Exploring Lisbon

This morning we joined a free walking tour of Lisbon (you tip the host at the end) and we learned a ton of history about this3,000 year old city: some of it tragic, some of it violent, some of it beautiful but all of it interesting. Everything in this city seems to be built on top of the remains of something else: palaces on top of burned convents, Catholic cathedrals on top of mosques destroyed in the Crusades, everything else built on top of everything before, following the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 (9.0 on the Richter) and its subsequent massive tsunami.

We spent most of our time in the historic neighborhood of Alfama, atop the highest hill in Lisbon. It was the only area of the city that wasn’t completely destroyed in that earthquake and is still home to a first century Moorish castle. We wandered alleys and walked up and down a million steps over and over and also received a lesson on Lisbon’s long standing tradition of street art.

Above is an example, and this work is a depiction of Lisbon’s strong tradition of Fado music—a genre, I’m told, that can’t really be described, but is something like a sultry, mournful blending of blues and something else . . .

Alfama might have survived the earthquake, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t gruesome history memorialized here. This lovely chapel and its surrounding plaza, high above where the River Tagus empties into the Atlantic Ocean, is in commemoration of St. Lucia. The nun did something to piss off the Roman rulers and to silence her, they gouged her eyes out, hoping she would bleed to death. Well, as things sometimes happen, the next morning she woke up and her eyes had grown back in their rightful sockets. Alas, the Romans slit her throat anyway. I assume her sainthood followed the eye regeneration—a miracle, indeed! (The tile fresco on the chapel wall shows her holding her previous eyeballs in a bowl, but also, her head clearly has eyeballs where they’re suppose to be.)

Another thing we learned is that over the centuries, the people of Lisbon sure have grown fond of erecting enormous monuments to countless kings and saints. Below is St. Vincent, the patron saint of Lisbon and its mariners. Then there is some king, whose name I now can’t remember, with his elephant by his side.  

And finally, a plaster shrine on someone’s apartment balcony, for St. Anthony. St. Anthony, we were told, is Lisbon’s favorite saint. He is the Saint of Loss Causes. Cheers!