A convent that watched power fall twice

An earthquake left the convent's roof open to the sky

The arches above Carmo Convent have had no roof since a November morning in 1755. An earthquake tore through Lisbon and gutted the church, the Gothic nave collapsing in on itself. Its library of some 5,000 volumes was destroyed outright. The 126 clerics who lived there fled first to Cotovia, then to Campo Grande, and never fully returned. Repairs came slowly and half-heartedly — new roof tiles in 1800, a barracks moved in by 1810 — but the church itself was left open to the sky. It stands that way now, pointed arches holding up nothing, one of the last visible wounds the earthquake left on the old city.

Almost two hundred years later, those same broken walls would be the last place a government in Portugal stood before it fell.

A constable gave his fortune and died inside

Before the ruin, there was a fortune. Nuno Álvares Pereira, the constable who commanded Portugal's armies and helped put a king on the throne, founded this convent in 1389. He built it on land bought from his own sister and an admiral named Pessanha. Construction dragged on for decades — the presbytery wasn't finished until 1407, the cells not until 1423 — but Nuno kept pouring money into it. Eventually he gave the convent everything he owned. Then he moved in himself, taking the name Frei Nuno de Santa Maria, and lived out his last years inside the walls he had paid for. He died there in 1431. A soldier who had spent his life seizing power ended it by giving all of his away, inside this building.

An iron elevator finally conquered the hill below

Below the convent, the hill itself had always been a problem. Getting from the low streets of the Baixa up to Carmo Square meant a steep climb, and Lisbon's council fielded plan after plan to fix it — mule-drawn rail lines, inclined planes, nothing built. It took a French-Portuguese engineer named Raoul Mesnier du Ponsard almost twenty years of petitions, beginning in 1882, before his iron elevator finally rose forty paces from the convent. King Carlos himself inaugurated it in August 1901, cutting the ribbon on the tall metal tower and its awning. It still carries people up to the same square where the convent's ruin stands, the one mechanical answer this hill ever fully accepted.

A dictator surrendered inside the ruined convent's barracks

The ruin's last stand as a stage came on April 25, 1974. By then the old convent buildings housed the headquarters of a police force, and Portugal's Estado Novo dictatorship was in its final hours. Marcelo Caetano, the regime's last president, took shelter inside the ruined convent's barracks as military rebels surrounded the block outside. Troops loyal to him held the building through the day while soldiers of what became known as the Carnation Revolution waited in the square below, flowers in their rifle barrels. Caetano did not try to fight his way out. He surrendered to António de Spínola, the general the rebels wanted to hand power to, and the Estado Novo ended inside the same walls the earthquake had already broken two centuries earlier.

A museum and a gendarmerie replaced the convent

The buildings didn't stay a barracks. In 1864 they were handed to the Association of Portuguese Archaeologists, who turned the roofless nave into a museum, its broken arches now sheltering old tombs and carved stone instead of a congregation. The convent's surrender-scarred quarters became, over the twentieth century, the General Headquarters of the National Republican Guard (Portugal), the gendarmerie that still polices most of Portugal's territory today. Its officers work now in the same rooms where Caetano waited out his last hours as president, seventy meters)from where you stand.