The cave where the dead were buried with shells
Cascais holds a Chalcolithic burial cave where around 115 people were laid to rest between the fourth and third millennia BC with scallop shells, carved stone idols and decorated schist slabs. Discovered by geologist Carlos Ribeiro in 1879 and later cleared and catalogued by Abreu Nunes in the 1940s, the finds now sit in the Cascais Town Museum and the National Geological Museum.
A geologist found a cave full of the dead
A few hundred meters from where you are standing, a geologist named Carlos Ribeiro climbed down into a cave on the edge of Cascais. He found it full of the dead. Ribeiro is remembered as the father of Portuguese archaeology, and this was one of the finds that earned him the title. He believed the bones went back to the Paleolithic, the earliest and coldest stretch of the Stone Age. He was wrong about the date, but not about the importance of the place.
The following year, a congress of anthropologists touring Europe came to see the cave for themselves. They had spent the previous night in Cascais celebrating the Prince Royal's birthday, and arrived a little worse for it. Ribeiro and the later diggers pieced together what they found. It was a burial ground. It was used across the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods. That was the fourth and third millennia BC. Farming communities across Iberia first began working copper in this era. Around 115 people were buried inside. They were laid down with offerings meant to follow them.
The grave goods showed a life turned toward the sea. Diggers found scallop shells and other mollusks packed in beside the bones. Cylindrical stone idols lay there too. They were carved for no purpose but the grave. Schist slabs cut with decoration were there as well. Stone tools, some chipped and some polished smooth, lay among the dead. Whoever buried them wanted them furnished for whatever came next.
Excavators finally catalogued the shells and idols
By the end of the 19th century the cave was no longer safe. The scholar José Leite de Vasconcellos warned that Cascais was growing over it. Building lot by building lot, the town expanded. The site was degrading under the weight of the town above it. Decades passed before anyone acted on the warning with any thoroughness.
In 1942 the archaeologist Afonso do Paço carried out a second major excavation. Then, between 1945 and 1947, Abreu Nunes went back in and did the careful work. He finally recorded what the cave held. He cleared out the funerary remains layer by layer. He catalogued the idols, the shell offerings, and the carved slabs left with the dead. When the digging was done, he had the cave cleaned out and wired for light. A burial chamber became something that could be walked into and read. It was no longer merely found.
Some of what Nunes and his predecessors recovered sits today in the Cascais Town Museum. The rest is held at the National Geological Museum. Ribeiro himself helped build this institution into a career. That was a hundred years after he first climbed down into the dark to see what the town was standing on.
An earthquake and tsunami struck the same ground
The ground that held those Chalcolithic burials had one more disaster coming. On the morning of 1 November 1755, a massive earthquake tore through Lisbon. A tsunami raced along the coast. Cascais took the same blow. Contemporary accounts describe processions and desperate pilgrimages to churches and hermitages. People searched for shelter. The cave's dead had been laid down with shells and carved idols meant to protect them. The living now had nothing but prayer.
A king who refused ever to sleep indoors again
King Joseph I of Portugal happened to be in Cascais that morning. The timing saved his life. The earthquake and tsunami flattened Lisbon but left the king untouched. It did mark him. He came away terrified of enclosed spaces. He refused ever again to sleep inside a walled building. Eventually his whole court moved into a complex of tents at Ajuda. They could not risk another roof coming down on them. A town that had just watched its dead rediscovered in a cave now watched its king refuse to sleep under any ceiling at all.
A second king chose Cascais and died there
More than a century later, Cascais became a royal refuge again. This time it was by choice rather than chance. Starting in the 1870s, Luís I of Portugal made the town his family's seaside home. Every September he came here. He drew the Portuguese nobility down to the coast with him. He died in Cascais in 1889. He died on the same stretch of shore where Joseph I's court had once fled the ruins of Lisbon. Two kings, more than a hundred years apart, both bound to this same short run of coastline. One fled here in terror. The other chose it, and never left.
The cave still holds its light, and the coast above it still holds its dead.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and Strata will dig the ground under your feet instead, wherever that is, in about a minute, with every source shown.