, one of the first planned urban areas in the world. More importantly, Pombal's engineers developed a new building technique: a flexible timber internal frame called the 'Pombaline cage,' designed to absorb seismic shocks rather than transmit them. They tested the design by marching soldiers around models of the frame to simulate earthquake vibrations. This was one of the first examples of earthquake-resistant construction in history.

Look up at the arch and then look down Rua Augusta stretching north. Every building on that street is Pombaline. Same height, same rhythm, same pale facades. It looks like an outdoor shopping mall designed by someone who had read too much Enlightenment philosophy. In seventeen fifty-five, this was the most modern street in Europe.

Walk through the arch and begin moving north. The Chiado district is about six hundred metres up the hill.

But the Chiado's most important literary figure is not connected to the Bertrand. He is connected to a café about a hundred metres from here, and you almost certainly do not know his name, which is extraordinary given that he may be the most original writer of the twentieth century. Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon in eighteen eighty-eight, spent most of his life in this neighbourhood, died in nineteen thirty-five, and wrote under seventy-two different names — names he called heteronyms rather than pseudonyms, because each one had a separate biography, handwriting, philosophy, and literary style. Alberto Caeiro was a pastoral poet who had never left the countryside, despite the fact that Fernando Pessoa had never left Lisbon. Ricardo Reis was a classicist in voluntary exile in Brazil. Álvaro de Campos was a modernist engineer who had studied naval engineering in Glasgow. Pessoa invented these people as completely as a novelist invents characters, and then wrote their collected works.

The café he frequented was A Brasileira, on Rua Garrett, and outside it you will find a bronze statue of Pessoa sitting at a table, his hat tilted, his round glasses on, as if he is waiting for you to sit down and argue with him. A Brasileira opened in nineteen zero five and served the roasted coffee imported from Brazil that gave the café its name. It became the gathering point for Lisbon's modernist movement — poets, painters, architects, and intellectuals meeting over bica coffee to argue about everything.

The Chiado itself was devastated by a fire in nineteen eighty-eight that destroyed two entire blocks of the neighbourhood, including the historic Grandella and Chiado department stores. The reconstruction was led by the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza Vieira, who became internationally famous for the project. Siza's approach was conservative in the best sense: he rebuilt the facades to match the original Pombaline style while completely redesigning the interiors. If you look at the buildings around you, you are seeing his work. The Chiado looks old because Siza wanted it to look old.

Before you move on, duck into one of the antique shops on Rua Garrett or Rua do Alecrim. The Chiado has always been where Lisbon's intelligentsia bought their books and their beautiful things, and that tradition continues, alongside an increasingly international crowd of tourists and the coffee shops that followed them.

The original mechanism was hydraulic, powered by steam. Two counterbalanced cabs moved up and down on rails inside the tower — as one went up, the weight of the descending cab helped pull it. The whole system was converted to electric power in nineteen zero seven and has been running ever since, making the Santa Justa one of the oldest operating elevators in the world.

At the top, a walkway connects to the ruined Carmo Convent on the hillside above. The Carmo was one of Lisbon's grandest Gothic churches before the earthquake of seventeen fifty-five collapsed its roof. Rather than rebuilding, the Carmelite monks left it as an open-air ruin, and it now houses an archaeological museum. Standing in the roofless nave with the Lisbon sky above you and Roman mosaics at your feet is one of the stranger and more beautiful experiences in the city.

But the best reason to queue for the Santa Justa elevator is the terrace at the top. The view from the wrought-iron observation gallery takes in the entire Baixa grid below you — you can see Pombal's urban planning from above, the identical rooftops stretching from the river to Rossio — and the castle on the hill ahead, and the dome of the Pantheon over in Alfama, and on a clear day, the bridge and the river all the way to the sea.

The queue on summer mornings is genuine and unhurried, because this is Lisbon and there is no particular urgency to anything. Get in line, wait, and think about the fact that in nineteen zero two, factory workers, shopkeepers, and housewives rode this iron tower every morning to get to work, just as they ride escalators in shopping centres today. The extraordinary became ordinary very quickly. It always does.

At the north end of the square is the National Theatre, the Teatro Nacional Dona Maria II, completed in eighteen forty-six in a Neoclassical style so serious that it seems to be judging you from the portico. Above the entrance, a statue of Gil Vicente, Portugal's first great playwright, looks down with the expression of a man who has seen better productions.

At the centre of the square, on a column twenty-three metres high, stands a statue of Dom Pedro IV, first Emperor of Brazil and later King of Portugal — a man who, uniquely in history, was simultaneously a monarch of two continents and then voluntarily gave up Brazil to his own daughter. The column is genuinely Dom Pedro IV's. The statue on top, however, is not quite what it seems. It was originally commissioned as a statue of Maximilian of Mexico, the Austrian archduke who was briefly installed as Emperor of Mexico by Napoleon III before being overthrown and executed. Mexico declined the finished statue. Portugal bought it second-hand, swapped the face, and put it on the column. Nobody mentions this in the guidebooks.

The coffee houses on the south end of Rossio — Café Nicola on the western side has been here since seventeen eight two — were the original internet of Lisbon. News was read, argued about, and disseminated here. Political movements were organised over bica. The café culture of Rossio produced some of the same intellectual ferment that Parisian café culture produced, with rather less violence.

Rossio is also the station you can see at the northern end, with its Manueline-horseshoe arched doorways that look so extravagantly medieval they must surely be Victorian-era pastiche — and indeed they are, built in eighteen eighty-six. The trains from here go to Sintra, thirty kilometres northwest, where the Portuguese royal family built their fairy-tale summer palaces in the hills. Rossio station is worth five minutes of your attention simply to marvel at the audacity of a railway company deciding that their terminus should look like a fifteenth-century royal chapel.

The Romanesque style — round arches, thick walls, small windows, the overall sense of compressed power — was the architectural language of Christian Europe in eleven forty-seven. It is a warrior's architecture. The Sé was built to last, and it has, through multiple earthquakes, fires, and centuries of renovation and decay. The rose window on the facade is a later Gothic addition. The interior has been layered with contributions from every century since the twelfth, which means that walking through the Sé is like reading a compressed history of Portuguese art.

In the Gothic cloister on the right side of the building — reached through a separate entrance — you can see the damage the earthquake of seventeen fifty-five did to the medieval stonework. Sections of the cloister arcade have partially collapsed and were never fully rebuilt. They were left as the earthquake left them, which is either a statement about the limits of reconstruction or a monument to the catastrophe, depending on your interpretation. Archaeologists excavating the cloister floor have found layers of occupation going back to Phoenician settlements from around seven hundred BC.

The cathedral is the resting place of Saint Vincent of Saragossa, patron saint of Lisbon. According to medieval legend, Vincent's body was transported from the Algarve to Lisbon by ship in eleven seventy-three, guided by two ravens who perched on the prow and stern of the ship for the entire journey. This is why two ravens appear on the coat of arms of Lisbon. A pair of ravens is still kept in the cathedral precinct, maintained as a symbol of the city. You may see them if you look carefully.

Alfama's survival of the seventeen fifty-five earthquake was not miraculous — it was geological. The Baixa sits on silted river sediment, which amplifies seismic waves like a bowl of jelly amplifies vibration. Alfama sits on solid bedrock, which absorbs rather than amplifies. While the earthquake destroyed almost everything in the flat lower city, Alfama's buildings suffered far less damage. This geological accident preserved a medieval neighbourhood that would otherwise have been swept away and rebuilt in the Enlightenment grid.

The streets you are walking now are the streets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The houses with their wrought-iron balconies, the courtyards where cats sleep on warm stones, the smell of grilled sardines and jasmine drifting from open windows, the sudden miradouros — viewpoints — that appear between buildings and reveal the river below: this is the Alfama that Portuguese people talk about when they talk about Lisbon's soul.

Fado was born here, or at least grew up here. This music of saudade — a Portuguese word for which there is no precise translation, combining longing, nostalgia, melancholy, and love for something lost — came from the sailors and fishermen and their families who lived in these streets. When a man shipped out on a voyage that might take a year or two years or might never end, the music left behind was fado.

In June, Alfama hosts the Festa de Santo António, Lisbon's wildest street party, held on the night of the twelfth and thirteenth of June in honour of Saint Anthony of Padua, who was actually born in Lisbon in eleven ninety-five and is claimed by the city as its own. The entire neighbourhood becomes an outdoor festival of grilled sardines, cheap wine, paper decorations, and dancing in the streets. Every balcony is draped with basil plants — a traditional symbol of love and celebration in Lisbon — and the lanes fill from midnight until dawn.

The siege of eleven forty-seven was one of the decisive military events of the western Mediterranean. Afonso Henriques's Portuguese army, reinforced by the Crusader fleet, encircled the city and maintained the siege through the summer and into autumn. The Crusaders scaled these walls in a desperate assault that took most of a day. When the city fell, the Moorish governor surrendered the citadel, and Afonso entered the castle and claimed Lisbon for the Kingdom of Portugal. He renamed it Castelo de São Jorge in honour of Saint George, patron of England — a gesture of thanks to the English and Flemish Crusaders whose siege skills had made the conquest possible.

Inside the castle grounds, the archaeological site below the ramparts is extraordinary. Excavations since the nineteen eighties have revealed stratified layers of five thousand years of continuous occupation: Phoenician storage pits, Roman houses, Visigothic churches, Moorish palaces, and medieval Portuguese buildings, all stacked on top of each other like a geological section through human history. You can see the excavation open to visitors near the inner courtyard.

The peacocks are real, not a tourist gimmick — they have been kept here since the sixteenth century when the castle served as the royal residence. The castle's highest tower houses a camera obscura, a Victorian optical device that projects a real-time image of the surrounding city onto a concave dish inside a darkened room. It is one of the best ways to see Lisbon from above without a helicopter.

Stand on the outer ramparts and look north and west. The orange-roofed city spreads below you without any interruption until it hits the river. The castle's position explains why every civilisation that wanted to control Lisbon built its stronghold here.

The Carnation Revolution is worth knowing about. On that morning, a military coup ended forty-eight years of right-wing dictatorship — the Estado Novo regime established by António de Oliveira Salazar in nineteen thirty-three. The regime had survived Salazar's death in nineteen seventy and continued under his successor Marcello Caetano. It fell in a matter of hours. The coup was almost entirely bloodless — hence the name, from the carnations that soldiers and civilians placed in the barrels of rifles. Portugal went from dictatorship to democracy in a single day, without a civil war, which was remarkable enough to become a model studied by political theorists ever since.

Across the river, on the southern bank, you can see the Cristo Rei statue — a figure of Christ with arms outstretched, modelled closely on the Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, standing ninety metres high on a concrete pedestal. It was completed in nineteen fifty-nine as a votive offering after Portugal was spared from the Second World War. It looks, depending on your mood and the light, either magnificent or slightly incongruous.

The church behind you is Nossa Senhora da Graça, the Church of Our Lady of Grace, one of the oldest in Lisbon — the first church on this site was built in the fourteenth century. The current building is largely seventeenth century, with a tile-covered façade. The friars of the Augustinian order have been here almost continuously since thirteen sixty.

The kiosk in the square — the green metal pavilion serving coffee and beer and pasteis de nata — is frequented almost entirely by locals, which is the highest possible recommendation. Sit down if there is a table. Order a cerveja or a galão and look at the view for as long as you can stand to look at it, which for most people is considerably longer than they expected.

Fado is impossible to describe adequately to someone who has not heard it. The word itself means fate in Portuguese. It is a music of saudade — that untranslatable Portuguese concept that contains loss, longing, nostalgia, and love in a single feeling — performed by a single singer accompanied by the Portuguese guitarra, a twelve-string instrument descended from the medieval cittern, and a viola baixo, a steel-string bass guitar. The fado singer, the fadista, does not merely perform the songs. They inhabit them. When it is done well, in a small room, late at night, it is one of the most emotionally direct experiences that music can offer.

Fado was declared a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage in twenty eleven, which gives it the official status of something irreplaceable. It had already been that for about a century and a half. The music emerged in Lisbon — in neighbourhoods like this one and in Alfama — in the early nineteenth century, among sailors, dockworkers, bohemians, and the urban poor. The Portuguese historian Rui Vieira Nery argues that fado crystallised the experience of a country that had been a great empire and was no longer: the music of a people who had been to the ends of the earth and come home to find the world had moved on without them.

The greatest fado singer of the twentieth century was Amália Rodrigues, born in Lisbon in nineteen twenty, daughter of a fruit seller from the Alfama. She became a film star, an international celebrity, and the voice that made fado known beyond Portugal. She died in nineteen ninety-nine and was given a state funeral. Her house in Lisbon is now a museum. When she died, the Portuguese government declared two days of national mourning. There are streets, squares, and metro stations named after her all over the country.

You are in the right neighbourhood to end your walk. One of the tascas — the tiny, unfussy restaurants that serve the honest cooking of Portugal — will feed you well for ten or twelve euros: bacalhau à brás (salt cod with eggs and fried potato), or caldo verde (kale and potato soup with chorizo), or a simple grilled pork with roasted potatoes and mustard. Order a glass of vinho verde and listen to whatever the night brings. If you hear music drifting from a doorway below street level, go toward it.