To write a history of a city is to write about a person as well as a place. When the city is ancient, like Lisbon, its personality will be complex and many-layered. Some aspects of the city’s story will be repetitive — over and over again the sea figures in the history of Lisbon — but other features will be ephemeral. The sellers of holy relics no longer throng the religious institutions of the city hawking their dubious wares. They have been replaced by a new breed of streetwise vendors who tout the latest fashions in clothes or in gadgets at bargain prices.
Writing about a person suggests a chronology since each individual has his own personal history, but to understand the personality of the city we need to pursue themes which cross over historical ages. These connecting threads are sometimes communal — the Roman Catholic Church has been established in the city for centuries; foreigners, such as the English, have long played a part in its development. Millions of Lisbon’s inhabitants have grown up within view of the river and have earned their living on the waters of it or in industries and commerce connected with the sea. Treating our subject in themes will tempt us to look for influences to explain how this or that came about; historical accounts will shed light on our perspectives.
The character of Lisbon has also been formed by its geography. Like Rome it is founded on seven hills; it is at the estuary of a great navigable river, the Tagus. To the west are vast tracts of the Atlantic bringing an oceanic coolness and dampness to soften the severity of a southern climate. It is exceptionally mild in winter with no snow and little frost. Its hinterland is fertile; its geological make-up is seismic. In 1755 a great earthquake destroyed a large part of the city. To these bare geographical facts can be added a political history that has turned the focus of Portugal more towards the overseas rather than inland towards continental Europe. Its Iberian neighbour, Spain, has often been perceived as a threat to its nationhood, which was established early; for a period of sixty years in the sixteenth century the threat became a reality when Portugal was annexed by the Spanish crown. Real or perceived, the geographical position of Spain has meant that Portugal has been cut off from mainstream Europe. We might say that Lisbon, as a result, has been stretched in one direction toward Brazil and in another, southward, toward the Cape of Good Hope, and from there eastwards to Asia.
Tracing historical themes will involve us in tracing literary and artistic responses to the city as well. Medieval chroniclers had already described details of Lisbon by the time Damião de Góis wrote his celebrated observations in 1554. The city has always appeared to them and those who have followed as a labyrinth: outward voyaging from the port is matched by inward-looking streets, hidden gardens, stairways that do not seem to lead anywhere. Lisbon is a city of steep inclines and complicated, unsymmetrical streets that criss-cross the hills: only in the Baixa area near the river and in the more modern northern part of the city does any form of a grid system appear.
Foreigners, including the English, added to the vast flow of literature about the city, in the nineteenth century. Julio de Castilho and other writers put ‘olisipography’, as the study of Lisbon became known, on a scholarly footing. Poets, writers and musicians have enthused over the ages on particular parts of the city — whether it was the fadistas singing of the Alfama, the Romantics languishing at the sight of the moon on the Tagus or Fernando Pessoa stalking the streets of the Chiado. All these perceptions of the city are part of its identity, part of its existence in the imagination of those who perceive it. Exploring them will bring us closer to understanding the enduring character of Lisbon.