Lisbon's Gothic-Romanesque cathedral
Cruzes da Sé sits inside Lisbon Cathedral, built from 1147 on the site of the city's main mosque after Afonso I's army took Lisbon from its Moorish rulers. Twin fortress-like towers, a Gothic royal tomb chapel, and buried Roman and Visigothic remains all lie within this single plot of ground in the old city.
A fortress-like cathedral rose on a captured mosque site
This point sits inside Lisbon Cathedral, known as the Sé de Lisboa, a working Catholic cathedral that still holds Mass today. The building looks like a small fortress, with twin towers and thick stone walls built to double as a stronghold. Afonso I of Portugal ordered it built in 1147, right after his army took Lisbon from its Moorish rulers. He built it, local tradition says, on the site of the city's main mosque. An English crusader named Gilbert of Hastings had just been made bishop of Lisbon, and the new cathedral was built to give him a seat. Builders named Robert and Bernard, who also worked on the cathedral at Coimbra, raised the first Romanesque walls starting around 1150. Workers finished the main chapel fast enough to consecrate it that same year. The whole Romanesque church, with its rounded arches and heavy barrel vault, was not finished until the early 1200s.
Soon after, the cathedral absorbed the relics of Vincent of Saragossa, Lisbon's patron saint, brought north from the Algarve, and pilgrims came to see them for centuries. In 1383, during a fight over who should be king, an angry crowd threw Bishop Martinho Anes off the top of the north tower. Earthquakes struck the building again and again, in 1337, 1344, and 1347, long before the famous one. Each time, the cathedral was patched up and kept standing.
Kings built a Gothic chapel to bury their own dead
King Dinis of Portugal added a Gothic cloister to the cathedral's east side, finished in the early 1300s. His son, Afonso IV of Portugal, went further. Afonso IV tore out the old Romanesque apse and built a new Gothic chapel with a walkway, called an ambulatory, lined with smaller chapels. Afonso IV meant it as a royal burial place for himself and his wife, Beatriz. Afonso IV had won a famous battle in 1340, at the Salado, and that earned him an exception to a church rule that normally barred laypeople from burial in the main chapel. Three medieval tombs still stand in the ambulatory today. One holds Lopo Fernandes Pacheco, 7.º senhor de Ferreira de Aves, a nobleman shown lying with his sword and his dog. Another holds his wife, Maria de Vilalobos, shown reading a prayer book.
A mob threw the bishop from the north tower
During a succession crisis that split Portugal from Castile, a mob turned on the cathedral's own bishop. They suspected Martinho Anes of plotting with Portugal's Castilian enemies. The crowd dragged him to the north tower and threw him from the top.
Lightning burned the cathedral's north tower
Lightning struck the north tower and started a fire. It burned through the wooden cap on top of the tower, the wooden floors inside, and the clappers of the bells. Workers rebuilt the damaged parts by November that year, though the new baroque-style top on the tower was not finished until 1710.
The great earthquake wrecked the Gothic chapel and tombs
At 9:40 in the morning, Lisbon's great earthquake struck the city. It wrecked the cathedral's Gothic chapel and the royal tombs inside it, and brought down the south tower. Fire followed the quake and finished what the shaking had started, tearing through the cloisters and many of the side chapels. The rose window over the west front, one of the cathedral's oldest features, was destroyed outright.
Lisbon slowly rebuilt its ruined cathedral
Lisbon rebuilt its wrecked cathedral slowly, over decades. Workers reconstructed the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament between 1761 and 1785. Between 1769 and 1771, architect Reinaldo dos Santos oversaw repairs to the south tower, a new wooden roof over the nave, and a reworked main chapel in the Baroque style then in fashion. In 1781, sculptor Joaquim Machado de Castro carved new stone tombs to hold the bones of the royal dead whose original graves the earthquake had destroyed.
Restorers stripped away later styles to find the medieval
The Portuguese state named the cathedral a National Monument in January 1907. In the following decades, restorers worked to undo some of the Baroque and Neoclassical changes made after 1755, trying to bring back the building's medieval look. Craftsmen at the Ricardo Leone factory rebuilt the west front's rose window using surviving fragments of the original.
Diggers found a Roman road beneath the courtyard
Archaeologists dug into the cathedral's central courtyard starting in 1990 and found a buried Roman road lined with shops, part of a Roman kitchen, and a sewage channel beneath it. They also found traces of Visigothic buildings and a stretch of red-painted wall from the mosque that is believed to have stood on the site before the cathedral replaced it. Whether that mosque was built over an earlier Visigothic church is still debated among historians. In 2020, Portugal's Minister of Culture ordered the Muslim-era remains preserved rather than cleared away. The cathedral still holds Mass today, and on June 13 each year, couples marry there in a mass wedding honoring Saint Anthony, who Catholic tradition says was baptized at its font. Igreja de Santo António de Lisboa stands about 200 feet away, marking the saint's traditional birthplace.
The cathedral's fortress-like towers and Romanesque nave still stand over the corner of Cruzes da Sé and Largo da Sé, holding eight centuries of burials, fires, and earthquakes within its walls.
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