Belém Tower

Landmark · BelémLisbon,Portugal

A 1510s gun tower at the mouth of Lisbon's harbour, its stone carved with twisted rope, armillary spheres and a rhinoceros head.

The Torre de Belém is a gun platform covered in carved decoration no other fortress in Europe carried: twisted rope cut in stone, ribbed domes on the corner turrets, and armillary spheres. Look under one corner turret and a rhinoceros head juts out of the wall, probably modelled on the live rhinoceros King Manuel shipped to the Pope. The stone is Lioz limestone, and it goes from white to honey depending on the hour you come. It was built to cover the mouth of Lisbon's harbour, and it still sits low in the water at the river's edge. The story everyone tells about it is wrong. The tower is usually said to have stood in mid-river until the earthquake shifted the Tagus. In fact it was built on a small island close to the north bank, and it is the shoreline that moved: reclamation and silting brought the land out to meet it. Inside, a tight spiral stair climbs through the governor's rooms and a powder store to an open terrace where a loggia frames the estuary. At low water the rock the tower stands on is still visible.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Late afternoon is when the stone turns — the limestone reads white at midday and honey-gold in the last two hours.
Find the rhinoceros — it sits under a corner turret on the seaward side, weathered almost smooth, and most people walk past without ever looking up at it.
The inside is narrow and one-way — a single spiral stair serves the whole tower, so a queue at the door means a queue on the stairs as well.

Things to do

1
Go up the spiral to the loggia
The stair is narrow enough that traffic runs one way at a time, and it opens onto a terrace with a stone loggia facing the water. From there the estuary widens west toward the Atlantic and the bridge closes the view upstream.
2
Come back at low tide
When the water drops, the rock the tower was built on appears around the base. Only then does it read as what it was — an island standing in the river rather than a building on the bank — because the shoal it sits on comes out of the water with it.
3
Go down into the bastion first
The lowest level is the gun deck: a low vaulted room with sixteen embrasures opening straight onto the water, so the cannon fired almost at river level. Under it are the vaulted chambers that held prisoners for two and a half centuries, damp and without windows. Both come before you have climbed a single step of the spiral.