The Castle Terrace and the Lost Royal Palace
Why is it significant?
Step onto the wide terrace inside the castle walls, with the old cannons lined up along the parapet and the whole of the lower city laid out below you like a map. On a clear day you can follow the river all the way to the great red bridge and beyond.
Key Facts
| Place | The Castle Terrace and the Lost Royal Palace |
|---|---|
| Address | Castelo de São Jorge, Rua de Santa Cruz do Castelo, 1100-129 Lisboa, Portugal |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.71210, -9.13370 |
| Part of Walk | Saints, Sieges and Stairways: Alfama and the Castelo de São Jorge in Lisbon |
| Generated | Generated |
Step onto the wide terrace inside the castle walls, with the old cannons lined up along the parapet and the whole of the lower city laid out below you like a map. On a clear day you can follow the river all the way to the great red bridge and beyond.
The bronze king standing here is Afonso Henriques, the conqueror of 1147, a copy of the famous nineteenth-century statue in Guimarães. After the conquest, the Moorish governor's residence on this hilltop became the palace of the kings of Portugal, the Paço da Alcáçova. For more than three centuries kings held court, received ambassadors and signed treaties up here, until King Manuel the First moved down to a new palace on the riverbank in the early 1500s, closer to the ships and the spice warehouses that were making him rich.
One evening in 1502, in the queen's chamber of this palace, a court poet called Gil Vicente performed a short monologue to celebrate the birth of the future King João the Third. He played a cowherd who stumbles into the royal bedroom. That small performance is traditionally counted as the birth of Portuguese theatre, and Gil Vicente went on to become the country's great early playwright.
The castle only got its name, São Jorge, in the late fourteenth century, under King João the First, who had married the English princess Philippa of Lancaster, and Saint George was the warrior saint of the English. The earthquake of 1755 finished off what was left of the palace, and much of what you see in the walls today, the crisp battlements and neat towers, comes from a sweeping restoration around 1940 under the Estado Novo dictatorship, which wanted a castle that looked properly heroic.
On the far side of the citadel, an archaeological site shows the deeper layers: traces of an Iron Age settlement going back to around the seventh century before Christ, and houses from the Islamic city. Kings were only the latest tenants of this hill. Now leave the terrace and follow the lane east, still inside the outer walls, into the small residential quarter of Santa Cruz.