Lisbon through the ages

The Mar da Palha, the Sea of Straw, is a basin in the Tagus estuary 23 kilometres across at its widest and the best natural port on the Atlantic coast of Portugal. Iron Age people held the hill where the castle and cathedral now stand from the 8th to the 6th centuries BC, and Phoenician pottery found near both shows they traded with the Phoenicians, who kept a post on the site supposedly called Alis Ubbo, "Pleasant Haven" or "Safe Harbour". Most modern historians hold that Lisbon began as an indigenous settlement in contact with the Phoenicians rather than as a Phoenician foundation.

The consul Decimus Junius Brutus Callaicus brought Olissipo into the Roman world by alliance in 138 BC and walled it against Lusitanian raids. It was made a municipium and named Olisipo Felicitas Julia by either Julius Caesar or Octavian. Around 30,000 people lived there, and the town linked the northern countries to the Mediterranean, selling garum, a luxury fish sauce, salt, and the Lusitanian horses renowned in antiquity. The Visigothic king Walia plundered and burnt it in 419; under later Visigothic rule it was called Ulixbona, and its Greek, Syrian and Jewish merchants went on trading with the Byzantine Empire.

Muslim troops under Abdelaziz ibn Musa took the city in 714, and al-Ushbuna became again the commercial and administrative centre of the Tagus; contemporary accounts describe it as one of the largest cities in Europe, several times the size of Paris or London. Mozarabic Christians kept their own bishop and were tolerated as dhimmi on payment of the jizyah, and the Jewish community, present since the city's earliest days, grew more influential as its merchants added Levantine spices and medicines to the older trade in salt, fish and horses. Rebuilt to a Middle Eastern pattern of walls, mosque, medina and alcácer, it kept a hilltop castle that survives in altered form as the Castelo de São Jorge. In 844 several dozen Viking boats sailed into the Sea of Straw and held the city for a time after a thirteen-day siege.

Afonso I failed to breach the walls in 1137, and crusaders failed again in 1140. In June and July 1147 a force of 164 boatloads of English, Norman and Rhenish crusaders sailed from Dartmouth for the Holy Land; bad weather forced them into Porto, where they were persuaded to join a fresh assault. The Portuguese attacked by land while the crusaders brought up their siege engines, and the Moors capitulated on 22 October. By the account of the priest Raol, Germans from Cologne and the Flemish contingent broke their oaths to the king once inside, looting Muslims and Mozarabs alike and cutting the throat of the elderly Mozarab bishop; plague afterwards killed thousands among both populations. Afonso I took possession on 1 November, when the great mosque was dedicated to St Mary as a cathedral, and made the English crusader Gilberto of Hastings the city's first bishop.

Afonso I granted Lisbon a foral in 1179 and opened a new fair to restore its trade. Its merchants, Christian and Jewish, rebuilt the old links to Seville, Cádiz and Constantinople and opened new ones to the northern ports the Muslims had rarely visited. Afonso III moved his court, the archives and the treasury from Coimbra to Lisbon in 1256. Castilian forces took the city in 1373 and left only on payment of a ransom, after which the Fernandine Walls were built.

The Jewish quarter lay along the Rua Nova dos Mercadores around the Great Synagogue, and Jews may have made up a tenth of the population or more. However eminent an individual Jew became, they were quartered separately, forbidden to go out at night, made to wear distinctive clothes and to pay extra taxes, and were the first victims of popular revolts. The Moorish quarter was the corresponding ghetto: with the Muslim elites gone to North Africa, most of its people worked low-wage jobs or were slaves of Christians. An earthquake in 1290 killed thousands, and the Black Death in 1348 killed half the population.

When Ferdinand I died without a male heir the crown passed in principle to John I of Castile. For the merchants of Lisbon, union with Castile meant severing the trade links with England and northern Europe on which the city lived, and they and the lesser nobles backed the Master of Avis. His forces survived the siege of Lisbon in 1384 and won the Battle of Aljubarrota in 1385; he was acclaimed John I, a new aristocracy rose out of the merchant class, and only from this point did the centre of power in Portugal move south to Lisbon. The capture of Ceuta in 1415 gave the city's merchants a foothold on the caravan trade in gold and ivory.

Ottoman conquests in North Africa, Egypt and the Middle East cut into the spice, gold and ivory trades on which Lisbon depended, and its merchants, many of them descendants of Jews or Muslims with links across the Maghreb, resolved to reach the sources directly. Prince Henry organised the effort with funds from the Order of Christ and founded mariners' schools; the Gulf of Guinea was reached around 1460, the year he died. Vasco da Gama's ships, sent on the merchants' initiative but with royal funding, reached India in 1498, and Pedro Álvares Cabral reached Brazil in 1500.

For a time Lisbon sold Europe goods no one else could supply: pepper, cinnamon and diamonds carried on the Carreira da Índia, Chinese porcelain and silk, slaves from Mozambique, brazilwood and Brazilian sugar. The great trading houses, the Casa da Índia among them, collected the revenue and paid for the Jerónimos Monastery and the Torre de Belém, each classified a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983. The wealth rested in part on slavery: the first African slaves were sold in the Praça do Pelourinho, separated from their families, worked without pay and brutally treated, and by the mid-16th century a tenth of the population was of African descent.

When Spain expelled its Jews in 1496 many fled to Lisbon, perhaps temporarily doubling its population. In 1497 Manuel I decreed that all Jews convert to Christianity, those refusing being expelled only after their property was expropriated. In 1506 remarks by a converso at the Church of São Domingos, inflamed by three Dominican friars, set off a massacre of New Christians in which between 3,000 and 4,000 people were killed. The king ordered an investigation, two of the friars were burned alive, and the Dominicans were expelled from their convent. The Inquisition became formally active in 1536 and held its first auto-da-fé in the Palace Square in 1540. Since the goods of the condemned reverted to the inquisitors it worked as an instrument of control over the merchant class, and many merchants left for England or the Netherlands with their naval and cartographic knowledge.

Sebastian I and much of the Portuguese nobility were killed at Alcácer Quibir in 1578, and the succession crisis that followed was settled by force: Philip II of Spain defeated the troops of António, Prior of Crato, at Alcântara and was crowned Philip I of Portugal in 1581. Through the 17th century the Dutch, English and French took the Portuguese trading posts that supplied the city, and the spice trade went into long decline; Lisbon lost population and standing. On 1 December 1640 conspirators stormed the royal palace and citadel and acclaimed the Duke of Braganza king as John IV.

What relieved the country's finances was gold, found in 1693–95 in what is now Minas Gerais in Brazil. The royal fifth of everything mined began arriving in Lisbon in 1699 and peaked at more than three tonnes a year in the early 1750s, and the clergy and aristocracy spent it on Baroque palaces and on the Church of Santa Engrácia, later the National Pantheon. The gold drew large numbers of Portuguese emigrants to Brazil, and Lisbon merchants, undercut by British-financed rivals with direct access to the mines, turned to buying captive Africans at Luanda and selling them for gold at Rio de Janeiro.

The first shock struck at 9.40 on the morning of All Saints' Day, followed by a second at ten and a third at noon. Many who ran for the open riverside squares were drowned about half an hour later by a seven-metre tsunami. Fires burned for six days and looting was widespread. Two thirds of the city was destroyed, including 17,000 of the 20,000 more lightly built houses of the poor; of 180,000 inhabitants, between 30,000 and 60,000 died. Voltaire turned the disaster against philosophical optimism in his Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne of 1756 and again in Candide in 1759.

The Marquis of Pombal, effectively ruler of Portugal under Joseph I, answered the king's question about what to do with the words "Bury the dead. Feed the living. Rebuild the city." He refused advice to move the capital and had the Baixa laid out afresh by Eugénio dos Santos and Carlos Mardel under the chief engineer Manuel da Maia: wide straight avenues set at right angles, standardised façades, pine piles driven into the sandy soil, and a wooden bracing frame, the gaiola pombalina, designed to flex in an earthquake rather than come apart. Royal income from Brazil paid for almost the whole reconstruction; the work was not finished until 1806.

Pombal used the crisis politically, limiting the power of the Church and expelling the Jesuits; members of the Távora family were tortured and publicly executed in 1759 over an alleged plot against the king, a charge some historians hold to have been fabricated to break the old aristocracy. By the 1770s he had neutralised the Inquisition, and the New Christians who made up much of the educated middle class were freed from the restrictions that had barred them from high office. Pombal was dismissed when Maria I succeeded her father, and the police force created under her in 1780 expelled Freemasons, Jacobins and liberals.

The royal family, aristocracy and high clergy sailed for Brazil on 29 November 1807, a day before General Junot's army entered Lisbon; Rio de Janeiro served as capital of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves from 1808 to 1821. A British force under Wellesley and Beresford forced Junot out in late 1808, after which the British administered Lisbon and the country as virtual colonies. In 1820 Liberals in Porto rebelled, a coup in Lisbon expelled the British governors, and the Constitution of 1822 ended the privileges of the clergy and the nobility.

Carlos I and his heir Luís Filipe were assassinated in the Terreiro do Paço in 1908, and on 5 October 1910 a republican coup ended the monarchy. The coup of 28 May 1926 established the Estado Novo, which suppressed civil liberties and political freedom and ruled until 1974 as the longest-lived dictatorship in Western Europe. During the Second World War Lisbon was one of very few neutral, open Atlantic ports in Europe, a gateway for refugees to the United States and a haven for spies; more than 100,000 people fleeing Nazi Germany left through it. The Carnation Revolution, launched in Lisbon with a military coup on 25 April 1974, brought the regime down; Portugal withdrew from its African colonies and East Timor, and in 1974 and 1975 large numbers of refugees from those colonies arrived in the city.

Portugal joined the European Community in 1986, and the eastern municipality was rebuilt for Expo '98, held 500 years after Vasco da Gama's voyage to India. The city had 658,236 residents in 2025 within an administrative area of 100.05 square kilometres and its recent growth is essentially due to arrivals from abroad, the share of foreign nationals having roughly doubled between 2014 and 2019 to 17.48 per cent. Tourism had reached about six visitors for every resident by 2022, with a plurality of city-centre houses converted to tourist accommodation and housing supply squeezed as a result. Wages and purchasing power remain among the lowest of any European capital, and the city has a high level of youth emigration, mostly to France, the United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Belgium.