Cities and disaster
The Lisbon earthquake and tsunami of 1755
What happened?
At 9.30am on 1 November 1775 – All Saints Day – an earthquake struck the Atlantic, with its epicentre about 125 miles west of Cape St Vincent on the south-west coast of Portugal (some sources claim that it was actually further south). It lasted about 10 minutes (in three separate ‘jolts’) and is now reckoned to have reached 9 on the Richter scale – that is, its magnitude was similar to the one that occurred in the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day 2004.
It was felt as far afield as France, Switzerland, northern Italy and Finland. In north Africa, the city of Algiers was completely destroyed and Tangiers was extensively damaged. But it was the fate of the Portuguese capital of Lisbon, then one of Europe’s most beautiful cities, that had the biggest impact at the time and for years to come.
Fissures 5 metres (16 feet) wide ripped through the city centre. Many buildings were destroyed, and when the inhabitants fled their homes, leaving fires burning, a huge conflagration resulted that raged for five days. It destroyed much of Lisbon, including the opera house, which had only recently opened with the unfortunate name of ‘The Phoenix’.
But these were not the only injuries that the city suffered. About 30 minutes after the earthquake, a tsunami hit the city. The first of three waves, estimated to have been 6m (20ft) high, swamped ships moored in the River Tagus, killing many of the people who had boarded them in search of safety and dragging others out to sea, some 20,000 in all. The royal palace, sited next to the Tagus, was swept away. The destruction from the tsunami was even greater in the south of the country: in the Algarve, waves cresting at more than 30m (98ft) destroyed coastal fortresses and razed houses.
What was the cost?
Between 60,000 and 100,000 of Lisbon’s population of 275,000 were killed by the earthquake, tsunami or fire, and 85% of Lisbon’s buildings – about 18,000 of them – were destroyed. The Royal Hospital of All Saints, the largest public hospital at the time, was consumed by flames and hundreds of patients burned to death. The destruction of the royal palace also meant the loss of its 70,000-volume library, the royal archives (including records of early explorers and navigators such as Vasco da Gama) and a great many works of art, including paintings by Titian, Correggio and Rubens.
What was the disaster’s legacy?
In less than a year, Lisbon was in the throes of reconstruction, in a style – substantial squares and wide avenues – that was quite different from the medieval city that had disappeared in the rubble. The Lisbon earthquake saw the birth of seismology – it was the first such event to be studied scientifically – and the new buildings rising in the city were the first to be ‘seismically protected’.
In Portugal as a whole, political tensions were accentuated in the wake of the catastrophe, and the country’s colonial pretensions were severely curtailed. But the effects of the disaster were felt far beyond Portugal’s borders and for many years afterwards.
The fact that the earthquake had done such terrible damage to such a Catholic country – and on a Catholic holiday – made many people doubt their faith. The arbitrariness of survival particularly affected the French author Voltaire, who described the earthquake in his novel Candide (1759), in which he savagely satirised the notion that this is the ‘best of all possible worlds’. In it, he wrote:
The next day, in searching among the ruins, they [Candide and his tutor Pangloss] found some eatables with which they repaired their exhausted strength. After this, they assisted the inhabitants in relieving the distressed and wounded. Some, whom they had humanely assisted, gave them as good a dinner as could be expected under such terrible circumstances. The repast, indeed, was mournful, and the company moistened their bread with their tears; but Pangloss endeavoured to comfort them under this affliction by affirming that things could not be otherwise than they were.
‘For,’ said he, ‘all this is for the very best end, for if there is a volcano at Lisbon it could be in no other spot; and it is impossible but things should be as they are, for everything is for the best.’
The philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), too, became obsessed by the disaster. He published three different works about it and developed the concept of the ‘sublime’ partly to comprehend what had happened in Portugal.
Artists also recorded the event. According to Jan T Kozak and Charles D James of the National Information Service for Earthquake Engineering:
The extensive number of renderings of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake found throughout Europe demonstrate the traumatic effect the disaster had on the continent. Depictions of [it] were created, copied, and widely distributed and discussed throughout all of southern, western and central Europe. Whether created by the new desire to investigate, record and understand the earthquake in natural rather than strictly metaphysical terms, or created by the more sensational desire to report on human calamity, these depictions indicate that the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 represents a watershed event in European history.
