HISTORICAL NOTES: THE EARTHQUAKE OF 1755

1755 is a pivotal date for understanding the history of Lisbon. Some will tell you it’s 1962, the year in which Benfica won the championship by defeating Real Madrid in Amsterdam, but if you want to impress the history-freak friend on a trip to Lisbon, you simply can’t avoid knowing this date, or the story of the Marquis of Pombal.

A panel of azulejo tiles shows what Praça do Comércio looked like before the 1755 earthquake.

On the night between November 1st and 2nd, 1755, the lisboetas (inhabitants of Lisbon) were awakened by a thunderous roar. After a few moments of stunned stillness, their beds, the floors beneath them, and the slippers at their feet began to shake. Thus began a long seven minutes of tremors that destroyed much of the city as they had known it. As if that were not enough, the earthquake was followed by the arrival of several gigantic waves that surged back from the ocean into the Tagus estuary, reaching the riverfront districts and sweeping away whatever had remained standing after the quake. Finally, the prolonged earthquake sparked numerous fires throughout the city, caused by the widespread use of oil lamps for and the heavy reliance on wood in house construction.

What the people of Lisbon found at dawn was a city center completely destroyed. Where the evening before there had been houses, humble workshops, noble palaces, and lively squares, now there were heaps of rubble, engulfed in flames that continued to burn for days.

A natural catastrophe had wiped out the capital and shattered the certainties of one of the most powerful colonial empires of the eighteenth century. From that moment on, a slow decline of Portuguese power began. Although Lisbon would later be rebuilt, Portugal never fully regained the central role it had once held among colonial powers. The news spread quickly - relatively speaking for the time - throughout Europe. In an era when the Enlightenment philosophy proclaimed humanity as master of its own destiny, the Lisbon earthquake caused another kind of hearthquake, shaking the very foundations of Enlightenment and inspiring Voltaire to write his critique of optimistic philosophy, the Candide.

After the initial shock, the time to think about rebuilding the city arrived. The task was entrusted to none other than the Marquis of Pombal, who was not an architect himself and therefore assigned the urban planner Manuel da Maia to draw up several proposals for the new city. After scrutinizing them with a stern eye, the Marquis chose a strategy that was both political and urbanistic: Lisbon’s Baixa district would not be rebuilt according to its late-medieval layout of narrow, winding streets and tightly packed houses, ready to collapse at the slightest new tremor. Instead, Baixa would be reconstructed on a grid plan, crossed by wide avenues and lined with tall buildings, all built in the same uniform style. Property owners were allowed only to choose the colors of their façades, so as not to disturb the harmony of the new district.

An elegant street in Baixa, the district with streets built in a regular grid pattern.

This was one of the first models of anti-seismic engineering applied in Europe, a rational response to a natural catastrophe that relied on reason rather than superstition or conjecture, a choice that perfectly reflected Enlightenment ideals. Thus was born the Baixa Pombalina, inspired by city plans we can also see in Paris, Barcelona, and Madrid, but with the unmistakable stamp of the Marquis of Pombal. This layout, however, posed a problem: buildings spaced so far apart, even with multiple floors, could not sustain the same population density as before. This did not deter the Marquis, who simply expropriated the land of those whose homes had been destroyed by the earthquake. To meet the demand for new housing, new residential areas emerged, forming what are now the neighborhoods of Lapa, Estrela, and Rato, which developed around the major factories of the time, such as those producing silk, hats, and combs.

The reconstruction of what had been destroyed in a single night took several centuries. The labour and sacrifice of the workers still echo today in the monument dedicated to them, standing in the center of the square that bears their name: Praça dos Restauradores.