Panteão Nacional: The Church That Took Three Centuries
Why is it significant?
Stand at the foot of the steps and look up at the dome, perfectly white against the sky, sitting on a church shaped like a Greek cross. It looks like it was designed in one go. It was not.
Key Facts
| Place | Panteão Nacional: The Church That Took Three Centuries |
|---|---|
| Address | Campo de Santa Clara, 1100 Lisboa, Portugal |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.71500, -9.12470 |
| Part of Walk | Lisbon in Blue and White: Graça, São Vicente & the Azulejo Trail |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand at the foot of the steps and look up at the dome, perfectly white against the sky, sitting on a church shaped like a Greek cross. It looks like it was designed in one go. It was not. In Portuguese, when something drags on forever, people call it obras de Santa Engrácia, the works of Santa Engrácia.
The story starts with a crime. In 1630, holy objects were stolen from the earlier church on this site. A young man called Simão Pires Solis, a New Christian, from a family of converted Jews, was accused, tortured and executed, and the legend says that as he died he swore his innocence and declared that the church would never be finished. Many people now believe he was innocent, and the curse became Lisbon's favourite explanation for what happened next.
That earlier church collapsed in a storm in 1681. A new, ambitious baroque design was begun in 1682... and then the money ran out, the architect died, kings lost interest, and for centuries the building stood without its dome. It was finally completed by the Estado Novo regime, which inaugurated it as the National Pantheon in 1966, almost three hundred years after the first stone.
Inside, the floor and walls are a geometric dazzle of coloured marble, pink, grey, black and white. And the people resting here tell the story of Portugal: writers like Almeida Garrett and Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, General Humberto Delgado, murdered by the dictatorship's political police in 1965, the fado singer Amália Rodrigues, the footballer Eusébio, and a memorial to Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the consul in Bordeaux who saved thousands of refugees in 1940 by issuing visas against orders.
A church begun under absolute monarchy, finished by a dictatorship, and now honouring democrats, singers and a disobedient diplomat... Portugal's history in one building. Walk around the right side of the Pantheon to the small garden at the end of Campo de Santa Clara, where the river suddenly opens up below you.