Parque Eduardo VII: An English King and an Old Alliance
Why is it significant?
Walk into the bottom of the park and turn to look up the slope: a wide green carpet of clipped box hedges, cut into geometric patterns, climbing toward a giant flag at the top, while behind you the whole city falls away to the river.
Key Facts
| Place | Parque Eduardo VII: An English King and an Old Alliance |
|---|---|
| Address | Parque Eduardo VII, 1070-051 Lisboa, Portugal |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.72680, -9.15160 |
| Part of Walk | Up the Avenida da Liberdade: Lisbon's Grand Boulevard from Restauradores to Parque Eduardo VII |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk into the bottom of the park and turn to look up the slope: a wide green carpet of clipped box hedges, cut into geometric patterns, climbing toward a giant flag at the top, while behind you the whole city falls away to the river.
Why does a park in the middle of Lisbon carry the name of an English king? In April 1903 King Edward the Seventh of Britain came to Lisbon on a state visit, sailing up the Tagus on the royal yacht. The visit was meant to reaffirm the oldest alliance in the world still in force, sealed between England and Portugal by the Treaty of Windsor in 1386. The city renamed the park, until then the Parque da Liberdade, in his honour.
The friendship had its bitter side. Only thirteen years earlier, in 1890, Britain had sent Portugal an ultimatum, forcing it to give up its dream of a belt of colonies across Africa from Angola to Mozambique. The humiliation was enormous. It fed the republican movement that would overthrow the monarchy in 1910, and it produced a furious patriotic song, A Portuguesa, which one day became the national anthem.
The park itself took decades to finish. The architect Francisco Keil do Amaral reshaped it in the 1940s, and today it covers about twenty-five hectares, the green crown at the top of the avenue. At weekends families picnic on the slopes, joggers grind their way uphill, and every year, in late spring, the Lisbon book fair fills the paths with hundreds of stalls.
Look at the symmetry before you climb: the avenue below, the roundabout, the park above, all on one straight axis from the river to the hilltop. It was planned to read like a sentence. Now walk up along the eastern side of the park, on your right as you face uphill. A little way up, a building covered in blue and white tiles is named after a marathon runner.