Lisbon travel guide

Top 10 sights in Lisbon

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© Rehman Abubakr · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Belém Tower

   A tower of 1514 built in the river to guard the harbour, and the point from which the Portuguese fleets left and to which they returned. Its stonework is Manueline — ropes, artichokes, armillary spheres — and one corbel carries a rhinoceros, the first in European art, copied from the animal shipped here in 1515.

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2. 

   2© Holger Uwe Schmitt · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Jerónimos Monastery

   Begun in 1501 and paid for out of a fifth of the revenue from the spice trade, which is the point: the building is what pepper bought. Vasco da Gama is buried inside the door, and the cloister is the finest piece of Manueline stone-cutting anywhere.

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   Alfama

   The oldest quarter of Lisbon, on the slope below the castle, and the part that survived the 1755 earthquake because it stands on bedrock rather than fill. Tram 28 grinds up through it, the fado houses are here, and the lanes are still lived in.

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4. 

   4© Alvesgaspar · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Lisbon Cathedral

   The cathedral, begun in 1147 as a fortified Romanesque church immediately after the city was taken from the Moors, and repaired after every earthquake since. Its two blunt towers and rose window are the surviving twelfth-century part.

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5. 

   5© Jules Verne Times Two · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Praça do Comércio

   The square where the royal palace stood until the 1755 earthquake and tsunami destroyed it, rebuilt by Pombal as a formal arcaded space open to the river. King Carlos I and his heir were shot at its northwest corner in 1908, which ended the monarchy four years later.

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6. 

   6© Jean-Christophe BENOIST · CC BY 4.0

   Padrão dos Descobrimentos

   A monument of 1960 on the river, fifty-two metres high, marking five hundred years since the death of Henry the Navigator — who stands at the prow with thirty-two others behind him. The pavement in front is a wind rose given by South Africa, mapping the voyages.

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7. 

   7© Robert Nyman · CC BY 2.0

   Castle of Saint George

   A Moorish castle on the highest hill, taken by Afonso Henriques in 1147 with the help of passing crusaders and used as the royal palace for the next three centuries. The terrace gives the whole city and the estuary; the excavations inside go back to the seventh century BC.

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8. 

   8© Deensel · CC BY 2.0

   Lisbon Baixa

   The grid Pombal drove through the rubble after 1755, and the first large-scale earthquake-resistant construction in Europe — the buildings were framed in timber cages, tested by having troops march around scale models. Every street was assigned a trade, and some still carry those names.

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9. 

   9© Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Calouste Gulbenkian Museum

   The collection of Calouste Gulbenkian, an Armenian who took five per cent of Iraqi oil and spent it on art, then left the lot to Portugal for sheltering him in the war. Egyptian, Islamic, Chinese and European work of the highest quality, ending in a room of Lalique.

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10. 

    10© Fulviusbsas · CC BY-SA 3.0

    National Museum of Ancient Art

    The national collection of Portuguese art, whose central object is the St Vincent Panels of about 1470 — sixty faces of fifteenth-century Portugal, most of them unidentified. The Namban screens showing Portuguese ships arriving in Japan are here too, and Bosch's Temptation of St Anthony.

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1. 

   1© Deensel · CC BY 2.0

   Sanctuary of Christ the King

   A shrine with a 110-metre figure of Christ on the hill at Almada across the river from Lisbon. It was inspired by the Rio de Janeiro statue and completed in 1959; from its platform the 25 April bridge and the whole of Lisbon are in view.

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2. 

   2© Berthold Werner · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Rua Augusta Arch

   A triumphal arch on the Praça do Comércio, raised to mark the rebuilding after the earthquake of 1755. Six columns some eleven metres high carry it, with statues of historical figures above.

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   Belém Palace

   A pink eighteenth-century palace at Belém, the residence of the president of Portugal since 1910 and previously a royal one — the court was staying here rather than in the city when the 1755 earthquake struck, which is why the family survived.

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4. 

   4© No machine-readable author provided. Juntas assumed (based on copyright claims). · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Águas Livres Aqueduct

   An aqueduct of nine hundred and forty-one arches finished in 1799 to bring water into the city, whose central span across the Alcântara valley is sixty-five metres — the tallest stone arch ever built. It came through the 1755 earthquake undamaged and can be walked across.

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   5

   Ribeira Palace

   The main royal residence in Lisbon for some two hundred and fifty years, on the waterfront where Praça do Comércio now is. The earthquake and the fire and the tsunami of 1755 destroyed it and the royal library of seventy thousand volumes inside it; nothing above ground remains.

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6. 

   6© Ingo Mehling · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Carmo Convent

   A Carmelite convent brought down by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. The Gothic church stands roofless as it was left, and shows the mark of that earthquake more plainly than anything else in the old city.

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   Church of Santa Engrácia

   A church begun in 1682 and finished in 1966, so that a job like the works of Santa Engrácia became the Portuguese phrase for anything interminable. It is now the National Pantheon, with Vasco da Gama and Amália Rodrigues among those honoured in it.

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8. 

   8© Jean-Christophe BENOIST · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Palace of Queluz

   A rococo palace at Queluz built between 1747 and 1794 as a summer retreat, and often called the Portuguese Versailles at about a tenth of the scale. Its tiled canal, in which the court took boat rides, still runs through the garden.

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9. 

   9© Bznein · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Rossio Square

   Lisbon's main square since the Middle Ages, rebuilt on Pombal's grid after 1755 and paved in the wave pattern of black and white stone that Portugal exported to Brazil. The column carries Pedro IV, and the National Theatre stands where the Inquisition's palace did.

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10. 

    10© Alvesgaspar · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Lisbon Oceanarium

    An aquarium at the Parque das Nações, the site of the 1998 world exposition. It is among the largest indoor aquariums in Europe and receives about a million visitors a year.

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