Sé de Lisboa

Church · AlfamaLisbon,Portugal

A fortress-like cathedral begun in 1147 on the site of Lisbon's main mosque, with Roman and Islamic streets excavated beneath its cloister.

The Sé looks like a fortress because it partly was one: a squat west front with two blunt towers, battlements along the top and a single rose window, put up in a city that had just been taken. Inside, a dim Romanesque nave gives onto a lighter Gothic choir. Walk from one into the other and the join is obvious. The building reads as a stack of periods rather than one design, because earthquakes in 1344, 1531 and 1755 each forced heavy repairs, and each repair was made in the style of its own day. It was begun around 1147, in the months after forces under Afonso Henriques and a northern crusader fleet took the city from its Muslim rulers, and it was built on the site of the main mosque. The cloister is where it gets interesting. Excavation there has opened the ground down through a medieval street, an Islamic quarter with a storage jar still in place, and Roman foundations with drains beneath that, all stacked directly under the church. The most photographed thing about the building is outside it: tram 28 passes right across the west front.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Look for the dog on the tomb — in the ambulatory a fourteenth-century knight lies in stone with his sword, a dog carved at his feet, next to his wife.
Late afternoon lights the west front — it faces west, so it takes the low sun at the end of the day; in the morning the whole facade sits in its own shade.
The nave is no longer free — one ticketed visit covers the nave, the high choir, the bell-tower walk and the treasury upstairs; only the small prayer chapel is open to anyone.
Visits stop when Mass starts — the cathedral is still the patriarch's own church, so tourist rounds pause during services and the doors close to sightseers on Sundays and holy days.

Things to do

1
Go down into the cloister dig
Behind the church the cloister floor has been taken up and the layers left open — a Roman drain at the bottom, an Islamic house and street above it, medieval graves above that. You walk on raised boards over about fifteen centuries of the same square of ground.
2
Wait for the tram
Stand in the small square west of the cathedral facing the two towers and wait. A tram passes directly in front of the facade, close enough that the yellow fills the frame against the grey stone. Line 28 runs through every few minutes, so the wait is short.