On the morning of November 1, 1755, about 180 miles southwest of Lisbon, the Earth moved. Like big time. An earthquake with an estimated 8.4 magnitude on the Richter Scale. That number may not mean anything to some folks (including me) but for the sake of comparison with other historical earthquakes, an 8.4 would put the 1755 earthquake as a top 20 quake of all time according to the United States Geological Survey. Yes, the Earth shook that morning in a pretty significant way. And it was felt in Lisbon in a transformational way, and that's not a good thing for 1755.
Before we get into how and why an earthquake 180 miles from Lisbon affected the city that November morning, I think it is worth making a couple of points regarding the prior paragraph. First...it's estimated, right? The Richter Scale wasn't created until 1935, so the 1755 quake wasn't actually recorded on any instrument. I'm trusting science on this one and assuming someone making this evaluation knows what they are doing when they assigned the 8.4 number. Second, the USGS has only been recording earthquakes since the early 20th century, so there may have been other, larger earthquakes that would have knocked an 8.4 out of the top 20. Having said all that, it was undoubtedly pretty significant in size.
It crushed Lisbon. In so many ways.
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| Detail from the side of the tomb of King Ferdinand I. |
In 1755, the population of Lisbon was around 200,000 people. An estimated 30,000 to 40,000 of those people perished as a result of the earthquake. That's up to 20% of the entire population of the city. That's a lot. In effectively one day. Think about if you were in a city hit by an earthquake and one out of every five people died as a result shortly thereafter.
The city made out worse than the people. 85% of the buildings in Lisbon were destroyed. If the initial quake didn't get them, the tsunami that followed about 40 minutes later might have. Or maybe it was the fires that spread unchecked throughout the city as a result of the initial tremors knocking over so many open flames in buildings all over the city.
I know what you are maybe thinking here. Why were there so many flames lit in the morning? Surely candles weren't needed for illumination at that time? Maybe not. But November 1 was All Saints' Day, and candles were lit all over the city in observance of that day. Which naturally led to all sorts of questions about why God was punishing the citizens of Lisbon on the very same day they were honoring all the saints. The notion of tectonic plates...maybe not so much accepted science in the middle of the eighteenth century. Divine retribution, yes. Seismology, no.
But destruction of lives, buildings and faith in the Catholic church wasn't all the earthquake wiped out. The Royal Library and other national archives were also lost, including historical records of the voyages of Vasco de Gama and other notable Portuguese explorers. The city of Lisbon didn't just lose people and buildings, it lost pretty much its entire historical record. It's actually amazing that natural disasters haven't wiped out libraries more often, I guess. But then again...8.4.
I said crushed, right? Not sure how it could have been much worse, short of total destruction of the city.
The reaction to the destruction caused by the earthquake was swift in Lisbon and southern Portugal. Reconstruction proceeded quickly on important public buildings that were left partially standing. What remained of entire sections of the city were razed, replanned and rebuilt. And for the first time in history, the destruction caused by the Earth moving was scientifically recorded. Not just what was destroyed, but how. But that's not what this post is about.
There are plenty of buildings in Lisbon that pre-date the 1755 earthquake. We visited the Castelo de São Jorge (from the 10th century) on the highest spot in the city; toured the Jerónimos Monastery (started in 1501); and learned about tiles in Portugal (it's a thing...) in the old Convento da Madre de Deus (from 1509). Looking at all three of those buildings today, you would never have known they were once shaken by an 8.4 magnitude earthquake. As you might expect. I mean what's the point of rebuilding quickly if things aren't back to normal pretty soon after you start.
We spend a lot of time tracking down history on our travels. The unique thing about chasing an earthquake from 250 plus years ago is that you are not likely to find much evidence of the thing actually having happened. Sure, you can see the aftereffects of an almost 2,000 year old volcanic eruption by visiting Herculaneum in Italy, but that's because the ensuing pyroclastic flow buried the entire town. But in a living, modern city, maybe not so much.
Except in Lisbon at the Convento do Carmo. Thanks in part to some procrastination and a quirk of Portuguese history.
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| The Convento do Carmo, Lisbon. |
After 1800, the restoration efforts stalled. The church was turned over to the military for use as a garrison in addition to being co-opted as a court of law and a sawmill, of all things. If there was any hope of the building ever being completely rebuilt, all that was extinguished in 1834 when the crown expelled the monastic orders from Portugal in what was effectively a gratuitous power and money grab. The relationship between the royal family and the Catholic church was a complicated one in Portugal. At most times, they colluded to keep the population repressed but every so often spats and disagreements led to things like the expulsion of the monastic orders. And in the case of the Convento, re-construction just stopped. Forever.
So in 2021, the Convento do Carmo sits in downtown Lisbon much the way it looked right after the 1755 earthquake as a beautiful ruin. It was one of the best places we visited in our few days in Lisbon on this trip.
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| Convento do Carmo: still ruined and reconstructed. |
For me, there's an obvious pull to the Convento do Carmo. There is nowhere else in Lisbon where you can get a sense first hand of how destructive the events of November 1, 1755 actually were. You can read all the stories and look at paintings and drawings of before and after conditions of the city on either side of the earthquake but there's only one spot in the city where you can lay eyes on what happened and that's at the Convento.
It's absolutely amazing how something can still be standing this intact after 250 years the way this place is. It's a testament to the daring of the master stone masons who built gothic cathedrals all over Europe that with most of the building destroyed, the structure can remain erect. Admittedly, sometimes these men were too daring, but not in central Lisbon. And OK, there was a little stabilizing work done in the 1900s. I'd be cool with any of the buildings I've designed in my career still standing after this long. I'm not holding my breath.
It is worth every penny to be able to walk down the nave of the Convento church and look up and around. Gothic cathedrals have been some of my favorite buildings since I started studying architecture. I moved on past a lot of buildings from before the 1850s or so a long time ago, but not gothic cathedrals. It is so amazing to see the raw structure still standing after so much time. We never learned about this place in school. It is in many ways as impressive as any other gothic building I have ever set foot in. Especially on a gorgeous sunny day like the day we were there. The sky filled in the empty roof structure.
There's another reason to visit the Convento. In 1864, the ruin was chosen to exhibit the collection of the Association of Portuguese Archaeologists, who had rescued and gathered objects at risk from destruction (mostly from the French and internal civil strife in the first half of the nineteenth century) throughout Portugal. The objects are still there. And there are a lot of them.
In addition to visiting the ruin of the old Convento, you are also visiting the Carmo Archaeological Museum. It's a bit of an eclectic experience. There are objects from literally every period of Portuguese history, including some objects gathered (read: stolen) from the Americas dating to before the "discovery" of the New World by Christopher Columbus.
The interior parts of the Museum actually have somewhat coherent collections. There are like types of exhibits (like the Pre-Columbian artifacts from what is now South America) gathered together in display cases telling a story. There are also some Moorish stone carvings which we appreciated; we searched high and low for some kind of Moorish experience in Portugal only to realize that most of it was just erased by the Christians who conquered them. It was actually harder to find evidence of the Moors in Portugal than it was finding evidence of the 1755 earthquake. Although ironically, we found the best of both in the exact same spot.
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| Moorish carvings and a fountain of unknown origin from the 17th or 18th century. |
It's an odd way of walking through a museum. So often, we are used to being led though exhibits that are connected together, usually with a narrative that connects stories or artifacts together. At the Convento, you just look at what interests you and then consult the descriptions of what is what. If you piece together the history then great. If not, then the experience is no less effective. Besides, I'm not sure it's really possible to connect the objects on display in the exterior portion of the Museum in any coherent way.
I've been to other ruined castles and churches and other sorts of structures before. I am sure they are all over Europe and the world, laid to waste by armies or by bombing or just by time and nature overtaking what man put in place so long ago. I've also been to I don't know how museums built within the last 150 years or so displaying fragments of old buildings in them as exhibits. But I don't think I've been to a place quite like the Convento do Carmo before. The gravity of its own destruction both captured a specific time in history and leant weight to the objects it displayed, a destroyed building holding pieces from buildings destroyed way more completely than it was.
We visited the Convento do Carmo on a Sunday and found it closed. It's at the top of a pretty good hill (isn't everything in Lisbon?) and with a trip to Castelo São Jorge (which is at the top of an even bigger hill) scheduled the next day after a morning trip to Sintra, I almost gave up on a return trip to the Convento. I'm glad I didn't. Plus we still made it to the Castelo by hopping on the No. 28 tram. What better way to get there?
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| One last look at the Convento to the west into the setting sun. |
How We Did It
The Convento do Carmo / Carmo Archaeological Museum is located in central Lisbon on the historic Largo do Carmo square. Plug it into your favorite map app and walk along the dotted line (or whatever your app uses to show "the way") and presumably up some sort of hill until you get there. It's open from 10 am to 6 pm every day of the week except for Sundays, but also not on January 1, May 1 and December 25. Most museums in Lisbon are closed on Mondays, so if you are in the city on a Monday, the Convento is a great place to go.
If you approach the Convento from the east, like we did, and are using Google Maps, like I always do, the directions may be a little inscrutable. They take you past the Santa Justa Elevator and then actually show you walking right through a city block. There's no street or alley where Google Maps was taking us so we just walked around. That's not where Google Maps was taking us.
If you elect to use Google Maps and it shows you walking through something like it showed us, there's a small store across the street and just a bit to the right of the Santa Justa Elevator has has an elevator in the back of it. Take this elevator up to the roof, then walk up through what looked to be an outdoor (but totally empty) bar and get to the Convento much quicker and easier than walking around. Consider that my pro tip for this post.
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