Lisbon, 1755
The church with no roof: Lisbon’s Carmo and the earthquake of 1755
How the Carmo convent lost its roof on 1 November 1755, what the quake did to Lisbon, and why the same ruin turns up again in 1974.
The nave of the Carmo church in Lisbon has no roof. Pale stone arches rise from the floor in pairs, and above them there is only sky. Nothing was left unfinished. The vault fell on the morning of 1 November 1755, and nobody ever put it back.
It was a Saturday and All Saints’ Day, and the churches were full. The main shock came at about 9:40 local time. Contemporary accounts put the shaking at anything from three and a half to six minutes, which is a very long time to stand inside a stone building.
What the Carmo was
The Carmelite convent was founded in 1389 by the Constable Nuno Álvares Pereira, and work on the church began in 1393. It was plain Gothic, the severe style of the begging orders, and by 1755 it had stood for more than three and a half centuries. The convent also held a library of about 5,000 volumes.
What the earthquake did
Lisbon had roughly 200,000 people, on one historian’s estimate. Between 30,000 and 40,000 of them are thought to have died, and about 85 per cent of the city’s buildings were destroyed. Those figures are argued over. A study published in 2009 found the contemporary reports vague and hard to separate from a run of earthquakes in Morocco that same November.
Seismologists still disagree about the size of the quake itself. Estimates run from about 7.7 to 9.0 on the moment magnitude scale.
The sea drew back from the harbour first, leaving cargo and wrecks on the mud. About forty minutes after the shock a wave came in and ran up the Tagus, and two more followed. Candles knocked over in houses and churches started fires, and Britannica says they burned for about six days.
At the Carmo, the stone roof over the nave collapsed and the library was destroyed. Only the pointed arches between the pillars survived. The roof was never rebuilt.
What people made of it
The shock landed on a major feast day and wrecked almost every important church in the city, so it was hard to read as anything but a message. Voltaire wrote a poem about the disaster and then used it in Candide against the idea that this is the best of all possible worlds. In 1756 Kant published three texts on the quake. His theory, about shifting caverns full of hot gas, was wrong, but it is counted among the first systematic attempts to explain earthquakes by natural causes alone.
The ruin gets a second job
In 1864 the site was donated to the Association of Portuguese Archaeologists, who turned the ruin into a museum. The Carmo Archaeological Museum is still there, inside what is left of the church. Opening hours and prices change, so check the museum’s own website before you go.
A dictatorship ends beside the same ruin
On the night of 24 April 1974 rebel officers used the radio as a starting gun. At 22:55 a presenter gave the time and played “E Depois do Adeus”, Portugal’s Eurovision entry that year. At 00:20 Rádio Renascença broadcast “Grândola, Vila Morena” by Zeca Afonso, the signal for the Armed Forces Movement to take its objectives.
The head of the government, Marcelo Caetano, took refuge in the headquarters of the National Republican Guard at Largo do Carmo, beside the ruin. Soldiers surrounded it. He surrendered to General António de Spínola, and Captain Salgueiro Maia, whose troops had driven into central Lisbon that morning, arranged it.
The revolution is named for the flowers. A restaurant worker, Celeste Caeiro, handed carnations to soldiers, and some of them pushed the stems into their gun barrels. The usual count is six dead and 45 injured, a small toll for the end of a regime that had lasted decades. Caetano went into exile in Brazil.
Where Novissima begins
Novissima, a literary thriller set in Lisbon, opens in this nave. Its Prologue is the morning of 1 November 1755, and the plot turns on a treaty that the state is due to sign in the roofless church at 9:40 on a Saturday, the minute the roof fell. The building is real. The machine, the institute behind it and every person in the story are invented.
The Prologue and Chapter 1 are free to read on this site.