Rossio

Historic · BaixaLisbon, Portugal

Officially Praça Dom Pedro IV, universally the Rossio, this has been Lisbon's gathering ground for some seven centuries — a place for fairs, markets, bullfights, carnival, and the public sentences of the Inquisition, which were read out here. The earthquake took the buildings and Pombal rebuilt it inside the new grid, ringed with four-storey fronts and closed at the north end by the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II. Two bronze fountains flank a column with Pedro IV on top, and the whole floor is laid in the calçada portuguesa pattern the pavers call mar largo, the wide sea: black and white blocks set by hand in a rolling wave, laid here in 1848. It has never stopped being the busy end of town. Commuters cross it, buskers work it, and the old cafés around the square have been serving coffee to people watching all of that for a very long time. The horseshoe-arched railway station stands on the north-west side and looks nothing like a station. Just off the north-east corner, at Largo de São Domingos, standing bars sell ginjinha to a queue that never quite disappears.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Look down — the wave pattern underfoot is hand-laid basalt and limestone, and in bright sun the moving pattern is genuinely disorienting to walk across.
Ginjinha is a doorway, not a bar — the cherry-liqueur places off the square have no seats; you take one at the counter, standing, and leave in four minutes.
The trains leave through a hill — behind that horseshoe-arched front every departure runs straight into a tunnel almost three kilometres long, driven under the high ground behind the square.
Early evening is the good hour — the low sun catches the fountains and the theatre front, and the commuter crossing is at its most watchable.

Things to do

1
Cross it slowly and watch your feet
Walk the length of the square looking down. The black and white blocks are cut and set by hand and the wave runs across your path rather than along it, which in strong sun produces a genuine sense of the ground moving. People do stumble on it.
2
Take a ginjinha standing up
Find one of the doorway-sized bars off the square, ask for it com elas — with the cherries in the glass — and drink it where you stand. It is sweet, strong and gone in one swallow, and the whole transaction including the queue takes about four minutes.
3
Go inside the station that does not look like one
The twin horseshoe doorways on the north-west side open into a booking hall, and the platforms sit a level above the street under a cast-iron roof. The front was built in 1890 in a revival of the Manueline — the same ropes and maritime carving as the monastery at Belém, applied to a railway terminus four hundred years later.