Prazeres Cemetery

Historic · Campo de OuriqueLisbon,Portugal

A Lisbon cemetery laid out as a town of family vaults the size of houses, along named streets, with the coffins visible through the glass.

Prazeres Cemetery looks like a small town of closed houses. The family vaults are the size of small buildings, with doors, windows, steps and curtains at the glass, and they stand along named streets lined with trees. You can look through the glass of many of them and see coffins on shelves, a chair, dried flowers, a photograph and the curtain still hanging. The cemetery covers more than twelve hectares and holds over seven thousand plots. The ground opened in 1833, which makes it newer than almost everything you passed on the way up. The plots were bought the way a house is bought, and the families built on them accordingly, street by street, until the dead had addresses. Fernando Pessoa lay here until 1985, when he was moved down to Belém. Nothing about the place is arranged for visitors: funerals go on while you walk, and the chapels are private property rather than exhibits. The way to see it is to pick one avenue and follow it west, until the wall stops you and the ground drops away to the river.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Bring water and a hat — the ground is high, steep and almost treeless in places, there is next to no drinking water inside, and the stone reflects the heat back at you.
Funerals happen while you walk — this is a working cemetery, so put the camera away and lower your voice near any gathering, and do not photograph mourners.
Walk to the western wall — the ground drops away to the river and the bridge from up here, which is the reason this hill was chosen and the reason the plots were expensive.

Things to do

1
Walk one street and look in the windows
Pick a numbered avenue and go slowly along it, looking through the glass in the chapel doors. Inside you see coffins on shelves, a chair for a visitor, dried flowers and sometimes a photograph. Each chapel belongs to one family, and the cemetery is laid out in named streets, so walking them is the way the ground was meant to be seen.
2
Find the pyramid
Follow the cypress avenue to the Palmela vault. It is a stone pyramid standing over an underground crypt, built in 1848 in its own plot, and it is far larger than any of the mausoleums around it. The inside opens only on the city's guided visits.
3
Ride the 28 to the end and start here
Take the tram to its terminus rather than getting off in the tourist stretch. The gate is across the square from the tracks, and arriving this way puts the cemetery at the beginning of a downhill walk back into the city instead of at the end of an uphill one.