Rua Garrett and the Chiado Fire of 1988
Why is it significant?
Stand on Rua Garrett where it meets Rua do Carmo and look around: polished shop fronts, stucco façades in soft colours, iron balconies, everything looking as if it had been here for two hundred years. Some of it has.
Key Facts
| Place | Rua Garrett and the Chiado Fire of 1988 |
|---|---|
| Address | Rua Garrett, 1200 Lisboa, Portugal |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.71070, -9.14040 |
| Part of Walk | After the Earthquake: The Baixa Pombalina and the Lisbon of 1755 |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand on Rua Garrett where it meets Rua do Carmo and look around: polished shop fronts, stucco façades in soft colours, iron balconies, everything looking as if it had been here for two hundred years. Some of it has. Some of it is barely thirty years old, and the trick is that you cannot easily tell which.
In the early hours of 25 August 1988, a fire broke out in a department store on Rua do Carmo, just below you. It spread through the old Pombaline blocks with terrifying speed, the timber floors and frames burning like kindling. Fire engines struggled to get into the narrow streets. By the time it was out, much of the area between here and the Baixa had been gutted, with a couple of dozen buildings destroyed or damaged and two people dead. For Lisbon, it felt like a small echo of 1755.
The city asked one of its most respected architects, Álvaro Siza Vieira, to lead the reconstruction. Siza made a choice that surprised many people: no showy new landmark. He kept the Pombaline façades, rebuilt the volumes and rooflines of the eighteenth-century plan, and put modern interiors behind them, with new passages and courtyards opening up the blocks.
So the Chiado was rebuilt twice in the same spirit, first by Pombal's engineers after the earthquake and then by Siza after the fire, both times on the principle that the city's form mattered more than any single building. Siza also designed the Baixa-Chiado metro station below, which links the low city and the high city underground. The street itself is named after Almeida Garrett, the Romantic writer who helped found the national theatre you saw in the Rossio.
Here the walk ends. You started where a palace vanished and a city was redrawn with a ruler, you passed the scars of fire and Inquisition, the ruins of the Carmo and the square of the revolution, and you finish in a street that burned and came back looking as if nothing had happened. That is the Baixa's whole story... Lisbon falls down, and Lisbon draws itself again.