Metravel city quest
City Lisbon: free walking route “quest: a city born from ruins” along the sights. 9 points. Approximately 2 h 50 min. Quests and legends - straight from your
The first of November 1755 was a religious holiday: All Saints' Day. Half of Lisbon was at morning Mass when, at half past nine, the ground began to shake. The tremors lasted almost ten minutes, with a magnitude now estimated at around nine. The stone vaults of churches packed with worshippers collapsed first. Those who ran to the river to escape the rubble faced a new disaster: a series of tsunami waves arrived from the Atlantic. Fire finished the job: thousands of fallen altar candles burned through what the earthquake and water had spared over the following days. Between ten and forty thousand people died, according to different estimates; the city lay in ruins.
After that day, King José I refused to sleep beneath a stone roof for the rest of his life and lived in tents. He entrusted clearing the rubble and rebuilding the capital to his first minister, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, the future Marquis of Pombal. A phrase credited to him became reconstruction's motto: ‘Bury the dead and feed the living’. Where medieval narrow streets had tangled, Pombal and his engineers laid out the lower city, Baixa, in a strict grid, with matching façades, broad avenues and a wooden ‘gaiola pombalina’ framework inside the walls to absorb the earth's shaking. Thus was born one of the world's first cities designed to resist earthquakes, before the term even existed.
But not all Lisbon fell that day. Alfama, the old district on the eastern hill, stood on solid rock rather than river silt. Although houses shook and cracked, its maze of lanes largely held. Today you will walk through both Lisbons: first through the perfect geometry of a city rebuilt from a blank sheet, then uphill into quarters remembering Moors, crusaders and saints long before that catastrophe.
What to do: 1) Read the story and task at each stop. 2) Find the place on the map and walk to it. 3) Look around and answer the question.
This walking route is about three kilometres long, with a climb in the final third. We start on Rossio Square, beside the column topped by an emperor's figure. Let's go!
The route points in order — what these places are and why they are interesting. Tasks and answers stay inside the quest.
This square was already the main one in the Middle Ages, five hundred years before the earthquake. Tournaments, fairs, bullfights and popular festivities took place here.
Head south from the column along arrow-straight Rua Augusta, a pedestrian street hung with shop signs. In Pombal's plan, though, this was the new Baixa's main axis: it would lead people from the trading square straight to the river, without a single turn, unlike the old medieval maze.
Walk through the arch and an enormous square opens before you, facing the Tagus River and enclosed on three sides by U-shaped buildings. Until 1755, the royal Ribeira Palace stood here with its immensely rich library and archive.
From Praça do Comércio, walk east along the river. In a few minutes, an unmistakable building appears on your left: its entire façade bristles with faceted stone projections like scales.
From Casa dos Bicos, climb Rua Augusto Rosa. Here begins the second part of the route, the Lisbon born seven centuries before Pombal's Baixa.
Walk around the cathedral's south side. Nearby, across a little square, stands a modest church that means almost more to Lisbon's people than the cathedral itself.
An optional stop: if you still have energy, climb from Santo António Church along the steep lanes past the cathedral to the hilltop and castle walls. A fortress stood here under the Romans and Visigoths; the Moors strengthened it in the 9th century.
Continue east through Alfama's narrow lanes, down from the castle hill to a terrace beneath a pergola entwined with bougainvillea. This is one of Lisbon's most photographed spots: Alfama's tiled roofs below, and beyond them the broad ribbon of the Tagus.
A few steps further is another terrace, wider still: from here you can see all Alfama at once, down to the river. The name means ‘gates of the sun’.
This route is part of Metravel city quests. Below are the other quests in this city and cities with quests nearby.