Praça Luís de Camões

Why is it significant?

High on his pedestal in the middle of the square stands a man with a sword at his hip, a book in his hand and a laurel wreath on his head.

Key Facts

Open the walk

High on his pedestal in the middle of the square stands a man with a sword at his hip, a book in his hand and a laurel wreath on his head. Luís de Camões, Portugal's national poet, has looked down on this square since 1867, and if you circle the base you will find eight smaller figures keeping him company, chroniclers, poets and the mathematician Pedro Nunes.

Camões was a soldier as much as a writer. He lost an eye fighting in North Africa, was jailed after a street brawl in Lisbon, and was shipped out to India and the Far East, where he spent seventeen years. The story goes that when his ship was wrecked at the mouth of the Mekong, he swam ashore holding his manuscript above the waves. No one can prove it. Every Portuguese schoolchild knows it.

That manuscript was Os Lusíadas, The Lusiads, published in 1572: ten cantos telling Vasco da Gama's voyage to India as a new epic, with the gods of Olympus quarrelling over the fate of the Portuguese. It became the founding poem of the nation, the way Dante is for Italy. When Camões died in 1580, the country lost its independence to Spain the same year, and later generations saw the coincidence as a kind of omen.

The square itself was opened on ground cleared after the 1755 earthquake, where a great noble palace had stood. And Portugal's national day, 10 June, is the date of Camões's death. Under the dictatorship the regime turned him into a symbol of empire; after 25 April 1974 the poet was claimed back as a voice of language and wandering, of a small country staring at a very large sea.

Look at the pavement around you, the black and white calçada portuguesa, laid stone by stone by hand. Now take Rua do Loreto and then Calçada do Combro westward, about four hundred metres, to a terrace where a stone giant from Canto Five glares out at the river.