Praça dos Restauradores & Palácio Foz: The Morning of 1640
Why is it significant?
Stand at the southern end of Praça dos Restauradores and look up the square to the tall stone obelisk in the middle, with two bronze figures at its foot. Behind you is the bustle of Rossio; ahead, the city's grandest avenue begins its long climb north.
Key Facts
| Place | Praça dos Restauradores & Palácio Foz: The Morning of 1640 |
|---|---|
| Address | Praça dos Restauradores, 1250-187 Lisboa, Portugal |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.71500, -9.14170 |
| Part of Walk | Up the Avenida da Liberdade: Lisbon's Grand Boulevard from Restauradores to Parque Eduardo VII |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand at the southern end of Praça dos Restauradores and look up the square to the tall stone obelisk in the middle, with two bronze figures at its foot. Behind you is the bustle of Rossio; ahead, the city's grandest avenue begins its long climb north. On your left, a long palace fills almost the whole side of the square.
The obelisk, raised in 1886, remembers the morning of 1 December 1640. For sixty years Portugal had shared its king with Spain, ever since the crown passed to Philip the Second in 1580. That morning a band of conspirators, nobles sick of Spanish taxes and Spanish wars, stormed the royal palace by the river, killed the hated secretary of state, Miguel de Vasconcelos, and threw his body from a window. Then they proclaimed the Duke of Bragança king, as João the Fourth.
Independence was easier to declare than to keep. The war with Spain dragged on for twenty-eight years, and the names carved around the obelisk are the battles of that long struggle, until Spain finally recognised Portugal in 1668. The two bronze figures stand for Victory and for the spirit of Independence. Restauradores means the Restorers, the men who gave the country back its own crown.
Now the palace. It was built in the late eighteenth century for the Marquis of Castelo Melhor, and in the late 1880s it passed to the Marquis of Foz, who filled it with mirrors, gilding and paintings in the Parisian taste and gave it the name it still carries. Then came a darker tenant. In the years of the Estado Novo dictatorship, the palace housed the regime's propaganda office, the department that shaped what the Portuguese were told about their own country.
Today it holds a tourist office and public departments, which is a rather satisfying reversal. Look around the square, too, at the tall art deco front of the old Éden theatre, a reminder that this was once Lisbon's Broadway of cinemas and revues. Now walk to the northern corner of the palace, where a narrow, very steep street climbs west toward the Bairro Alto. At its foot is the lower station of a funicular.