The Marquis of Pombal and the Lisbon that was not meant to die

By GoPocket · 29 Jun 2026 · 3 min read

There is a square in Lisbon where a man in stone looks down upon the city he practically invented. He is not a king, not a saint: he is a minister, a reformer, a man whom many loved and many hated with equal intensity. Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, better known as the Marquis of Pombal, is perhaps the figure who more than any other shaped the modern soul of the Portuguese capital. His story is one of ruthless ambition put at the service of a crystal-clear vision, in one of the most dramatic moments any European city has ever lived through.

The morning Lisbon disappeared

It was the first of November 1755, All Saints' Day, and most Lisboans were in church when the earth began to shake. The earthquake that struck the city was of unheard-of violence, followed by a tsunami and fires that burned for days. Medieval and Manueline Lisbon, that of the great navigators and spices, that which had accumulated immense riches during the golden century of discoveries, was reduced largely to rubble. It is estimated that the catastrophe killed a considerable portion of the population and destroyed thousands of buildings, including churches, palaces and historical archives of incalculable value.

A minister with the powers of a pharaoh

Pombal was not born to govern a city. He was a career diplomat, had spent years in London and Vienna, and had studied up close how the enlightened monarchies of Europe functioned. When he returned to Portugal, he brought with him modern ideas and an iron will. The earthquake gave him something no reformer ever obtains through ordinary means: a tabula rasa. With the king prostrate from trauma and the nobility paralyzed, Pombal took hold of the country with almost supernatural energy, concentrating upon himself powers that technically did not belong to him.

The rational city: when urban planning becomes ideology

The Baixa Pombalina, the lower quarter of Lisbon rebuilt under his direction, is not merely an example of eighteenth-century urban planning: it is a political manifesto in stone and lime. The orthogonal streets, the buildings with uniform facades, the symmetrical squares tell the enlightenment ideal of an ordered, rational, controllable city. Pombal recruited military engineers and architects to design a quarter capable of withstanding future seismic shocks — an extraordinary intuition for the time, which led to the development of innovative construction techniques still studied today.

The dark side of the reformer

It would be dishonest to recount Pombal without speaking of prisons. His government was also a regime of surveillance and repression. The Caxias prison and, even more so, the cells of the Fort of São Julião da Barra saw hundreds of opponents, nobles fallen from grace, suspect intellectuals pass through. The trial against the Távora family — accused of attempting the king's life — remains one of the most controversial episodes of his government: a spectacular death sentence that many historians consider more a political reckoning than an act of justice.

The fall and ambivalent memory

When King Joseph I died, Pombal's fortune reversed in a matter of weeks. The new queen, Maria I, was surrounded by nobles and clergy who had been waiting for years for the moment of revenge. Pombal was removed from power, tried, and condemned — although his advanced age spared him more serious consequences. He died on his estate, far from Lisbon, in the same provincial city where he was born.

Why Pombal still belongs to Lisbon

Visiting the Baixa today means walking inside an eighteenth-century project still intact, an absolute rarity in Europe. Every building, every street corner, every proportion tells a precise intention. And in the tension between that planned rationality and the vital and melancholic chaos that Lisbon nonetheless managed to preserve — the fado in the alleys, the chipped azulejos, the irregular hills of the historic center — perhaps lies the most authentic character of the city. Pombal wanted to control everything, and Lisbon respected his plan where it could, then did as it pleased. A balance that, looked at well, is perhaps not so different from that of any other great love story.

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