A hillside street in Arroios

Earthquakes shook this high ground above the river

The Cruzeiro de Arroios, a stone wayside cross about 650 feet away, once marked the edge of Lisbon's old parish. Crosses like this stood at the boundaries of parishes long before the city grew out to meet them.

The ground here has shaken before. In 1531, an earthquake struck Lisbon and killed an estimated 30,000 people, leveling 1,500 houses. A tsunami followed the same quake, surging up the Tagus River through the heart of the city. Lisbon shook again in 1551, killing 2,000 people, and again in 1151, with 1,000 dead recorded. Arroios sits on the high ground above the river, spared the worst of the flooding but not the shaking.

Note: the 1151 Lisbon earthquake already appears in the opening scene with 1,000 deaths recorded; no additional paragraph needed here beyond what is already told.

In 1383, João Fernandes Andeiro was murdered in Lisbon, a killing that set off the political crisis that followed the death of King Ferdinand I.

In 1841, Diogo Alves was executed in Lisbon, convicted as one of the city's most notorious killers of the period.

In 1875, Nuno José Severo de Mendoça Rolim de Moura Barreto, 1st Duke of Loulé, died in Lisbon.

A building permit records this hillside filling in

A city building permit survives for Rua Ponta Delgada no. 42, about 650 feet from here, filed on 22 May 1899. It is one of the few paper traces of how this hillside filled in with houses as Lisbon's old center grew crowded and people moved uphill. A local account suggests the building there may date from that same period.

In 1909, an earthquake struck Benavente, in the Ribatejo region, and killed 30 people.

Political killings struck Lisbon's center below this corner

Lisbon's center, downhill from this corner, saw a run of political killings in the early 20th century. In 1908, King Carlos I's son and heir, Luís Filipe, Prince Royal of Portugal, was shot dead in the city, alongside an aide, Alfredo Luís da Costa. One of the gunmen, Manuel Buíça, died in the same attack. A decade later, in 1918, President Sidónio Pais was murdered at a Lisbon train station. In 1921, Prime Minister António Granjo was murdered during a period of street violence and coups.

An engineering school anchored the growing neighborhood

In 1911, the Instituto Superior Técnico opened a quarter mile from here, Lisbon's new school of engineering. Arroios became the neighborhood where the city trained the people who built its bridges, dams, and power plants. Around the same years, the hillside filled in with research institutes: the Instituto de Novas Tecnologias in 1998, and the Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores Microsistemas e Nanotecnologias in 1980, both within a quarter mile.

Street art and a memorial marked recent years

In 2020, a mural called Look Up went up about 850 feet away, part of a wave of street art that spread through Arroios' side streets. In 2024, a memorial plaque to Alexey Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died in a Russian prison that year, was placed nearby. It sits among the newer landmarks of a district that has become, in recent years, a place where exiles and activists leave their mark.

Apartment buildings now line a quiet residential street

Today this corner is quiet, a residential street of apartment buildings above the old city. The engineering school's classrooms and labs still anchor the neighborhood about a quarter mile away.