Lisboa Oriente

But here’s the strange part: Lisbon waited until 1934 to put him up there — a hundred and fifty-two years after he died.

To understand why, we have to start with the morning Lisbon ended.

It was a Saturday morning, All Saints’ Day, and Lisbon’s churches were full — candles lit, people in their best clothes. Just before ten in the morning, a series of violent tremors levelled much of the city. Then the Tagus pulled back. The riverbed was exposed, and curious crowds ran down to see it. Around forty minutes later, the tsunami came in. The brand-new marble quay — where hundreds of survivors had fled looking for solid ground — disappeared into the river. Then the fires started. They burned for days. The royal library, tens of thousands of books, paintings by masters like Titian and Rubens, and the archive of Portuguese maritime exploration since Vasco da Gama — gone. Around eighty-five percent of Lisbon’s buildings were destroyed.

Pombal was one of the king’s secretaries of state at the time — not yet the all-powerful man he would become. But in the weeks after the disaster, his response made him indispensable. Very quickly, he was running the country in practice.

What he did next was genuinely impressive. He set up gallows in visible locations and hanged looters. He fixed food prices. And less than three months after the earthquake, he sent a thirteen-question survey through the Church to parish priests across the kingdom. What time did the tremors begin? How long did they last? Did animals behave strangely? Did wells rise or fall? The questionnaire never once mentions God. Centuries later, modern seismologists used the surviving responses to model the earthquake and tsunami. Pombal helped lay the foundations of scientific seismology by using the clergy as a sensor network.

But there was another side.

In 1761, he used the Inquisition — the same institution he publicly despised — to strangle and burn an elderly Jesuit priest, Gabriel Malagrida, right here in Lisbon. And the Inquisition was already under his family’s influence: the man presiding over it was Pombal’s own brother. Voltaire, Pombal’s intellectual ally, wrote in horror that the Inquisition had managed the impossible — it had made people feel sorry for the Jesuits.

When the new queen, Maria I, came to power in 1777, she pushed him from power almost immediately. Political prisoners he had jailed began to walk out after years in the dark. A foreign diplomat described the scene as a resurrection of the dead.

That’s the man Lisbon took a hundred and fifty years to celebrate. His name is on this square, this roundabout, and the architecture of the historic centre you’re about to walk through.