Praça da Figueira: The Hospital Under the Square
Why is it significant?
Walk into the middle of the square, among the pigeons and the trams, and look up at the castle sitting on its hill above the rooftops. The king on horseback here is João the First, and he looks rather pleased with himself. He has reason to.
Key Facts
| Place | Praça da Figueira: The Hospital Under the Square |
|---|---|
| Address | Praça da Figueira, 1100 Lisboa, Portugal |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.71370, -9.13780 |
| Part of Walk | After the Earthquake: The Baixa Pombalina and the Lisbon of 1755 |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk into the middle of the square, among the pigeons and the trams, and look up at the castle sitting on its hill above the rooftops. The king on horseback here is João the First, and he looks rather pleased with himself.
He has reason to. João the First won the throne in the crisis of 1383 to 1385, defeated Castile at the battle of Aljubarrota, and married Philippa of Lancaster, sealing the alliance with England that Portugal still likes to call the oldest in the world. His sons included Henry, the prince the English call the Navigator. The statue, though, is recent: it was set up in 1971.
What lies beneath your feet is far more interesting. Before 1755, much of this square and the eastern side of the Rossio was covered by the Hospital Real de Todos-os-Santos, the Royal Hospital of All Saints. King João the Second laid its first stone in 1492, and it became one of the great hospitals of Renaissance Europe, a whole complex with wards, a church and gardens. The earthquake and the fires that followed left it in ruins.
It vanished so completely that later generations half forgot it was here. Then, when the ground was dug up in the twentieth century, and again during construction work around the year 2000, archaeologists found walls, burials and objects from the old hospital. The square you are standing on is, in a sense, a lid on a lost building.
After the disaster, the empty space became a market, and for decades a great iron and glass market hall stood here, until it was demolished in 1949. Figueira means fig tree, perhaps from a tree that once grew on the spot, a very homely name for a place with such a story. Now cross the north-western corner of the square towards the bell tower of a church whose stones, as you will see, still carry the marks of fire.