Imagine you’re in Lisbon, Portugal, on Saturday November 1, 1755. It’s early morning on All Saint’s Day, a feast day that celebrates all the saints of the Catholic Church. The day should have been one of solemn commemoration with church services and visits to cemeteries to offer flowers; a blend of older traditions with standard Christian practices. The people should have been prepared for a holy day – but the events to come were far from sacred.
At around 9:40 in the morning, everything began to
At the same time,
According to an
By the time the quakes ended, the city was already in chaos and many lives had been lost. But worse was to come.
Around 40-45 minutes after the earthquake ended, those who huddled at the docks for safety would have witnessed something unsettling. The tide was receding – and people, so Davy claims, started shouting “The sea is coming in, we shall be all lost”.
A 20-foot (6-meter)
The impact of what is now referred to as the Great Lisbon earthquake was devastating. As many as 50,000 (though some estimate much lower figures) people may have been killed by the event and the ensuing tsunami. Thousands of people fled the city in the aftermath, especially as so many buildings and homes had been leveled. Even the royal palace was destroyed, along with vast quantities of historical and cultural materials in the form of art, literature, and architecture.
According to modern
The worst of the three quakes is estimated to have had a magnitude of 8.5 to 9.0, but of course, this is only a rough idea given that modern seismology did not exist at the time.
Although Lisbon’s story is well known, it was not the only place to suffer as a consequence of the earthquake. Other areas of the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula were also hit by the quake, as were parts of North Africa, such as
According to some