Praça do Príncipe Real
Why is it significant?
Walk under the enormous cedar in the middle of the garden, its branches trained flat on an iron frame so wide that people sit beneath it as if under an umbrella. Around the square stand pastel mansions, and one neo-Moorish palace in pink and white that looks like it wandered in from another century.
Key Facts
| Place | Praça do Príncipe Real |
|---|---|
| Address | Praça do Príncipe Real, 1250-184 Lisboa, Portugal |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.71690, -9.14880 |
| Part of Walk | Pessoa's Lisbon: Poets, Bookshops and Lookouts of Chiado & Bairro Alto |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk under the enormous cedar in the middle of the garden, its branches trained flat on an iron frame so wide that people sit beneath it as if under an umbrella. Around the square stand pastel mansions, and one neo-Moorish palace in pink and white that looks like it wandered in from another century.
For a long time this was the ugliest spot in the neighbourhood. After the 1755 earthquake, building began here on a huge new palace and later on a cathedral, but the projects were abandoned, and for decades the site was known simply as a heap of rubble. Only in the nineteenth century was it turned into a garden, and in 1859 it was named after the Prince Royal, Pedro, the eldest son of Queen Maria II.
Under the garden lies something few visitors notice: a great octagonal reservoir of the Patriarcal, built in the 1860s to hold water from the Águas Livres aqueduct. Lisbon's water once rested here in the dark, under the feet of strollers.
By the late nineteenth century this was a fashionable address, and the people who moved here were exactly the readers and writers of the papers we just passed. The square even had, for a time, an official republican name, Praça Rio de Janeiro, before the old royal one came back. Lisbon is like that: regimes rename things, and the people keep calling them what they always did. Pessoa himself, twenty-two years old, watched the monarchy fall in 1910 and the republic rename half the city.
Today the square is a calm island above the city, with old men playing cards, a kiosk and benches in the shade. From here head east along Rua Dom Pedro V, a straight, gentle walk of under half a kilometre, to a balcony that hangs over the whole of downtown Lisbon.