Fire took the Chiado twice, and the poets stayed

A department store fire gutted eighteen Chiado buildings

In the early hours of August 25, 1988, a fire broke out at the Grandella department store on Rua do Carmo, a few steps from where you stand. It was between three and four in the morning. The flames moved fast, jumping to Rua Garrett and beyond, eventually reaching eighteen buildings across Chiado. Eleven of them collapsed completely, including the Grandella store and the Armazéns do Chiado, neither of which ever reopened.

The fire fighters struggled from the start. Streets were narrow, access was difficult, and the stores themselves were full of things that burned fast, some accounts say even gas canisters kept for sale on the shelves. Two people died. Seventy-three were hurt, most of them firemen. Between two and three hundred people lost their homes that night, and close to two thousand lost their jobs by morning. People in Lisbon still call it the worst thing to happen to the city since the earthquake of 1755.

Nobody ever fully explained how it started. The fire began as a slow burn on the top floor of the Grandella building, which investigators noted was an odd way for an intentional fire to behave — those usually spread fast from the start. The cause was never settled.

The earthquake lost Camões's grave, and Lisbon honoured an empty tomb

Before the fire, there was the earthquake. On November 1, 1755, Lisbon was struck by one of the deadliest earthquakes in European history, and the shock reached into every church, convent, and palace in the Chiado. One of its casualties was a grave: the tomb of Luís de Camões, Portugal's national poet, buried in 1580 in the Convent of Saint Anne. The convent collapsed in the earthquake, and his remains were lost inside the ruins.

Then in 1855, a set of bones was identified — probably wrongly — as the poet's, and the discovery was enough to revive a project that had stalled for half a century. Money came in from across Portugal and from the Portuguese community in Brazil. In 1867, a bronze Camões went up in the square that now bears his name, standing on a limestone column ringed by eight smaller statues of the writers and navigators of Portugal's Age of Discovery. King Luís I himself came to see it unveiled.

The tomb was never found. The statue stands about fifty meters from where you are, in the square the poet gave his name to, though it holds no body at all.

An opera house rose after the earthquake and kept reopening

The earthquake had also destroyed Lisbon's opera house, the Tejo Opera House, leaving the city without a stage for the kind of grand productions its aristocracy expected. A group of Lisbon businessmen decided to fund a replacement themselves. Built in only six months, the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos opened on June 30, 1793, under Queen Maria I. Architect José da Costa e Silva modeled it on the great theaters of Naples and Milan.

The house was named for Princess Charlotte of Spain, who had married the future King John VI at the age of ten and later lived with him in Lisbon; Carlos, the masculine form of Charlotte, still marks the façade in a Latin inscription. It closed during the civil war between kings Miguel I and Pedro IV in the 1830s, converted to gas lighting in 1850, wired for electricity in 1887, and shut again for repairs from 1935 to 1940. It has been reclassified twice, most recently as a National Monument in 1996. Each time it closed, it opened again.

Pessoa took his bronze seat the year the district burned

The year the fire burned through the Chiado was also the year the neighborhood chose to fix another of its poets permanently to the pavement. On June 13, 1988, on the hundredth anniversary of his birth, a bronze statue of Fernando Pessoa was unveiled outside Café A Brasileira, the coffeehouse on Rua Garrett where he had spent long hours in the 1920s among Lisbon's writers and artists. President Mário Soares came to unveil it himself.

Sculptor Lagoa Henriques set Pessoa in a chair at a small table, hat on, leg crossed, with an empty chair across from him where anyone can sit. It sits about seventy paces from where you stand, close enough that the smoke from Rua do Carmo would have reached it that August.

Siza rebuilt Chiado's interiors behind its old façades

The rebuilding fell to Álvaro Siza Vieira, the Portuguese architect and future Pritzker Prize winner, invited by Lisbon's mayor Krus Abecasis in 1989 to oversee the reconstruction. His plan kept the old façades standing while rebuilding the interiors from scratch, with modern construction and fire safety built in from the ground up this time. The work took a decade, finishing around 1999, and included a shopping center on the ruined Armazéns do Chiado site and a new metro station tucked beneath the streets. The final piece of Siza's plan, a set of terraces and balconies behind the ruins of the Carmo Convent, did not open until 2015.