The first tremor struck Lisbon at 9.45 am on 1 November 1755 – All Saint’s Day. From the hills above, it must have looked as if a rug had been pulled from under the city. Buildings toppled into the narrow streets. Panicked residents rushed for the refuge of the waterfront only to see the river Tagus recede towards the sea, feel the ground beneath them give way and the waters return in a series of great waves that swept a kilometre inland. Candles lit in homes and churches to mark the holy day soon set what remained of the city ablaze. Tens of thousands died. The Lisbon that had launched the age of discovery was reduced to smouldering rubble. But one man had a vision for its reconstruction.
IN A time before world wars, and before weapons of mass destruction, no one could have imagined devastation on such a massive scale. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 was “a Spectacle of Terror and Amazement, as well as of Desolation to Beholders, as perhaps has not been equalled from the Foundation of the World!” as one eyewitness put it. “It would be a vain Attempt to endeavour describing the numberless Miseries and terrible Distresses of all kinds occasioned by this dreadful Calamity, as well as the shocking Effects that it had on the Minds of All People. Infinite were the Numbers of poor broken limbed Persons, who were forced to be deserted even by those who loved them best and left to the miserable Torture of being burnt alive. Women big with Child were delivered in the open Fields and Places, amidst the Groans and Cries of trembling multitudes.”
Portugal’s capital was Europe’s fourth largest city, with a population of 275,000. The wealth of the country’s colonies made Lisbon perhaps the world’s richest port. But it was built on unsteady ground, alluvial sands that the earthquake – estimated at magnitude 8.7 – practically liquefied. Many buildings sank in the slumping soils before they collapsed. Worse, the masonry buildings were built without supporting frameworks: upper storeys were supported only by the floor of the storey below, so when one floor collapsed, the entire structure fell. The city’s streets were so narrow that they were quickly blocked by rubble. Its people were trapped and crushed.
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While philosophers and religious leaders argued over whether the quake demonstrated the force of nature or the vengeance of God, King José I, a better card player than a ruler, retreated to his country estate and refused to return or even live ever again under a solid roof. It was left to the king’s practical chief minister, the bewigged aristocrat Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo (later the marquis of Pombal) to take control. Reportedly, when the king asked, “What shall we do?” Pombal answered, “Bury the dead and feed the living.”
If Lisbon was the first modern disaster, Pombal (left) was the first to implement modern disaster relief. Concerned about the spread of disease from decomposing bodies, he had the tens of thousands of corpses put on barges that were taken out to sea and sunk. He charged the army with delivering food to the city. To prevent looting and to keep people from fleeing into overcrowded areas, anyone entering or leaving the city required a pass. He gave judges the power to convict, sentence and hang looters on the spot. To prevent profiteering he fixed food prices, removed taxes on fish and took possession of all construction materials. Ships were not allowed to leave the harbour with goods that might be needed for the relief effort. Although the homeless population now lived in tents, Pombal made it illegal for landlords to evict their tenants, so that people could eventually return home. He also demanded that the clergy stop preaching that the “end of days” was near.
With the immediate situation under control, Pombal quickly began developing a plan for rebuilding. Most of the city’s churches, the customs house, opera house and royal palace, along with all their worldly art and treasures, were gone. Pombal called in architects and engineers to provide him with plans for a new Lisbon. According to Stephen Tobriner, professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, their suggestions ranged from abandoning the ruins and building the city elsewhere to rebuilding it the way it was or rebuilding it in the same place but on a grid of wide streets and open plazas. Pombal decided to combine the last two, making certain that all the buildings in the Baixa, the central and worst-hit part of the city, would be built to new specifications.
“Many buildings sank in the slumping soils before they collapsed”
Pombal’s choice of engineer was Manuel da Maia. He came up with a grid of streets – main streets 60 feet wide, cross streets 40 feet wide – lined with buildings all four storeys high with matching neoclassical facades, arched entries, long rectangular windows on the second and third storeys and small square windows on the top floor. The lower floors were designed for the nobility, the floors above for the servants, and the top floors for the city’s artisans, making this the world’s first planned community.
In a brash political move, Pombal decided that his planned development would turn Lisbon from a royal city into a mercantile one and thereby encourage the growth of a Portuguese middle class. Pombal decided not to rebuild the palace and instead set up commercial districts in the newly vacant quarter. The main square along the waterfront would remain, but instead of Palace Square it would be Commercial Square. While the destruction of Lisbon may have hurt the monarchy, the rebuilding of Lisbon promoted its ultimate decline.
Pombal’s most innovative ambition, however, was to make the buildings of the resurrected Lisbon earthquake-proof. Instead of clearing away the rubble, Pombal’s engineers decided to build on top of it, giving some much needed solidity to the ground. Masts from wrecked ships in the harbour were taken and set into the ground as pilings on which the new buildings would be constructed. Most important of all, the brick and masonry walls of the new structures would be built around an inner framework of crossed timbers and iron cross-ties that would give the walls both extra strength and the elasticity to endure shocks or tremors. The structure, similar to the construction used in building ship hulls, was known as a gaiola, or cage, because of the way the building looked before the masonry was attached. By some accounts these structures were tested by marching soldiers across them.
To prevent fire from spreading easily from one building to the next, the designs called for walls between buildings to be built higher than the roof lines. But Pombal also recognised that time was against him. With the residents of Lisbon living in huts or tents, the new buildings had to go up as quickly as possible. So in yet another innovation, he had his workforce prefabricate whole sections of the buildings outside the city and then move them into place.
How successful was Pombal’s bold scheme? It took another hundred years to complete the work, but to see Lisbon’s centre today, now known as the Baixa Pombalina, is to see de Maia’s drawings brought to life and Pombal’s vision of an Enlightenment city resurrected from the ashes of a medieval one. The streets built by Pombal now accommodate trams and cars, with the open plazas still providing a sense of spaciousness.
There has not been a major quake near Lisbon for the past 250 years, so the lessons learned may have been forgotten. After all, Lisbon still sits on shifting sands, as last year’s collapse of a new waterfront subway station attested. Carlos Sousa Oliveira, a seismologist at Lisbon University, worries that today’s Lisbon may not be so earthquake-proof. His recent studies of the city’s buildings show that renovations carried out on many of the Pombaline structures over the past century – plumbing, electrical wiring and redesign – have compromised the integrity of the timber gaiolas. Recent restoration and remodelling of buildings in the Baixa have been done without a set of strict guidelines and, he says, create serious uncertainties about how well they will withstand an earthquake. The question now is whether the world’s first earthquake-proof city will be ready for the next big one.
