The Great Lisbon Earthquake – World Magazine

By Ruth Orr

Portugal—We are most familiar here with the colonial and global expansionist efforts of the British and Spanish, and with good reason, for they left an indelible mark on our region and our country, but they were not the only Europeans to claim rights over other peoples and lands. Portugal, for example, was a major player in the Ages of Discovery, leading to a bitter rivalry with Spain that required papal intervention to settle. That is why Brazil speaks Portuguese and everyone speaks Spanish, but that is a different story altogether. The point is that in the 18th century, Portugal was a global power, and its capital, Lisbon, was the jewel in its crown. This port city, once one of the most beautiful in Europe, was famous for its wealth and sophistication. Although the country’s general prosperity began to decline as other nations entered the game of exploiting people, by mid-century Lisbon was still home to between 200,000 and 275,000 people, most of them good Catholics.

For this reason, most of the city's population went to church on Saturday, November 1, 1755. For those who were not Catholic, November 1 was All Saints' Day, a big enough holiday that you were expected to attend services unless you had a good excuse. The morning began like any other, and the city's six magnificent cathedrals were filled with worshippers.

But at around 9:40 a.m., their world literally came crashing down around them when a series of massive earthquakes struck the city.

Over a ten-minute period, there were three distinct earthquakes. The second shock caused the most damage, and lasted for at least three and a half minutes. Modern seismologists estimate that it measured about 8.5 on the Richter scale, making it a “great” earthquake. For the uninitiated, the Richter scale gets significantly worse as you go up, so an 8.0 quake is about ten times worse than a 7. A 7.0 quake releases roughly the same amount of energy as 32 Hiroshima atomic bombs. Doing the math, that means that for three and a half minutes, Lisbon was subjected to the energy of more than 320 atomic bombs that tore through the city. Huge cracks more than 15 feet wide opened up in the middle of the streets.

The epicenter of the earthquake was about 180 miles southwest of Lisbon, in the Atlantic Ocean. The quake was felt in North Africa and as far away as Switzerland. Morocco was hit hard, with nearly 10,000 people killed as a result of the quake.

But it was Lisbon that felt the full effects of the devastation. All those magnificent cathedrals, packed with people, collapsed, burying tens of thousands of faithful beneath them. Hundreds more died when the wharf and the stone pier building that stood on it collapsed into the river. Hundreds more people were trapped in various buildings throughout the city.

Then the fires started. Candles lit in honor of the holiday were thrown from their holders onto papers, desks, carpets, or curtains. Suddenly the fires people had started were filled with flammable debris and debris that had fallen from shelves. The flames covered the floors in front of them, making it easy for them to jump from the safety of their hearths into the rest of the house. Shortly after the earthquakes ended, the city was engulfed in flames.

Firefighters did their best to put out the fires, even succeeding in some of the most densely populated areas, but many people fled their homes rather than fight the fires. The problem was compounded by the narrow streets, filled with debris from collapsing buildings. Hundreds of patients at the Real Hospital were burned to death, unable to run due to illness or infirmity. People tried to gather in public squares with whatever belongings they had salvaged from their destroyed homes, but as the fires approached and spread, the squares (and many of the merchandise) were abandoned, adding more fuel to the ever-growing fires. The city burned for five days, destroying more than two-thirds of the city. The fires sucked up so much oxygen that people within 100 feet of the flames found themselves suffocating.

To escape the fires and collapsing buildings, people gathered along the open waterfront, believing they were safer there. Those who could, boarded boats and headed out to sea to wait out the devastation as far away from the fires and collapsing buildings as possible.

Then came the tsunami. These poor people were not going to survive. As is often the case when a major earthquake strikes off the coast, the displaced seawater began to appear shortly after the party began. Forty minutes after the quake struck, a huge wave swept through the harbor and followed the river into the center of town. Those lucky enough to be on horseback in the hope of surviving the wave pushed their horses to breaking point in an attempt to race the water to higher ground. Those who weren’t so lucky were swept away and drowned.

Sorry, did I say one tsunami? Because there was more than one. As the water receded, it revealed a vast expanse of seabed that people had never seen before, including lost cargo and forgotten shipwrecks. Perhaps thinking of recovering something from the destruction, the people who had survived it gathered on the beach to see what had happened. Then two more waves came ashore, pulling more people and debris out to sea. Refugees pulled themselves out of the water and the boats became overcrowded, causing the boats to capsize and sink.

Ultimately, between 30,000 and 50,000 people died in Lisbon alone, between 15 and 25 percent of the city's population. Destruction and death also swept along the coast in other Portuguese cities, especially in the Algarve region. Many Spanish cities were also damaged.

The earthquake struck at a time when political tensions in Portugal were already high, and it brought the struggling empire to a standstill. The royal family escaped the quake unscathed, thanks to one of the king’s daughters requesting a holiday away from the city. But they were not affected by the disaster, as after the disaster the king developed an intense fear of living within walls, and the entire court was moved into a series of huge, elaborate tents and pavilions. The king never got over this fear, and a new palace was not built until after his death.

The clean-up was a massive undertaking. Firefighters were sent out to put out the fires. Teams of ordinary citizens were recruited to collect corpses from the streets, removing them by the thousands before the disease could spread. Despite the Church’s objections, most of the bodies were loaded onto boats and driven into the sea for burial. The Portuguese army was deployed to deter looters. They built a series of public gallows, on which more than 30 people caught taking advantage of the chaos were to be executed.

Then came the rebuilding. Although the king and his advisers suggested abandoning the city entirely and starting over elsewhere, they ultimately opted to demolish the entire remains of the Baixa district (the most damaged part of the city) in order to build an entirely new city on the site of the old one. They promised themselves that they would not get bogged down as they had done before. The new city was planned in straight lines, with neat blocks and wide streets to prevent congestion. It took only a year to clear the rubble so that new construction could begin.

Perhaps the most impressive result of the reconstruction (apart from the beautiful scenery of Lisbon’s streets) were the Pumabelin buildings. Designed to be earthquake-proof, they are among the oldest such buildings in Europe. Essentially, flexible wooden cages were embedded in the floors and walls of the new buildings, which could take the stress of earthquakes and distribute it more evenly, preventing the buildings from collapsing as a whole. The system was tested by building miniature models and then having the army trample them as hard as they could, which is pretty cool.

The buildings of Pombaline still stand today, and combined with the wooden pillars buried in the ground in the Baixa neighborhood, the city is in good shape to stand for hundreds of years to come.

As for the rest of the legacy? It was the first major earthquake studied by scientists, and it gave birth to the field of seismology as we know it today.

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