Saints, Sieges and Stairways: Alfama and the Castelo de São Jorge in Lisbon

From the house where Saint Anthony was born to the castle the crusaders took in 1147: Lisbon's oldest quarter, its fountains, its Moorish walls, a Roman theatre and the fortress cathedral

Lisbon · 12 stops · 28 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Igreja de Santo António: Where Lisbon's Favourite Saint Was Born

   Largo Santo António da Sé, 1100 Lisboa, Portugal

   Listen · 2:25

   Stand in the little square and face the church with the curved pediment and the single doorway, squeezed between the tram rails and the cathedral. It looks modest... almost polite. Yet ask anyone in Lisbon who their saint is, and this is the address they will give you.

   Tradition says that around 1195 a boy called Fernando Martins de Bulhões was born in a house on this very spot, a stone's throw from the cathedral where he was baptised. He studied with the Augustinian canons, then left Portugal for good, joined the young Franciscan order and became a famous preacher in Italy. He died near Padua in 1231 and was made a saint less than a year later, one of the fastest canonisations in history. So the world calls him Anthony of Padua. Lisbon has never quite forgiven Padua for that.

   Go down into the crypt and you are shown a small room, venerated as the place of his birth. The church above it is not medieval at all. The earthquake of 1755 brought the old one down, and what you see was rebuilt afterwards to a design by Mateus Vicente de Oliveira, the architect who also worked on the royal palace at Queluz.

   And then there is June. On the night of the twelfth, Lisbon throws its biggest street party for Santo António. Alfama fills with smoke from grilled sardines, paper garlands hang between the balconies, and people give each other manjericos, little pots of basil with a paper carnation and a four-line love verse stuck in the soil. Anthony is the matchmaker saint, so the city also stages its famous Saint Anthony weddings, a tradition that began in 1958. Children used to set up tiny altars on the pavement and ask passers-by for a coin for the saint.

   Officially, Lisbon's patron is Saint Vincent, a martyr whose ravens you will meet later. In practice, Anthony won the city's heart a long time ago. Now leave the cathedral for the end of the walk, and go downhill towards the river, to a house covered in stone spikes.

2. 2. Casa dos Bicos: The House of Spikes and Saramago's Olive Tree

   Rua dos Bacalhoeiros 10, 1100-135 Lisboa, Portugal

   Run your eyes over the façade in front of you: row after row of stones cut into sharp little pyramids, like a giant grater turned towards the river. Morning light catches every point, and by afternoon the whole wall seems to bristle with shadow.

   This is the Casa dos Bicos, the House of Spikes. It was built around 1523 for Brás de Albuquerque, the son of Afonso de Albuquerque, the ruthless governor who carved out a Portuguese empire in the Indian Ocean. The son had travelled in Italy, and the diamond-point façade is a fashionable Renaissance idea, a cousin of the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara. Back then the house stood right on the waterfront, so ships coming up the Tagus saw it before almost anything else.

   Then came the morning of 1 November 1755. The earthquake tore off the upper floors, and for more than two centuries the house was a stump of two storeys, used as a warehouse for salt cod. Only in the early 1980s were the missing floors rebuilt, guided by old views of the city drawn before the disaster. When the builders dug, they found something older still: tanks where the Romans salted fish, and a stretch of the old city wall.

   Since 2012 the building has been home to the José Saramago Foundation. Saramago, the only Portuguese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1998, died in 2010. Now look at the olive tree just in front of the door. It was brought from Azinhaga, the village where he was born, and his ashes lie beneath it. A line from the last page of his novel Baltasar and Blimunda is carved nearby, about a soul that did not rise to the stars because it belonged to the earth.

   It is a very Lisbon combination... an imperial palace, a Roman fish factory and a Nobel laureate under an olive tree. Now follow the riverside street east along the foot of Alfama, passing the old fountain of Chafariz d'El-Rei, for about half a kilometre of easy, flat walking, until you reach a square with a stone fountain of its own.

3. 3. Largo do Chafariz de Dentro: The Fountain Inside the Walls

   Largo do Chafariz de Dentro, 1100 Lisboa, Portugal

   Catch your breath in this open square at the foot of Alfama, with the stone fountain on one side and the lanes of the old quarter climbing away behind it. After the tight streets by the river, it feels like a room with the windows thrown open.

   The name tells you where you are. Chafariz de Dentro means the fountain inside... inside the walls, that is, the great ring of fortifications King Fernando built around Lisbon in the 1370s. There has been a fountain here since the Middle Ages, and the structure you see dates largely from a rebuilding in 1622. For centuries this was one of the places where the neighbourhood came for water, and where gossip, quarrels and courtships began.

   The water was the whole reason Alfama existed. The name comes from the Arabic al-hamma, the baths or the hot springs, because warm, mineral water rises from the ground in this part of the hill. In the Moorish city and long afterwards, people bathed, washed and drank from these springs, and the district grew around them.

   The fountain you passed on the way, Chafariz d'El-Rei, is one of the oldest in the city, and its story has a harder edge. A rule from the 1500s is said to have divided its spouts by sex and by status, and enslaved Africans, of whom there were many thousands in Renaissance Lisbon, had a spout of their own. Water carriers, many of them poor migrants from Galicia, then hauled barrels up these hills for anyone who could pay.

   The big building on the square was once a water pumping station, and today it is the Museu do Fado, because this square also belongs to music. Fado grew up in the nineteenth century in neighbourhoods exactly like this one, in taverns full of sailors and fishwives. Now take Rua de São Pedro, the narrow shopping street leading west out of the square, and turn uphill to the white church of São Miguel.

4. 4. Igreja de São Miguel: Gold, Sardines and the Heart of Alfama

   Largo de São Miguel, 1100 Lisboa, Portugal

   Stand on the small sloping square and face the church: a plain white front, two modest bell towers, a flight of steps, and washing hanging from the balconies right beside it. From the outside, São Miguel looks like a village church that wandered into the city and decided to stay.

   It is one of the oldest parishes of Alfama, founded in the twelfth century, soon after the Christian conquest, and dedicated to the archangel Michael, the warrior who weighs souls. The building you see was largely rebuilt in the late 1600s. Then the earthquake of 1755 cracked and damaged it, and it was repaired rather than replaced, which is why it still feels older and more crooked than the churches down in the Baixa.

   If the door is open, step inside. The plain shell hides an interior glowing with talha dourada, carved wood covered in gold leaf, twisting columns and cherubs climbing all the way up to the ceiling. This was the Portuguese baroque answer to the question of what to do with Brazilian gold... you covered the inside of your churches with it.

   Now imagine this square in June. During the festivities of the popular saints, the whole of Alfama turns into one long street party, and this corner is among the loudest. Grills smoke on every doorstep, sardines are eaten on slices of bread, paper garlands zigzag between the windows and the music goes on until the small hours. Each neighbourhood competes in the marchas, costumed parades with their own songs, and Alfama takes its march very seriously indeed.

   A few steps south, around the corner, the stump of a Moorish wall tower stands in Largo de São Rafael, beside a street still called Rua da Judiaria, a quiet reminder of the Jewish quarter that lived here until King Manuel's decree of 1496. And Rua de São Pedro, which brought you up from the fountain, was for generations the market street where fishwives cried the day's catch. Now leave the square by the lanes heading north and east, and look for a very narrow stepped alley climbing between the houses.

5. 5. Beco do Carneiro: Alfama's Tightest Squeeze

   Beco do Carneiro, 1100 Lisboa, Portugal

   Put out both arms in this alley and you will almost touch the walls on either side. Steps worn smooth, laundry flapping overhead, a cat watching you from a windowsill... this is Beco do Carneiro, and it may be the narrowest public lane in Alfama.

   Locals like to say that neighbours here can shake hands from window to window across the street, and looking up, you will see why nobody doubts it. Beco means a narrow alley or a dead end, and Carneiro means ram. Nobody is quite sure whether the name remembers a family, a sign over a door, or an actual animal. Lisbon is full of names like that, small mysteries painted on tiles.

   Why is Alfama still a maze when the old centre below is a perfect grid? Partly because the street plan of the Moorish city was never erased. Partly because this hill stands on firmer rock than the valley of the Baixa, so when the earthquake struck in 1755, much of Alfama cracked and suffered but did not vanish as completely. There was no clean slate here for the planners, and the medieval tangle survived around the springs and the old walls.

   Look at the doorways as you climb. You may spot small tiles of Saint Anthony or of the Virgin set above the doors. They were put there for protection, and many families kept them up long after people stopped saying why. Notice, too, how the houses step up the slope, each one built on the shoulder of the one below, so that one family's roof is the next family's terrace.

   This is the Alfama that fado sings about: small rooms, shared stairs, everybody knowing everybody's business, and the river glittering at the end of every gap. For a long time it was a poor quarter of fishermen, dockers and sailors' widows, and outsiders looked down on it. Today people come from across the world simply to get lost in it. The top of the alley comes out near the church of Santo Estêvão. From there, keep heading west and uphill through the lanes, a real climb of a few hundred metres, until the ground opens out at Largo das Portas do Sol.

6. 6. Largo das Portas do Sol: The Gate of the Sun and Saint Vincent's Ravens

   Largo das Portas do Sol, 1100 Lisboa, Portugal

   Walk to the balustrade and let the view come to you: the jumble of Alfama's roofs tumbling down to the river, the white dome of Santa Engrácia, the twin towers of São Vicente de Fora, and the wide, shining Tagus beyond. Behind you, a statue of a saint holds a little ship in his hand.

   This square takes its name from a gate. The Portas do Sol, the Gates of the Sun, were one of the openings in the Moorish wall, and they faced east, towards the sunrise. The gate itself has gone, but a fragment of the old wall still stands at the edge of the square. For centuries, travellers coming up from Alfama passed through here to reach the castle quarter.

   Now the saint. That is Saint Vincent, the official patron of Lisbon, a deacon martyred in Spain in the early fourth century. The legend says that his body was later laid to rest on the rocky cape in the Algarve that still bears his name, guarded by ravens. In 1173, King Afonso Henriques had the relics brought to Lisbon by ship, and the story goes that two ravens kept watch on the boat all the way. Look at the city's coat of arms on lamp posts and bins today... a ship with two black ravens. That is this story.

   There is a lovely detail about those ravens. For a long time, people kept ravens around the cathedral, where the relics were held, and visitors in the past wrote about them hopping about the cloister. Lisbon took its legend quite literally.

   The handsome palace on the square is the Palácio Azurara, home since 1953 to a museum of Portuguese decorative arts, all furniture, silver and tapestries. And the yellow tram that squeals past is the 28, climbing the same slopes it has climbed for a century. Now cross the road and climb the steep lanes uphill, a short but stiff ascent, to the gate of the Castelo de São Jorge, and walk straight up into the walled citadel at the very top.

7. 7. Castelo de São Jorge: The Citadel and the Siege of 1147

   Castelo de São Jorge, Rua de Santa Cruz do Castelo, 1100-129 Lisboa, Portugal

   Pass through the inner gate and you are inside the citadel, the castle within the castle, its high walls and square towers closing around a courtyard shaded by trees. Listen for a strange, wailing cry... the peacocks that wander the grounds as if they owned them.

   Everyone who has ever ruled Lisbon wanted this hilltop. There were people up here in the Iron Age, then Romans, then Visigoths, and from the eighth century the Muslim rulers of al-Andalus, who built the fortress whose walls still shape the castle. In 1147 these walls faced the moment that made Lisbon Portuguese.

   That summer a fleet of crusaders, English, Flemish and German, on their way to the Holy Land, put in at Porto. The bishop there persuaded them to stop and help Afonso Henriques, the first king of Portugal, take Lisbon instead, with the promise of plunder. The siege lasted from July until late October. There were siege towers, mines dug under the walls, hunger inside the city... and we know a remarkable amount about it because one of the crusaders, an Anglo-Norman priest, wrote a long eyewitness letter about the conquest.

   And then there is the legend of Martim Moniz. The story goes that this knight saw a castle gate half open and threw his own body into the gap, so that it could not be closed until his comrades forced their way in. He died there, says the tale, and Lisbon later named a gate, a square and a metro station after him. Historians are cautious about the details, but the city loves him all the same.

   One of the towers here is called the Tower of Ulysses, after a cheerful old legend that the Greek hero founded Lisbon on his way home from Troy, giving the city its ancient name, Olisipo. Inside it, a camera obscura projects live images of the city onto a white dish, a periscope view of the streets you have just climbed. Now come back out of the citadel to the great terrace near the entrance, where old cannons point out over the rooftops.

8. 8. The Castle Terrace and the Lost Royal Palace

   Castelo de São Jorge, Rua de Santa Cruz do Castelo, 1100-129 Lisboa, Portugal

   Step onto the wide terrace inside the castle walls, with the old cannons lined up along the parapet and the whole of the lower city laid out below you like a map. On a clear day you can follow the river all the way to the great red bridge and beyond.

   The bronze king standing here is Afonso Henriques, the conqueror of 1147, a copy of the famous nineteenth-century statue in Guimarães. After the conquest, the Moorish governor's residence on this hilltop became the palace of the kings of Portugal, the Paço da Alcáçova. For more than three centuries kings held court, received ambassadors and signed treaties up here, until King Manuel the First moved down to a new palace on the riverbank in the early 1500s, closer to the ships and the spice warehouses that were making him rich.

   One evening in 1502, in the queen's chamber of this palace, a court poet called Gil Vicente performed a short monologue to celebrate the birth of the future King João the Third. He played a cowherd who stumbles into the royal bedroom. That small performance is traditionally counted as the birth of Portuguese theatre, and Gil Vicente went on to become the country's great early playwright.

   The castle only got its name, São Jorge, in the late fourteenth century, under King João the First, who had married the English princess Philippa of Lancaster, and Saint George was the warrior saint of the English. The earthquake of 1755 finished off what was left of the palace, and much of what you see in the walls today, the crisp battlements and neat towers, comes from a sweeping restoration around 1940 under the Estado Novo dictatorship, which wanted a castle that looked properly heroic.

   On the far side of the citadel, an archaeological site shows the deeper layers: traces of an Iron Age settlement going back to around the seventh century before Christ, and houses from the Islamic city. Kings were only the latest tenants of this hill. Now leave the terrace and follow the lane east, still inside the outer walls, into the small residential quarter of Santa Cruz.

9. 9. Santa Cruz do Castelo: A Village Inside the Walls

   Largo de Santa Cruz do Castelo, 1100 Lisboa, Portugal

   Slow down in these quiet lanes, where the tourist crowds thin out and you hear a radio through an open window, a broom on a doorstep, a neighbour calling across the street. You are still inside the castle walls, but this is not a monument. People live here.

   Santa Cruz do Castelo is the old neighbourhood that grew up within the outer ring of fortifications after the conquest of 1147. Christian settlers, soldiers and servants of the royal household moved into the houses of the defeated Muslim population, and a parish took shape around a church dedicated to the Holy Cross. Tradition holds that the first church here was raised soon after the conquest.

   The church on the small square is not that medieval building. Like so much of Lisbon, the earlier church was badly damaged in 1755, and what stands now is a later rebuilding, plain outside and calm within. The parish, though, kept its old identity, and the castle's patron, Saint George, has always been at home in this little community.

   Look at how the houses press up against the old walls. For centuries, families built right into the fortifications, using ancient stones as the back wall of a kitchen. When the dictatorship restored the castle around 1940, many of the buildings attached to the walls were cleared away to make the ramparts look medieval again. The neighbourhood survived, but it lost part of itself to the idea of how a castle should look.

   There is something touching about this place. Kings came and went, the court moved down to the river, the earthquake brought the palace down, and still there were people hanging out washing and arguing about football inside the walls of Lisbon's oldest fortress. Now let the lanes carry you out of the quarter and back down the south side of the hill, to the terrace of Santa Luzia, with its tiles and its bougainvillea.

10. 10. Miradouro de Santa Luzia: Tiles, Knights and a Lost City

    Largo de Santa Luzia, 1100 Lisboa, Portugal

    Walk under the pergola, where bougainvillea spills purple over the columns, and lean on the old wall at the edge. Below you the roofs of Alfama fall away in terracotta steps towards the river, and the ships on the Tagus look like toys.

    The little church beside the garden is Santa Luzia, and it has an unexpected owner. It is linked to the Order of Malta, the Knights Hospitaller, who have had a presence in Portugal since the Middle Ages. The terrace itself sits on top of a stretch of the old Moorish wall, so you are standing on the city's former edge.

    Now find the tile panels on the church's outer wall. One of them shows the great riverside square of Lisbon, Terreiro do Paço, as it looked before 1755, with the royal palace and its tower still standing. It is one of the few chances you will ever have to see the city the earthquake erased. Remember that image... if you walk the Baixa later, you will stand exactly where that palace stood, and find nothing of it left.

    Another panel shows the siege of 1147, Christian knights storming the Moorish walls, and among the scenes is the death of Martim Moniz in the castle gate. It was painted centuries after the event, so take it as the city telling its own legend in blue and white.

    Come back here at sunset if you can. The light turns the river copper, the fado from somebody's radio drifts up the hill, and the yellow tram rattles past behind you as if it had all the time in the world. Locals and visitors share the wall in a kind of silent agreement. Now cross back past the church and walk downhill along the tram line towards the cathedral, then turn into Rua de São Mamede, where a Roman theatre is hiding behind a fence.

11. 11. Museu do Teatro Romano: Nero's Stage on the Hillside

    Rua de São Mamede 3A, 1100-532 Lisboa, Portugal

    Look over the railing into the pit of honey-coloured stone below the street: curved steps, column bases, a stage front carved with fragments of ornament, all set into the slope of the hill. Houses perch above it as if nobody had noticed it was there. For a long time, nobody had.

    This was the theatre of Olisipo, Roman Lisbon. The city became a privileged Roman town under Augustus, with the proud name Felicitas Iulia Olisipo, and a theatre was the kind of building a town like that needed to prove it was civilised. The seats were cut into the slope facing the river, so the audience watched comedies and tragedies with the Tagus glittering behind the stage.

    The most remarkable find is an inscription. It records that in the year 57, under the emperor Nero, a wealthy local priest of the imperial cult called Gaius Heius Primus paid to rebuild the stage front and the orchestra. Imagine that... the name of a Lisbon benefactor, carved in stone almost two thousand years ago, reading like a modern sponsor's plaque.

    And here is the twist. The theatre was rediscovered because of a catastrophe. In 1798, as workmen cleared rubble and rebuilt this hillside after the 1755 earthquake, they struck the Roman stones. An Italian architect working in Lisbon, Francisco Xavier Fabri, made careful drawings of what was found... and then the city simply built over it again. Only from the 1960s did archaeologists dig it out properly, and the museum opened beside it in 2001.

    Think about that for a moment. The same disaster that destroyed the Lisbon of the kings uncovered the Lisbon of the emperors. Every time this city has been knocked down, it has found something older underneath. Now walk down the street to the end and turn right, past the old Aljube prison, which under the dictatorship held political prisoners and is now a museum of resistance, to the twin towers of the cathedral.

12. 12. Sé de Lisboa: The Fortress Cathedral

    Largo da Sé, 1100-585 Lisboa, Portugal

    Face the cathedral and take in its two square towers and the heavy, battlemented front, more like a castle gate than a church, with a great rose window set between them. A yellow tram grinds round the corner in front of it, and the whole scene could be a postcard from any decade of the last hundred years.

    Work on the Sé began soon after the conquest of 1147, and tradition places it on the site of the city's main mosque. Its first bishop was Gilbert of Hastings, an English crusader priest who had taken part in the siege. The fortress look was not decoration: a cathedral in a freshly conquered frontier city was meant to be defended.

    And defended it was not, at least not for one bishop. In December 1383, during the crisis that would bring King João the First to the throne, an angry crowd accused the Castilian-born bishop, Martinho, of siding with the enemy. They dragged him up one of these towers and threw him to his death. History has not always been gentle in this square.

    Inside, find the font where, tradition says, the baby who became Saint Anthony was baptised... your first stop is just across the road. Then go into the Gothic cloister, built around 1300 under King Dinis. Archaeologists have dug deep into its garden and found layer upon layer of Lisbon: a Roman street with shops, houses from the Islamic city, and medieval foundations. The whole history of this walk is stacked in one hole in the ground.

    Like the rest of Lisbon, the Sé was badly hit in 1755, and much of the interior was later rebuilt. Then, in the twentieth century, restorers stripped away many later additions to give it back a stern medieval look, so even this old face is partly a modern idea of the past. You have walked from a saint's birthplace, through a Moorish wall, a royal castle and a Roman stage, to the church that started Christian Lisbon. The tram stop is right in front of you... and Alfama will still be here tomorrow.