An architect who never saw it finished
Rua do Cabo sits near Campo de Ourique, ground that was farmland and orchards until Lisbon's 1755 earthquake sent survivors uphill to settle there. Half a mile away, architect Carlos Mardel spent eighteen years building the Mãe d'Água reservoir, dying in 1763 with it unfinished; it was not completed until 1834.
An architect spent eighteen years on an unfinished reservoir
Half a mile from here stands the Mãe d'Água das Amoreiras, the reservoir built to catch water from Lisbon's aqueduct. Carlos Mardel, a Hungarian architect working in Portugal, designed it in 1745. It was meant to be the final stop where fresh water would reach the city.
The first site chosen for it sat near São Roque, on land belonging to the Counts of Soure. Workers tore down houses and leveled the ground. Then Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, Marquis of Pombal ordered the reservoir moved to Campolide de Baixo, near Rato.
Mardel worked on the new site for eighteen years. He never saw it finished. He died in 1763 with the building still half done. The great water chamber was open to the sky.
Another architect finished the reservoir eighty-nine years after it began
Nine years after Mardel's death, the architect Reinaldo Manuel dos Santos took over the project in 1772. He changed both the inside and the outside of the design. He reworked what Mardel had left behind.
The work dragged on. The roof over the reservoir's deep stone tank did not go up until 1834. This was during the reign of Queen Maria II. Eighty-nine years after Mardel first drew the plans, the reservoir finally began full operation. It stored water seven and a half meters deep. A city that had waited generations for it finally had it.
A king's palace was designed for this high ground and never built
Lisbon's earthquake tore down the Ribeira Palace and killed tens of thousands. King Joseph I needed a new residence. The architect Dionizio de S. Dionizio drew him one for Campo de Ourique, the high ground rising behind the unfinished reservoir. The design was grand. Nobody ever laid a stone.
The plans went nowhere for decades. Mardel's reservoir sat open to the rain through those same years, half a mile away, waiting on its own roof. Campo de Ourique got neither.
Earthquake survivors settled farmland and founded a neighborhood
The earthquake sent survivors climbing out of the ruined city center. Campo de Ourique had been orchards and farmland before that year. Displaced Lisboetas pitched camp on the plateau and stayed. A settlement grew there with no plan behind it, built by people with nowhere else to go.
The reservoir still stands half a mile north, its roof finally sealed a century after the ground around it filled with refugees.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and it will dig the ground you are standing on instead, wherever that is.
