Casa dos Bicos: The House of Spikes and Saramago's Olive Tree
Why is it significant?
Run your eyes over the façade in front of you: row after row of stones cut into sharp little pyramids, like a giant grater turned towards the river. Morning light catches every point, and by afternoon the whole wall seems to bristle with shadow. This is the Casa dos Bicos, the House of Spikes.
Key Facts
| Place | Casa dos Bicos: The House of Spikes and Saramago's Olive Tree |
|---|---|
| Address | Rua dos Bacalhoeiros 10, 1100-135 Lisboa, Portugal |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.70870, -9.13270 |
| Part of Walk | Saints, Sieges and Stairways: Alfama and the Castelo de São Jorge in Lisbon |
| Generated | Generated |
Run your eyes over the façade in front of you: row after row of stones cut into sharp little pyramids, like a giant grater turned towards the river. Morning light catches every point, and by afternoon the whole wall seems to bristle with shadow.
This is the Casa dos Bicos, the House of Spikes. It was built around 1523 for Brás de Albuquerque, the son of Afonso de Albuquerque, the ruthless governor who carved out a Portuguese empire in the Indian Ocean. The son had travelled in Italy, and the diamond-point façade is a fashionable Renaissance idea, a cousin of the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara. Back then the house stood right on the waterfront, so ships coming up the Tagus saw it before almost anything else.
Then came the morning of 1 November 1755. The earthquake tore off the upper floors, and for more than two centuries the house was a stump of two storeys, used as a warehouse for salt cod. Only in the early 1980s were the missing floors rebuilt, guided by old views of the city drawn before the disaster. When the builders dug, they found something older still: tanks where the Romans salted fish, and a stretch of the old city wall.
Since 2012 the building has been home to the José Saramago Foundation. Saramago, the only Portuguese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1998, died in 2010. Now look at the olive tree just in front of the door. It was brought from Azinhaga, the village where he was born, and his ashes lie beneath it. A line from the last page of his novel Baltasar and Blimunda is carved nearby, about a soul that did not rise to the stars because it belonged to the earth.
It is a very Lisbon combination... an imperial palace, a Roman fish factory and a Nobel laureate under an olive tree. Now follow the riverside street east along the foot of Alfama, passing the old fountain of Chafariz d'El-Rei, for about half a kilometre of easy, flat walking, until you reach a square with a stone fountain of its own.