(Cultural Dynamics of Science, 4) Ana Simões, Maria Paula Diogo - Science, Technology and Medicine in The Making of Lisbon (1840-1940) (2022, Brill) - Libgen - Li

Science, Technology and Medicine in the Making of Lisbon (1840–1940)
Cultural Dynamics of Science
Editors
Lissa Roberts (Science, Technology and Policy Studies (STePS), University of

Twente, The Netherlands)
Agustí Nieto-Galan (Institut d’Història de la Ciència (CEHIC) & Facultat de
Ciències (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain)
Oliver Hochadel (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas,
Institució Milà i Fontanals, Barcelona, Spain)
Advisory Board
Miruna Achim (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana–Cuajimalpa,

Ciudad de México, CDMX)
Warwick Anderson (University of Sydney)
Mitchell Ash (Universität Wien)
José Ramón Bertomeu-Sánchez (Universitat de València)
Paola Bertucci (Yale University)
Daniela Bleichmar (University of Southern California)
Andreas Daum (University of Buffalo)
Graeme Gooday (University of Leeds)
Paola Govoni (Università di Bologna)
Juan Pimentel (CSIC, Madrid)
Stefan Pohl (Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá)
Arne Schirrmacher (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)
Ana Simões (Universidade de Lisboa)
Josep Simon (Universitat de València)
Jonathan Topham (University of Leeds)
volume 4
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cds

Science, Technology and
Medicine in the
Making of Lisbon (1840–1940)
Edited by
Ana Simões
Maria Paula Diogo
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Research for this book was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology
under projects PTDC/IVC-HFC/3122/2014, UID/HIS/UI0286/2013, UID/HIS/UI0286/2019 and
UIDB/00286/2020.
Cover illustration: Engraving of the Praça do Comércio (Trading Square), Lisbon, in the late 19th century.
Courtesy of Museu de Lisboa (MC.GRA.1684).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Simões, Ana, editor. | Diogo, Maria Paula, editor.

Title: Science, technology and medicine in the making of Lisbon (1840–1940)
/ edited by Ana Simões, and Maria Paula Diogo.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2022] | Series: Cultural dynamics of science, 2351–9932 ; vol. 4 |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022018521 (print) | LCCN 2022018522 (ebook) | ISBN
9789004516243 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004513440 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Science—Portugal—Lisbon—History. | Technology—Portugal—Lisbon—History. |
Medicine—Portugal—Lisbon—History. | Lisbon (Portugal)—Intellectual life—19th century. |
Lisbon (Portugal)--Intellectual life—20th century.
Classification: LCC Q127.P8 S35 2022 (print) | LCC Q127.P8 (ebook) |
DDC 509.46942—dc23/eng/20220506 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022018521
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022018522
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
issn 2351-9932
isbn 978-90-04-51624-3 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-51344-0 (e-book)
Copyright 2022 by Ana Simões and Maria Paula Diogo. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden,
The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink,
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To our parents, through their eyes we came to see,
feel and love Lisbon
∵
Contents
List of Figures xi
Note on Contributors xiv
Introduction: Science, Technology and Medicine in the making of

Lisbon (1840–1940) 1
Ana Simões and Maria Paula Diogo
Part 1
The Fabric of the City
Introduction to Part 1 33
Maria Paula Diogo and Ana Simões
1 Paving the City and Urban Evolution: Science, Technology and

Craftsmanship under Our Feet 36
Lídia Fernandes
2 Trees, Nurseries, and Tree-lined Streets in the Making of Modern

Lisbon (1840–1886) 67
Ana Duarte Rodrigues
3 Working-Class Neighbourhoods in Lisbon. Republican Hygienist

Policies, Circulation of Workers and Capital 95
4 Crossing Urban and Transport Expertise to Pave Lisbon’s Future Urban

Sprawl (1930s–1940s) 120
M. Luísa Sousa
Part 2
Port City and Imperial Metropolis

viii Contents
5 Hybrid Features at Lisbon’s New Lazaretto (1860–1908) 150

José Carlos Avelãs Nunes
6 The Customs Laboratory of Lisbon from the 1880s to the 1930s:

Chemistry, Trade and Scientific Spaces 179
Ignacio Suay-Matallana
7 Lisbon after Quarantines: Urban Protection against International

Diseases 203
Celia Miralles Buil
8 The Colonial Garden and the Colonial Agricultural Museum: Education,

Research and “Tropical Illusion” in the Imperial Metropolis 230
Cláudia Castelo
9 Urbanising the History of “Discoveries:” The 1940 Portuguese World

Exhibition and the Making of a New Imperial Capital 261
Carlos Godinho and Antonio Sánchez
Part 3
The Daily Life in the City

10 A Liberal Garden: The Estrela Garden and the Meaning of

Being Public 294
Ana Duarte Rodrigues and Ana Simões
11 Allies or Enemies? Dogs in the Streets of Lisbon in the Second Half

of the Nineteenth Century 323
Inês Gomes
12 Intellectuals and the City. Private Matters in the Public Space 344
Daniel Gamito-Marques
Contents ix
13 Working-Class Universities: Itinerant Spaces for Science, Technology

and Medicine in Republican Lisbon 366
14 A Fascist Coney Island? Salazar’s Dictatorship, Popular Culture and

Technological Fun (1933–1943) 391
Jaume Valentines-Álvarez and Jaume Sastre-Juan
Supplement: Historical Urban Cartography of Lisbon 419

João Machado
Bibliography 421
Index 463
Figures
1.1a Zigzag pavement in the castle’s parade, circa 1900 42

1.1b Calceteiros, 1907 43
1.2 Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro’s political cartoon 44
1.3 Map with the indication of sidewalk pavements 45
1.4 Wide Sea Portuguese Pavement at Plaza Dom Pedro IV-Rossio, 1977 47
1.5 Pavement of Plaza Luís de Camões, n/d 49
1.6 Moulds at the warehouse of Lisbon’s city council, 1940–1 53
2.1 Map of Lisbon with tree lined streets and boulevards. 72
2.2 Project for the embellishment of King D. Pedro IV Plaza 76
2.3a Public Promenade, 1913 83
2.3b View from the Park of Liberty towards the Avenue of Liberty and the river
Tagus, 1914 83
2.4 Profiles of public streets 87
2.5 Distances between aligned trees in streets 91
3.1 Map with working-class neighbourhoods 98
3.2a A view of industrial Lisbon at the other side of the river Tagus 104
3.2b Underwater tunnel and train connecting Lisbon to Seixal, 1906 105
3.3a–b The two-platform bridge connecting the two Lisbons of the future and
working-class neighbourhood of the hygienic type, 1906 107
3.4a–b Working-class houses in Grandella neighbourhood, c.1910; and School at the
main central avenue 113
4.1 Road plan for the Sun Coast according to Agache (1936) 138
4.2 Main communication axes of the Lisbon 1948 urban plan 141
4.3 Lisbon’s imagined population growth in 20 years and its
extensions (1948) 142
5.1 Location of Lisbon and of the Lazaretto 153
5.2 General view of the old and new lazarettos 156
5.3 Plan of the new Lazaretto 159
5.4a–b Comparison between the New Lazaretto and the French Mazas Prison 164
5.5a–b 1st, 2nd and 3rd classes of the lazaretto bedrooms – “three different classes,
one real one;” The businessman, before and after being in charge of
the lazaretto 168
5.6a–b Inside the Lazaretto quarantine rooms, showing gridded windows;
Passengers of the Lanfranc ship, c.1910 171
5.7 Aerial view of the Lazaretto in 2020. 177
6.1 Old grain warehouse at Terreiro do Trigo, venue of the customs laboratory
of Lisbon 183
xii Figures
6.2 The collection of scientific instruments at the customs laboratory

in 2018 191
6.3 The commercial, and customs cluster of the Lisbon’s port 200
7.1 Health Stations in Portugal according to the 1901 legislation 208
7.2 Health Station Building in Lisbon (1901–1918) 209
7.3 Disinfection Station’s wharf (Lisbon 1906–1910) 216
8.1 Map with main institutions and spaces mentioned in this chapter 234
8.2a–b Partial view of the Colonial Garden with the Tagus river at the back, 1928;
Colonial Garden’s entrance in 1939 238
8.3 Inside the greenhouse 239
8.4a–b Partial view of the Colonial Garden with the Palácio da Calheta at the left,
1928; Colonial Garden. Partial view of the lake, [1939?] 242
8.5 Inside the Colonial Agricultural Museum 250
8.6a–b Portuguese Timor dwelling; Native village of the Typungo from Angola
(at the left the African brewery) 254
8.7 Sewing lesson: Missionary sister of Mary with Mozambican women and
children at the Colonial Section of the PWE 256
8.8 Experimental agricultural field 258
9.1 Plan of the Portuguese World Exhibition of 1940 265
9.2a Aerial image of the Belém area before the PWE 272
9.2b Image of the PWE preparation works 272
9.3 Esfera dos Descobrimentos (Discoveries Sphere) 277
9.4 Epic Room – Discoveries Pavilion 279
9.5 Image of the statue called “sovereignty” with an armillary sphere in the
hands and other armillary spheres at the top of the Portuguese people in the
World’s pavilion (Portuguese World Exhibition, 1940) 281
9.6a Armillary spheres on the balconies of Praça do Areeiro (Lisbon) 284
9.6b Photograph of the Monumental Cine-Theater in the Duke of Saldanha
square (Lisbon) with an armillary sphere at the top 285
10.1 Map of Lisbon by J. Henshall, indicating the Passeio Publico in green and the
future location of the Estrela Garden in blue, 1833. Detail from the Estrela
Garden made in c.1910, based on the map by Filipe Folque in 1858. 299
10.2 Project of the greenhouse by Burnay, 1877 306
10.3 Project of a urinal for Lisbon public gardens, 1869 309
10.4 Froebel School at the Estrela Garden, 1883 315
10.5 Views from the Party Flower organized in 1918 320
11.1 Cart for driving dogs and cats (Model 1887) 334
11.2 “Muzzle the dog and let your child drown.” 339
12.1 Map with the indication of places where the Cenacles’ group stopped,
including their residences 346
Figures xiii
12.2 Atalaia Street in Bairro Alto, between 1898 and 1907 348
12.3 Members of the Cenacle in 1884. From left to right: Eça de Queirós, Oliveira
Martins, Antero de Quental, Ramalho Ortigão, and Guerra Junqueiro 353
13.1 Fialho de Almeida’s monumental bridge, 1906 367
13.2 The Faculty of Sciences of Lisbon 372
13.3a–b The headquarters of the Free University, Plaza Luís de Camões, Chiado;
Portuguese Popular University headquarters 377
13.4 Map of Lisbon with the location of the Faculty of Sciences and the Faculty of
Medicine, as well as the sections of the Free and Popular universities 383
14.1a–b Eduardo VII Park in 1934: Aerial view; Close-up of the roller coaster
Vertigo 398
14.2a–b Different advertisements at Luna Park 402
14.3a–b Fascist echoes and national grandeur in the urbanization of
Eduardo VII Park 406
14.4a–b The Exhibition of the Portuguese World. Maquette and map of the final
project including the amusement park 409
14.5a–b Sketches of the 1940 Exhibition of the Portuguese World: The projected
captive balloon and the mural decorations at the amusement park 410
14.6a–b Fun, technology, and diplomacy at the Feira Popular. New Circus (and new
mechanical rides) for the New State in 1943; Members of the Portuguese
government and ambassadors of allied powers right before the end
of WWII 415
Note on Contributors

holds a PhD in Architecture and is a researcher at the Interuniversity Centre
for the History of Science and Technology (CIUHCT), at the Faculty of Sciences
of the University of Lisbon.
Cláudia Castelo
holds undergraduate and master degrees in History by the New University of
Lisboa, and a PhD in Social Sciences (Historical Sociology) by the University of
Lisbon. Currently, she is a senior researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences
(University of Lisbon). Her research interests focus on knowledge, develop-
ment and migration in the Portuguese colonial empire (nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries).
Maria Paula Diogo

is Full Professor of History of Technology and Engineering at the NOVA School
of Sciences and Technology and member of the Interuniversity Centre of the
History of Science and Technology (CIUHCT). Having pioneered the field
of History of Technology in Portugal, her research focuses on the History of
Engineering in Portugal and former colonies, particularly concerning circula-
tion and appropriation of knowledge, networks, centres, and peripheries and,
more recently, the concept of Anthropocene. She has published extensively on
these topics. As co-author of one of the books of the Making Europe book series
(Europeans Globalizing: Mapping, Exploiting, Exchanging) she was awarded
the Freeman Prize by EASST. In 2020 she was awarded the Leonardo da Vinci
Medal, the highest recognition of the Society for the History of Technology
(SHOT).
Lídia Fernandes
holds an undergraduate degree in Archaeology and a Master in Art History.
Since 1989 she has worked as an archaeologist at the Lisbon City Hall, and
since 2010 has been appointed coordinator of the current Lisbon Museum –
Roman Theater. She published several articles highlighting studies on archi-
tectural elements of Roman times, ceramics, urban archaeology, sites where
mathematical games have been carved in stone in Lisbon and Portugal, and
especially on the Roman theatre of Lisbon. She has curated several exhibitions
in Lisbon and authored catalogues on Olisipography.
Note on Contributors xv
has a background in biology and holds a PhD in History of Science History,
Philosophy and Heritage of Science and Technology from the NOVA University
of Lisbon (2015). His PhD thesis focuses on the foundation and consolidation
of the first natural history museum of Lisbon. Currently he holds a position as
junior researcher in the H2020 project InsSciDE – Inventing a Shared Science
Diplomacy for Europe. He is member of Interuniversity Centre for the History
of Sciences and Technology (CIUHCT) since 2011. He has published articles on
the interactions between naturalists, scientific institutions, and nineteenth-
century Lisbon.
Carlos Godinho
is a PhD candidate in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of
Lisbon. He has been researching on the history of the celestial and armillary
sphere, as an in-between cosmological model. Crossing astronomy, philoso-
phy, and religion, he studies the model’s role in the political culture from early
modern times, more specifically as a national symbol of Portugal. He has been
a researcher in the project “Visions of Lisbon – Science, technology and medi-
cine (STM) and the making of a techno-scientific capital (1870–1940)”.
Inês Gomes
holds a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Lisbon
(2015). She held a postdoctoral position at the Interuniversity Centre for the
History of Sciences and Technology (CIUHCT) and collaborated with the
Institute of Contemporary History (IHC), doing research in the areas of urban
history of science and environmental history. Currently, she is a postdoctoral
researcher at the University of Coimbra at CEIS20-Center for Interdisciplinary
Studies, participating since June 2019 in the European Research Council
funded project ReSEED. Rescuing seed’s heritage: engaging in a new framework
of agriculture and innovation since the eighteenth century.
João Machado
works in the field of history of science and technology since 2012, joining the
Interuniversity Centre for the History of Science and Technology (CIUHCT)
as a research fellow in 2015. In 2019 he started his PhD project at the NOVA
School of Science and Technology, “Computing was the solution, what was the
problem?,” focusing on emerging computer technologies and their effects in
Portugal during the 1980s, supported by a four-year scholarship from FCT-IP
(SFRH/BD/145338/2019).
xvi Note on Contributors
Celia Miralles Buil

is an urban historian. She holds a PhD in History and Urbanism from the
Université Lumière Lyon 2 and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in
2014. She is currently an assistant professor at the University of Strasbourg
(France). Between 2017 and 2020 she was a Post-Doc Researcher at University
of Lisbon (Portugal), member of the Interuniversity Centre for the History of
Science and Technology (CIUHCT). Her research interests include history of
health and environment in Iberian cities in the twentieth century.

is assistant professor at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science
of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon. She is the coordina-
tor of the Interuniversity Centre for the History of Sciences and Technology
(CIUHCT). Her research explores the history of gardens and landscapes
through an STM perspective. She was PI of two projects: “Sustainable Beauty
for Algarvean Gardens” (2015–2020) and “Horto Aquam Salutarem: Water Wise
Management in Gardens in the Early Modern Period” (2018–2021), both funded
by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology.
Antonio Sánchez
is Assistant Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Autonomous
University of Madrid. He was a member of the Interuniversity Centre for the
History of Science and Technology (CIUHCT) and is now a senior researcher in
the ERC project “RUTTER – Making the Earth Global: Early Modern Nautical
Rutters and the Construction of a Global Concept of the Earth”, led by Henrique
Leitão at CIUHCT. He is interested in early modern Iberian science, especially
in the production of artisanal knowledge related to cosmography and mari-
time culture. He has published books and articles about this topic in inter-
national journals such as Imago Mundi, Nuncius, Early Science and Medicine,
History of Science, Journal of the History of Ideas, and Centaurus, among others.
Jaume Sastre-Juan
is Serra Húnter Fellow at the Center for the History of Science (CEHIC) and
the Department of Philosophy of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
His main research interests are the politics of display in museums of science
and technology, the political history of “interactivity”, and the history of inter-
national science popularization policies. He has taught history of science
and technology at the Universitat de Barcelona, the Universitat Oberta de
Catalunya and the Universidade de Lisboa, where he was postdoc researcher at
Note on Contributors xvii
the Interuniversity Center for the History of Science and Technology (CIUHCT)
from 2015 to 2019.
Ana Simões
is Full Professor of History of Science at the Faculty of Sciences, University of
Lisbon, Portugal, and she was (co-)coordinator of the Interuniversity Centre
for the History of Science and Technology (CIUHCT), from 2007 to 2019. She
was President of the European Society for the History of Science (2018–2020).
She has published extensively in subjects including the history of quantum
chemistry, and history of science in Portugal (eighteenth-twentieth centuries),
ranging from popularization of science and science in the press, to entangle-
ments between science and politics, science and the universities, and urban
history of science, focusing on Lisbon. She is a founding member of the inter-
national group STEP and of the journal HoST. She participates in research
projects and networks, and regularly organizes meetings, both nationally and
internationally.
M. Luísa Sousa
is researcher and assistant professor (adjunct) at the Interuniversity Centre
for the History of Science and Technology (CIUHCT), Department of Applied
Social Sciences, Faculty of Sciences and Technology of NOVA University of
Lisbon (Portugal). She was Chief Editor of HoST and she is a member of T2M’s
Executive Committee. Her publications include works on history of technol-
ogy, mobility, and urban planning in Portugal and former colonies of Angola,
and Mozambique, such as (with Álvaro Ferreira da Silva) “The ‘script’ of a new
urban layout: mobility, environment, and embellishment in Lisbon’s streets
(1850–1910)” (Technology and Culture, 60.1, 2019).
is Assistant Professor of History of Science at the University Miguel Hernández
(Spain), and researcher at the “López Piñero” Interuniversity Institute. He has
been a long-term postdoctoral fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation/
Science History Institute of Philadelphia (2014–2015), and a postdoctoral fel-
low at the Interuniversity Centre for the History of Science and Technology
(CIUHCT) (2015–2017). He also serves as secretary of the EuChemS Working
Party on History of Chemistry. His research has been published in journals like
Annals of Science, Journal of Chemical Education or Dynamis. His main research
interests are related to history of science and chemistry (1850–1950), especially
customs laboratories, sites of chemistry, material culture, textbooks, experts,
and regulations.
xviii Note on Contributors
Jaume Valentines-Álvarez
is a researcher at the Interuniversity Centre for the History of Science and
Technology (CIUHCT) and adjunct professor at the Nova University of Lisbon
(FCT NOVA). He has recently been a visiting fellow at the University of Geneva.
His main interests are the tensions between scientific authority and political
authority, having studied junction points of engineering thought, artefacts and
politics in twentieth-century Iberian Peninsula (especially around the crises
of 1929 and 1973). Concerning technology and urban landscapes, he has pub-
lished on the visible geographies of amusement parks in Barcelona, the invisi-
bilized architectures of urban nuclear reactors, the underground emotions of
the antinuclear movement, and the underground practices in anti-raid shel-
ters during the Spanish Civil War.
Introduction: Science, Technology and Medicine
in the making of Lisbon (1840–1940)
“Lisbon Still”
Lisbon has no kisses or hugs
no laughter or esplanades
no steps
nor girls and boys holding hands
has squares full of nobody
it still has sun but
does not have either Amália’s seagull or canoe
no restaurants, no bars, no cinemas
it is still fado it is still poems
closed within itself it is still Lisbon
open city
it is still the Lisbon of Pessoa both happy and sad
and on every deserted street
it still resists
20 March 2020
Manuel Alegre1
∵
Why Lisbon? As historians, and in keeping with the golden rule voiced by Marc
Bloch in 1949, in his Apologie pour l’Histoire,2 our introduction could hardly
proceed in any other way than with a question that entails three interrelated
issues: Why write an urban history of science in Lisbon? Why choose this time-
line? How to write it?
1 Manuel Alegre was born in 1936. He is a Portuguese writer and politician, member of the
Socialist Party. He resisted the dictatorship and was in exile from 1962 to 1974, first in Paris,
then in Algiers. Free translation by editors.
2 Marc Bloch, Apologie pour l’Histoire ou Métier d’Historien (Paris: Armand Colin, 1949).
© Ana Simões and Maria Paula Diogo, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004513440_002

2 Simões and Diogo
1 Why Write an Urban History of Science in Lisbon? Commonalities,

Hybridity, and Uniqueness
The first of these questions will certainly cross the mind of many readers. This
would not probably be the case if, say, this book was about Berlin. As a mat-
ter of fact, the historical period addressed in this book (1840–1940) approxi-
mates the timeframe used by Dieter Hoffmann in his “Physical Tour of Berlin”
(1870–1930). As Hoffmann reminds his readers, this is a period bookmarked by
Hermann Helmholtz and Erwin Schrödinger, respectively; a period when the
history of physics was intimately linked to Berlin’s history, institutions, urban
spaces, and historical actors.3 However, the same cannot be said generally of
the city of Lisbon. There are no Helmholtzs or Schrödingers tied to its long his-
tory, and no scientific institutions of international relevance that stand out in
the mind of the average non-Portuguese reader. And yet, it is precisely because
of this apparent drawback that an urban history of Science, Technology and
Medicine (STM) in Lisbon is especially necessary. Berlin is no longer the disci-
plinary norm but its exception, Lisbon is the rule.
Over the past several decades, research into the history of STM shied away
from singular differences in the service of discovering historical common-
alities. Attention has been paid to a variety of people, from less well-known
scientists to mediators and go-betweens, to scientific institutions away from
mainstream ones, to state, private, regional, and local bodies. Attention has
similarly been given to gatherings, whether formal or informal, enduring or
ephemeral, and to a myriad of spaces, while not scientific in essence, that were
part and parcel of the scientific enterprise broadly conceived. In the process
locality has become central, while circulation is viewed both as a means of
connecting different localities and agents and as constitutive of knowledge
production itself.4
3 Dieter Hoffmann, “Physics in Berlin: A Walk Through the Historical City Center,” Physics
in Perspective 1 (1999): 445–454; Dieter Hoffmann, “Physics in Berlin: Walking tours in
Charlottenburg and Dahlem and Excursions in the Vicinity of Berlin,” Physics in Perspective 2
(2000), 426–445; reprinted in John S. Rigden and Roger H. Stuewer, eds., The Physical Tourist:
A Science Guide for the Traveler (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2009), 81–90, 91–110.
4 Among the extensive literature on the topic we highlight: Kapil Raj, Relocating modern
science. Circulation and the construction of knowledge in South Asia and Europe 1650–1900
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2007); Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James
Delbourgo, eds. The brokered world. Go-betweens and global intelligence 1770–1820 (Sagamore
Beach: Science History Publications, 2009); Kapil Raj, “Introduction: circulation and locality
in early modern science,” British Journal for the History of Science, 43, 4 (2010): 513–517; Lissa
Roberts, “Situating Science in Global History: Local Exchanges and Networks of Circulation,”
Itinerario, 33, 1 (2009): 9–30; and more recently Robert Mayhew, and Charles Withers, eds.,
Introduction 3
Moreover, the past two decades have seen historians of science come to
terms with the agency of cities in shaping STM following the publication of
Sven Dierig, Jens Lachmund and J. Andrew Mendelsohn’s seminal volume,
Science and the City.5 While historians have typically treated cities as the stage
upon which the drama of history unfolds, cities are now often perceived as
actors in their own right. Yet, the urban history of STM began by concentrating
its focus on mainstream cities such as Berlin, London, or Paris to the detriment
of cities such as Lisbon6 – an approach that follows in the footsteps of urban
historians who have contrasted first and second cities.7 That said, it is to the
merit of urban historians and historians of STM to have dedicated studies to
other metropoles such as Madrid, or more recently Vienna, which furthermore
were imperial central nodes.8 Going on the opposite direction, they have dedi-
cated also studies to Europe’s so-called second cities, the majority of which
focuses on South and Central European cities, whether as the historical object
to be studied or as part of a larger set of interurban connections, as is the case
in cities such as Barcelona, Buda, Milan, Moscow, Prague, Warsaw, and Zagreb
among others.9 Historians of these so-called second cities have been critical of
Geographies of Knowledge, Science, Scale and Spatiality in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press, 2020). For the creative role of circulation see the foundational
paper by James Secord, “Knowledge in transit,” ISIS 95 (2004): 654–672, and more recently
Pedro M.P. Raposo, ed., Moving Localities, HoST 8 (2013); Pedro M.P. Raposo, Ana Simões,
Manolis Patiniotis, and José Ramon Bertomeu-Sánchez, “Moving Localities, and Creative
Circulation: Travels as Knowledge Production in eighteenth century Europe,” Centaurus, 56
(2014): 167–188.
5 Sven Dierig, Jens Lachmund, and J. Andrew Mendelsohn, eds., Science and the City, Osiris, 18
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003).
6 Illustrative of work on major European capitals are: David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity
(New York and London: Routledge, 2006); Miriam Levin, Sophie Forgan, Martina Hessler,
Robert Kargon, and Morris Low, eds., Urban Modernity. Cultural Innovation in the Second
Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2010).
7 M. Umbach, “A tale of second cities,” The American Historical Review 110 (3) (2005): 659–
692; Blair A. Ruble, Second Metropolis: Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago, Silver Age
Moscow, and Meiji Osaka (Woodrow Wilson Center Press with Cambridge University Press,
2001); Jerome I. Hodos. Second Cities: Globalization and Local Politics in Manchester and
Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011).
8 Antonio Lafuente, and Tiago Saraiva, “The Urban Scale of Science and the Enlargement of
Madrid (1851–1936),” Social Studies of Science, 34 (4) (2004): 531–569; Tiago Saraiva, Ciencia
y Ciudad. Madrid y Lisboa, 1851–1900 (Madrid: Ayuntamiento de Madrid, Area de Gobierno
de las Artes, 2005); Mitchell G. Ash, ed., Science in the Metropolis: Vienna in Transnational
Context 1848–1918 (New York/Oxford: Routledge/Taylor and Francis, 2020).
9 For individual cities see Oliver Hochadel, and Agustí Nieto-Galan, eds., Barcelona. An Urban
History of Science and Modernity, 1888–1929 (London: Routledge, 2016); Agustí Nieto-Galan,
and Oliver Hochadel, eds., Urban histories of science. Making Knowledge in the City 1820–1940
4 Simões and Diogo
the use of historical categories such as peripheries and metropolises (centres),

and propose the category of ‘emerging cities’ as a means of accounting for the
historical idiosyncrasies proper to the object of study without re-instantiating
the hierarchisation of cities – e.g. centre-periphery, first-/second-cities –
and thereby predetermine the very object about which the critical historian
acknowledges they know very little.10 In both cases, they have restricted their
use to historical categories, that is, to notions used by historical actors when
they contrasted their home cities with other cities, which they took as models
for urban development and change. At the same time, they concede that avoid-
ing the standard dichotomy centre-periphery is not to deny the role of urban
asymmetries, and of an unequal distribution of power among urban experts.
And yet, while they embrace one of the central historiographical tenets of the
Science and Technology in the European Periphery (STEP) network, they con-
tinuously disavow, wittingly or unwittingly, the group’s main conclusions.
Contrary to many recent contributions, our urban history of Science,
Technology, and Medicine in the Making of Lisbon (1840–1940) is deeply informed
by STEP’s historiographical reflections in light of recent developments in post-
colonial and global studies.11 We claim that given the geographical and histo-
riographical avenues opened up by these areas of study, we are compelled to
return to a study of Europe that rejects euro-centrism, and to work towards the
de-construction of a purported European homogeneity grounded on the histo-
rians’ reduction of a plural and complex Europe to a limited set of names and
(London: Routledge, 2019); Tiago Saraiva, and Marta Macedo, eds., Capital Científica. A
Ciência Lisboeta e a Construção do Portugal Contemporâneo (Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências
Sociais, 2019): Tanya O’Sullivan, Geographies of City Science. Urban lives and origin debates
in late Victorian Dublin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2019). For a focus on inter-
urban connections see Eszter Gantner, Heidi Hein-Kircher, and Oliver Hochadel, eds.,
Interurban Knowledge Exchange in Southern and Eastern Europe 1870–1950 (NY and
London: Routledge Advances in Urban History, 2020).
10 Eszter Gantner, and Heidi Hein-Kircher, “‘Emerging Cities’: Knowledge and Urbanization
in Europe’s Borderland, 1888–1945 – Introduction,” Journal of Urban History 43(4) (2017):
575–586.
11 Representative examples are: Kostas Gavroglu, Manolis Patiniotis, Faidra Papanelopoulou,
Ana Simões, Ana Carneiro, Maria Paula Diogo, José Ramón Bertomeu Sánchez, Antonio
Garcia Belmar, and Agustí Nieto-Galan, “Science and Technology in the European
Periphery. Some historiographical considerations,” History of Science 46 (2008): 153–175;
Kostas Gavroglu, “The STEP (Science and Technology in the European Periphery) ini-
tiative: attempting to historicize the notion of European science,” Centaurus 54 (2012):
311–27; Manolis Patiniotis, “Between the local and the global. History of science in the
European Periphery meets Post-colonial studies,” Centaurus 55 (2013): 361–84; Maria
Paula Diogo, Kostas Gavroglu, and Ana Simões, eds., “FORUM STEP Matters,” Technology
& Culture, 57, 4 (2016): 926–997.
Introduction 5
places, and taken to be representative of the whole.12 Additionally we argue

that although it may sound paradoxical to rely on the conclusions of STEP –
because STEP has stuck to the concept of periphery, and STEP has hardly
addressed urban history of STM – this is not so. The paradox is just apparent.
STEP’s historiographical considerations argued against the use of the con-
cept of periphery as previously conceived in the standard centre-periphery
model put forward by Georges Basalla,13 subordinating peripheries to a sec-
ondary/passive status and mere recipient of products originating from the
imperial metropole (centre). If STEP’s historiography rejects Basalla’s clas-
sification, it does not jettison the category of periphery altogether. Rather,
STEP argues for the critical reconstruction of periphery as an historiographi-
cal category via a concomitant reconceptualization of the category of centre.
This move forces historians to abandon former evaluative dichotomies and
attendant ideological presuppositions, on the one hand, and highlight their
entangled historicities and their co-construction, on the other. Thus, during
the fifteen-year period of STEP activities, roughly from 1999 to 2014, while STEP
has not addressed urban history of STM per se, it has provided solid grounds
for uncovering the specific epistemological geography of so-called peripheral
cities.14 In this regard, Agustí Nieto-Galan and Oliver Hochadel’s two edited
volumes – on Barcelona and Athens, Barcelona, Budapest, Dublin, Glasgow,
Helsinki, Lisbon, Naples and Buenos Aires, respectively – stand out as exem-
plary proof of the historical approach put forward by the editors and contrib-
uting authors of this volume.15
In our view, restricting the concept of periphery to an actor’s category is
a necessary consequence of the métier of the historian, who must be faith-
ful to their subjects and respectful of the ways in which they envisioned the
world. Building on a reconceptualization of periphery, in tandem with the cor-
responding re-evaluation of the concept of centre, and elevating them to his-
toriographical status, is a welcome antidote to recent trends in global history,
which often tend to flatten the world in the sense of giving equivalent agency
to all actors (be they humans or non-humans, including cities). Actors have
very dissimilar agencies and encounters are the stage of negotiations in which
12 Ana Simões, “Looking back, stepping forward. Reflections on the sciences in Europe,”
Presidential Address, Centaurus 61 (2019), 254–67.
13 Georges Basalla, “The spread of Western Science. A three-stage model describes the intro-
duction of modern science into any non-European nation,” Science 156 (1967): 611–622.
14 Oliver Hochadel, and Agustí Nieto-Galan, “How to write an urban history of STM on the
‘Periphery’,” FORUM Step matters, Technology and Culture 57(4) (2016): 978–88.
15 The STEP rationale was the starting point for Hochadel, and Nieto-Galan, Barcelona; and
Nieto-Galan, and Hochadel, Urban histories of science.
6 Simões and Diogo
power relations are deeply uneven. All encounters change the world, but never
flatten it metaphorically speaking. The world keeps on being bumpy, but the
nature of its bumps changes and evolves in the process. Therefore, we disagree
that periphery has reached its limits as a historiographical concept, and there-
fore should be abandoned altogether. However, the still persistent misconcep-
tions behind the use of periphery as a historiographical concept makes it at
present a minefield for the historian, who may decide to voice equivalent per-
spectives walking a different route. This is what we propose to do in this urban
history of STM in Lisbon.
When STEP members turned their attention to the urban history of STM,
beginning with Barcelona, they shied away from using the category of periph-
ery, and explored alternative avenues. They emphasised the importance of
rendering explicit the conflicting notions of modernity present during turn
of the century Europe,16 for these competing visions of modernity informed
the work of urban planners in their designs for various cities across Europe.
Recognizing that there has never been a single urban model to be followed; that
the inspiration for certain designs have always been dependent on both sub-
ject and context regardless of the notoriety of certain figures; that both influ-
ence and inspiration have always gone in multi-directional ways, Nieto-Galan
and Hochadel characterize the nuances of urban dynamics as a dynamic of
competing visions of modernity and thus reject the historian’s essentialis-
ing gesture via the notion of a single modernity. Inspired by the suggestion
of the sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt,17 Nieto-Galan and Hochadel underscore
the role of multiple modernities. In tandem with the emphasis on a plural-
ity of urban modernities, often entangled,18 this volume points to hybridity
of characteristics as the common ground uniting many cities such as Lisbon
and recognize simultaneously that the specifics of Lisbon’s hybridity account
for its unique outlook. Furthermore, we stress the hybridity of urban actors
working in and for Lisbon, the manifold and often transient character of both
institutions and spaces, to argue that these characteristics are the rule, and
not the exception, in the urban history of STM. It is in this sense that Lisbon is
both the norm and unique.
By stressing hybridity as an historical dynamic, we shied away from com-
monly employed distinctions – first and second cities; centre/imperial
16 Oliver Hochadel, and Agustí Nieto-Galan, “Urban Histories of Science. How to Tell the
Tale,” in Nieto-Galan, and Hochadel, Urban histories of science, 1–15, on 4–7.
17 Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple modernities,” Daedalus 109(1) (2000), 1–29, on 1–2.
18 The sociologist Goran Therborn has suggested instead to look at entangled modernities in
“Entangled modernities,” European Journal of Social Theory, 6(3) (2003), 293–305.
Introduction 7
metropole and periphery – while reassessing their relevance when treating

Lisbon as our object of inquiry:
1) Centre/(imperial)metropolis-periphery
The problems posed by this schema are evidenced by the fact that,
despite its geographically peripheral status vis-à-vis other European cit-
ies, Lisbon was a global city during the period of European expansion
in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-centuries.19 In the following centuries
it became an imperial metropolis, the capital of an extended colonial
empire spanning South-America (Brazil), Africa (colonies of Angola,
Mozambique, Guiné, Cape-Vert and S.Tomé and Príncipe) and Asia (Goa,
Damão and Diu in India, the island of Timor and Macau). Lisbon’s status
as an imperial metropolis and colonial power lasted from the fifteenth
to the latter half of the twentieth century, notwithstanding the indepen-
dence of Brazil’s independence at the start of the nineteenth century.
2) First city-second city
While Lisbon has always served as the capital of Portugal, it was not
without rivals. Notable among them was the city of Coimbra; located in
the centre of the country, it was home to one of Europe’s oldest univer-
sities (founded in Lisbon in 1290 and moved to Coimbra in 1537). Thus,
Coimbra served as the site for the education and training of Portugal’s
ruling elite until the twentieth century when the University of Lisbon
was re-founded, due in part to the experiences of the nineteenth-century
Polytechnic School of Lisbon (established in 1837), and its university
status accreditation in 1911 under the newly formed Republic. The re-
founding of this university was fundamental for securing Lisbon’s sta-
tus as the nation’s metropolitan centre as well as reclaim its status as
Portugal’s scientific20 political, financial, and intellectual capital, home
to its ruling elites.
3) Peripheral European port city-gateway to Europe
Lisbon’s geographically peripheral character vis-à-vis the European
continent, alongside its being a port city bordering the Atlantic Ocean,
opened the possibility of elevating Lisbon into a key node within the net-
work of relations between the European, American, African, and Asian
continents. While fifteenth-century Iberian expansion saw Lisbon’s port
19 Annemarie Jordan Gschwend, K.J.P. Lowe, eds., The Global City: On the Streets of
Renaissance Lisbon (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2015).
20 Saraiva, and Marta Macedo, Capital Científica; Ana Simões, “From Capital City to Scientific
Capital. Science, Technology, and Medicine in Lisbon as Seen through the Press, 1900–
1910,” in Agustí Nieto-Galan, Oliver Hochadel, eds., Urban Histories of Science. Making
Knowledge in the City 1820–1940 (London: Routledge, 2019), 141–163.
8 Simões and Diogo
play a central role within the then-recently established maritime routes

uniting the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, and Indian oceans, its fate
waned in the following centuries. Following the devastation brought
about by the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, the city’s reconstruction and most
especially its major nineteenth-century renovations prioritised a succes-
sion of urban projects submitted to the city council for the city port and
its neighbouring areas along the riverside, from east to west. At the end
of the nineteenth-century, the city’s urbanisation came to reflect a vision
of Lisbon as the “gateway to Europe.” Beginning as a leitmotiv was even-
tually reinforced by the rhetoric of the Estado Novo dictatorship. This is
best seen in the regime’s 1940 plans for urban renewal, which aimed at
regaining Lisbon’s former status as a major European metropolis. For the
dictatorship “Portugal was not a small country,”21 and Lisbon was still a
grandiose imperial metropolis.
4) Small European capital-metropole of a lasting empire
As the capital of Europe’s oldest country with stable geographical bound-
aries (founded in 1140/1143), Lisbon significantly differs in both size and
population from other European capitals. For instance, in 1890, the popu-
lation of Lisbon was around 10% of the population of Paris, half the pop-
ulation of Madrid, and roughly the same as Bordeaux and Stockholm.22
Despite being a relatively small metropolitan port city of one of Europe’s
smaller countries, Lisbon acted as the centre of calculation, a la Bruno
Latour,23 for an empire that rivalled, in scale, those of the great European
powers. This discrepancy between Portugal’s centre of calculation and
its imperial reach became a source of recurring problems. This included
issues regarding the administration of an empire spanning various con-
tinents, the extraction of natural resources, and for Portugal’s claim of
effective occupation over historical rights in the context of the Scramble
for Africa, and especially the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference and the 1890
British Ultimatum.
5) Imperial metropolis-unstable financial situation
As a matter of fact, Lisbon witnessed the ebbs and flows of fortune as the
capital of a country, which for centuries lived on the riches of its colonies,
21 This was the slogan of a poster by Henrique Galvão (1934) which can be accessed easily
at the internet. It features all Portuguese African colonies mapped onto Europe to show
that they occupy all the continent. It became iconic and has been the leitmotiv for many
reflections.
22 José Augusto França, Lisboa: Urbanismo e Arquitectura (Livros Horizonte, 2005), 63.
23 Bruno Latour, Science in Action. How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987).
Introduction 9
and particularly its colony of Brazil. However, with Brazil’s declaration of

independence in 1822, Portugal and its capital found themselves in a dif-
ficult financial situation. It was this loss of Portugal’s largest colony, com-
bined with other internal and external social and political factors,24 that
accounts for the stringent financial conditions of Lisbon’s City Council
during the second half of the nineteenth-century. In 1892, and amidst
an increase in the number of urban renewal programs, Portugal would
declare bankruptcy.
All these conflicting conditions had a significant impact on the ways STM and
the city mutually constituted one another. Thus, they must be taken into con-
sideration in any attempt at an urban history of STM in Lisbon.
2 Why This Timeline? A Century between Backwardness

and Modernization
The pace of Lisbon’s transformation was in tune with the national policies for
infra-structuring the country and was strongly influenced by both national and
international political turmoil and economic and financial opportunities
and vicissitudes. Recent historiography on the Portuguese economy in
nineteenth-century has pointed out that, in addition to the long held view of
the country’s economic backwardness – the cornerstone of more traditional
economic analysis – Portugal demonstrated considerable growth in economic
activities, mainly agriculture and industry, and economic variables (use of the
available resources, work force and capital).25 However, this new approach
does not conceal the fact that from the mid nineteenth-century onwards the
Portuguese state faced serious financial problems, which deeply affected the
available resources for STM, and thus their degree of influence on urban devel-
opment as well as the career’s paths of main experts.
Between 1840 and 1940, Lisbon underwent profound transformations, even-
tually becoming a modern and cosmopolitan city that was shaped to serve an
emerging middle class. Hidden infrastructures (e.g. sewage, lighting, water
supply), visible infrastructures (e.g. gardens, new avenues, pavements, trans-
port, entertainment and consumption areas), and regulations concerning
public health and hygiene were at the core of this urban renewal driven by a
24 Including the Liberal Revolution and the civil war, several outbursts of epidemics, the
Scramble for Africa and the British Ultimatum.
25 Jorge Pedreira, “Introdução,” in História Económica de Portugal, ed. Pedro Lains and Álvaro
Ferreira da Silva (Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2005), vol. II, 27–41.
10 Simões and Diogo
select group of experts. Over the course of this century, scientists, engineers,
and physicians assumed the role of leading policy makers, while advocating for
the use of new technologies considering the challenges posed by the moderni-
sation of Lisbon – central among these challenges was the city’s population
growth and the 1850s sanitary crisis (outbreaks of cholera, yellow fever, and
diphtheria between 1854 and 1859). Time and again, experts and policy mak-
ers would find inspiration from various foreign examples, which most urban
experts had personally experienced, such as the Haussmannian transforma-
tion of Paris and the development of urban sanitation in London.
2.1 From the Regeneration Period to the First Republic (1850–1910)

A series of upheavals at the start of the nineteenth-century eventually took its
toll on the Portuguese state: the French invasion of Portugal by the Napoleonic
army (1806–10); the escape of the Royal family to Brazil (1807); the 1820 Liberal
Revolution that implemented a constitutional monarchy; the independence of
Brazil (1822); and the civil war between liberal constitutionalists and conserva-
tive absolutists (1828–1834). By the mid-nineteenth century it was urgent to
rebuild the country, boost morale, and solve the problem of the depletion of
national resources.
The political solutions deployed privileged material improvements, espe-
cially concerning the circulation of goods, which was viewed as the key for
stable and significant economic growth.26 Beginning in the 1850s, and after
an initially unsuccessful attempt by Costa Cabral (1843–1850), this approach
toward economic growth marked the birth of Portugal’s Regeneration period.
Its main protagonist was Fontes Pereira de Melo, an engineer who believed that
progress and economic growth were closely linked to material improvements
in general, and particularly to the extension of railway networks. Moreover,
the period of Regeneration saw engineers play a critical role as Portugal sought
to develop both its national and regional infrastructure. Thus, in addition to
railways, roads, and telegraphs, it was the development of urban infrastruc-
ture – e.g. water and electricity supply, sewage, and general embellishment of
the cities – that formed the core of Fontes’ agenda, whose rational planning
of Portugal’s urban landscapes was part of the more general strategy of the
efficient management of natural and human resources.
To realise the wide sweeping changes outlined in his agenda, Fontes Pereira
de Melo requested a series of loans from foreign financial markets, which were
26 Paulo Jorge Fernandes, “Política Económica,” in História Económica de Portugal, ed. Pedro
Lains and Álvaro Ferreira da Silva (Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2005), vol. II,
393–419.
Introduction 11
backed by the standard value in the Portuguese market of gold. However, grow-
ing international and imperial political tensions combined with Portugal’s
economic and financial turmoil that marked its last quarter of the nineteenth-
century led to a financial crash that forced a partial bankruptcy in 1892. The sit-
uation was so difficult that Eça de Queirós – one of the main historical actors
analysed in chapter 12 and one of the most reputed writers at the time – said: “I
believe that Portugal is over. Just by writing these words tears come to my eyes
as I am almost certain that the disappearance of the kingdom of Portugal will
be the great tragedy of the end of the century.”27
Despite Eça’s understandable pessimism, it is by virtue of Portugal’s
Regeneration policies, which signalled the end of the Ancien Régime and the
beginning of industrial capitalism, that a properly modern, European, and
bourgeois Lisbon was created. With the 1836 Administrative Code, Lisbon
established a set of procedures concerning the management of public spaces.
However, and despite tensions between state and municipal authorities being
quite common – even dating back to medieval ages28 – the growth of the city
exacerbated these conflicts. In 1840, the Lisbon City Council sought to pro-
vide a more efficient answer to this growth in urban needs, and reorganized its
administration procedures and practices to ensure its capacity for managing
the various areas of public, urban, life – e.g. cleaning to gardens, from streets
and sidewalks to public order, and from markets to stray animals. This agenda
of urban restructuring aimed at empowering the city’s municipal government
to implement the changes required for the modernisation of Lisbon’s urban
infrastructure. In the following decades, the City Council’s reorganization of
1840 would be reinforced by a succession of key reforms in 1864, 1874, and 1887.
Perhaps the best examples of the kind of modernisation particular to
Lisbon are the “artefact/objects” of the Passeio Público (Public Promenade)
and the Avenida da Liberdade (Avenue of Liberty). Created in 1760, dur-
ing the Portuguese Enlightenment and contemporaneous with the founding
of the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon (1779), the Passeio Público was extended
in the 1830s as part of a beautification project catering to Lisbon’s growing
bourgeoisie. Its official perimeter was completed in 1840 with a large water-
fall situated atop a garden, which featured a view of the whole of downtown
Lisbon and the river Tagus. Transformed into a public space catering to bour-
geois sensibilities, the Passeio hosted musical performances in the evening,
an event made possible by the introduction of public gas lighting. This urban
27 Alfredo Campos Matos, Eça de Queirós. Uma Biografia (Lisboa: INCM, 2017).
28 Humberto Baquero Moreno, “O poder central e o poder local: modos de convergência e de
conflito nos séculos XIV e XV,” Revista de História 8 (1988): 53–68.
and cosmopolitan atmosphere continued with the Passeio’s addition of the

Haussmann-inspired Avenida da Liberdade in late nineteenth-century: a land-
mark in the northward expansion of the city, doubling as a space of leisure for
Portugal’s emerging middleclass and as the neighbourhood that housed the
majority of Lisbon’s elite.
Until the end of the 1860s, Lisbon’s municipal government had relatively
few financial resources at its disposal. However, with the national policy out-
lined at the start of the 1870s, Lisbon’s municipality began to rely on interna-
tional loans – the Comptoir d’Escompte of Paris and the Bank für Handel und
Industrie in Berlin are among the leading foreign creditors29 – as the main
source of funding its urban development projects. This favourable conjunc-
ture was put to an end by the 1891 national crisis and the eventual declaration
of bankruptcy in 1892. During the strain imposed by the national deficit, the
municipality’s management and planning of Lisbon’s urban spaces began to
adapt and partially depend on the vicissitudes of private enterprise.
Six chapters in this book address these transformations while focusing on
three main topics: grey and green infrastructures (paving in chapter 1 and gar-
dens in chapters 2 and 10), health and sanitary issues (the lazaretto quarantine
facilities in chapter 5, regulations for stray dogs in chapter eleven and the gen-
eral ambiance that shaped the Lisbon intelligentsia and, by extension, the cul-
tural and political agenda of the capital city in which science and technology,
as harbingers of progress, played an important role in chapter 12). Although
running on a longer timeline that includes the republican period, chapter six
adds an additional layer of historical complexity to the above case studies by
focusing on the hybrid value – economic and scientific – of Lisbon customs
laboratory.
2.2 The First Republic (1910–1926)

Portugal’s critical situation continued to unfold over time, bolstering support
for the Republican agenda and the widespread resentment toward politi-
cians who failed to deliver on their promise of national prosperity. Moreover,
Portugal’s geopolitical standing as one of Europe’s leading imperial powers was
weakened by the outcome of the Berlin Conference (1884–1885), with the atten-
dant rule of effective occupation, as well as by the confrontational policies of
European countries – e.g. United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Belgium –
eager to secure as much of the African continents wealth as possible.
29 Álvaro Ferreira da Silva, and M. Luísa Sousa, “The ‘Script’ of a new urban layout: Mobility,
environment, and embellishment in Lisbon’s streets (1850–1910),” Technology and Culture
60, 1 (2019): 65–97.
Introduction 13
In 1910, the Republican Party overthrew the monarchy, thus inaugurating

the Portuguese Republic. Despite this political victory, the republican gov-
ernment inherited most of the country’s economic problems from the late
nineteenth-century; problems that would remain partially unresolved only
to be exacerbated by the consequences of the First World War. Nevertheless,
measures were taken to balance the national budget by investing in educa-
tion, rationalising the on-going exploitation of Portugal’s colonies, increasing
revenues, and reducing state expenses.30 Alongside this management of the
Portuguese economy, and in opposition to the church, the Republican regime
introduced a set of substantial changes to the political, social, and cultural
landscapes. Not only did the Republican government prioritise the voices of
the urban middle- and working-class, it advocated for the realisation of repub-
lican principles via public works projects aimed at the creation of a “new man,”
shaped by modernity’s twin features of scientific rationality and knowledge.
Thus, at the core of the republican agenda, was the concerted effort to pro-
mote education – from primary education to universities and adult educa-
tion – and with a special emphasis placed on scientific literacy. Despite the
efforts to promote professional education during the Regeneration period –
e.g. the Polytechnic Academy of Porto (est. 1836), the Polytechnic School of
Lisbon (est. 1837), and the creation of the Industrial Institute (est. 1852) – it was
the republican regime that launched a full educational program for the social
improvement of the people while simultaneously modernising the education
of Portugal’s elite.31
In a country where more than seventy-five percent of the population was
illiterate, learning how to write, read, and count was tantamount to one’s sta-
tus as an upstanding citizen, a productive member of society who was aware of
their rights and duties, and worked toward the moral and scientific progress
of Portuguese society. Hence, the multiple initiatives regarding the literacy and
popular education of both children and adults, initiatives that were promoted
by a wide range of socio-political actors – from state to private initiatives, from
Freemasonry and republicanism to anarchism, from workers’ associations
30 Maria Eugénia Mata, As Finanças Públicas Portuguesas da Regeneração à Primeira Guerra

Mundial (PhD dissertation, Universidade de Lisboa, 1985).
31 Ana Simões, Ana Carneiro, Maria Paula Diogo, Luís Miguel Carolino, and Teresa Salomé
Mota, 2013, Uma História da Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa (1911–1974)
(Lisboa: FCUL, 2013); Luís Miguel Carolino and Teresa Salomé Mota, eds., The Polytechnic
Experience in the Nineteenth-Century Iberian Peninsula, HoST 7 (2013); Saraiva and
Macedo, Capital Científica; Maria Paula Diogo, and Tiago Saraiva, Inventing a European
Nation. Engineers for Portugal, from Baroque to Fascism (Milton Keynes (UK): Morgan &
Claypool Publishers, 2021).
to the universities’ elite – and in a variety of forms – e.g. kindergartens and

day care centres, schools owned and managed by working-class associations
or republican centres, free and popular universities for adults. Completing
the Republican government’s education program was the founding of the
University of Lisbon, the Technical Institute in Lisbon, and the University of
Porto, all of which served as institutions of higher education in the fields of sci-
ence, engineering, and medicine, and effectively put an end to the University
of Coimbra’s title of the intellectual and cultural centre of Portuguese society.
In the end, both the republican turn towards education and a growing
awareness of the unhygienic living conditions of a significantly impoverished
working class would leave their imprint on Lisbon. Chapters thirteen, three,
and seven focus, respectively, on these new marks in the city: the Free and
Popular universities’ mobile lecture series and hosted by a network of public
spaces repurposed for educating the working classes and the creation of the
new republican citizen; the Saint-Simonian driven plea for building decent
housing for workers as illustrated by the case study of the Grandela neighbour-
hood; and the new spaces created in order to prevent the outbreak of epidem-
ics and ensure the security of the public’s health.
2.3 The Estado Novo Dictatorship (1933–1974)

In 1926, a military coup seized power in Portugal, quickly establishing a dicta-
torship via the dissolution of parliament, placing a ban on all political parties,
and instituting the practice of censorship. Thriving on the political and eco-
nomic instability of the republican period, the so-called National Dictatorship
(1928–1933) served as the antechamber for the Estado Novo (New State) dicta-
torship led by António de Oliveira Salazar, which would last until 1974.
The Estado Novo, a designation with a strong ideological and propagandistic
drive, was a presidential, authoritarian, and anti-parliamentary regime, insti-
tutionalized by the 1933 Constitution. Moreover, the economic and financial
reforms led by Salazar gave him full control over the expenditure and revenue
of all national ministries. Salazar’s passage of austerity measures (postponing
public works and other state investments), privatisation of the public sector
(leasing of railway lines, privatization of industries such as tobacco, prohibi-
tion of commercial or industrial exploitation by the State), steep tax hikes, and
a nationwide salary freeze, all led to an immediate surplus in public finances
for the dictatorship.32 What is more, included within this economic policy
was the management of resources of the vast Portuguese colonial empire,
32 Nuno Valério, “The Portuguese economy in the inter-war period,” Estudos de Economia 2
(1985): 143–151.
Introduction 15
particularly of Angola and Mozambique. With the 1930 Colonial Act, Lisbon
became the sole decision making centre with respect to the Angolan and
Mozambican economies. The empire was a cornerstone of a strong central-
ized regime supported by an intense campaign around the idea of a multi-
continental empire.
Portugal remained “neutral” during the Second World War, allowing the
country to increase national production and stabilise the national budget via
exports of textile, metal, and wolfram, and thereby further developing the
Portuguese economy. Opposing the traditional idea that Portugal was a purely
agrarian economy, recent historical analyses demonstrate how processes of
development, and the modernisation of certain industrial and technological
sectors played a key role in the Estado Novo’s economic expansion. Moreover,
these processes of modernisation were furthered in the 1950s via the invest-
ment of foreign capital, a key part of the country’s economic stimulus pack-
age – chemical and metalworking industry, tourism, transport, energy, and
public works projects, such as infrastructure, bridges, roads, and dams.33 The
existence of these processes of modernisation and development within a
national economy long held to be agricultural in essence, therefore, suggests
that the practices of science, engineering, and medicine were also placed at
the service of the Portuguese dictatorship.
Of the most important sites for the production of knowledge under Salazar’s
dictatorship, three particular laboratories – the Agronomical Station (1936),
the National Laboratory of Civil Engineering (1946), and the Laboratory of
Nuclear Physics and Engineering (1961) – are the clearest expression of the
importance of science and technology for autarky.34 As such, this view is far
from the commonly accepted narrative within Portuguese historiography,
whose arc begins with the political formation of an illuminated First Republic
and ends with an Estado Novo devoid of techno-scientific content. To the con-
trary, draconian censorship laws (such as the extended purges in the universi-
ties in the 1930s and 1940s) existed alongside the creation of state laboratories
33 Fernando Rosas, O Estado Novo nos Anos Trinta (1928–1938) (Lisboa, Editorial Estampa,
1986).
34 Tiago Saraiva, ed., The Fascistization of Science, HoST 3 (2009); Tiago Saraiva, Fascists Pigs.
Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism (MIT Press, 2016); Sousa, Maria
Luísa. A Mobilidade Automóvel em Portugal, 1920–1950 (Lisboa: Editora Chiado, 2016);
Quintino Lopes, A Europeização de Portugal entre guerras. A Junta de Educação Nacional
e a Investigação Científica (Casal de Cambra: Caleidoscópio, 2017); Júlia Gaspar, Percursos
da Física e da Energia Nucleares na Capital Portuguesa: Ciência, Poder e Política, 1947–1973
(Lisboa: Edições Colibri, 2019); Saraiva, and Macedo, Capital Científica; Diogo and Saraiva,
Inventing a European Nation.
and state departments to fund research paradoxically under the Estado Novo
dictatorship. Nevertheless, even the significant economic growth during and
after the Second World War did not change the peripheral status of Portuguese
economy. By the end of the 1960s, Portugal was still one of the European coun-
tries with the lowest income per capita.
As the regime itself, the changes in Lisbon during the Estado Novo bore
a strong propagandistic mark led by the municipality perfectly tuned with
the national policy objectives. Such changes were designed to showcase this
imagined lineage between past and present, establishing a direct link between
the Portuguese Golden Age (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) to the colo-
nial empire of the twentieth century and its eventual entrance into European
modernity via public works projects. The 1940 Exposição do Mundo Português
(Portuguese World Exhibition) – the event that concludes the historical period
analysed in this volume – celebrated two major events in Portuguese history:
the foundation of the country in 1140, and the restoration of independence
after the period of Spanish rule in 1640. They attested to the robustness of the
Portuguese nation and “race” enhanced by its empire. With the support of
Duarte Pacheco, the engineer, and eventual President of Lisbon’s Municipality,
the 1940 Exposição do Mundo Português took place in the riverside neighbour-
hood of Belém – the site from where Vasco da Gama embarked on an expedi-
tion to India in late fifteenth-century. For the Estado Novo, Belém only further
justified the dictatorship’s colonial agenda and was used as the pretext for
reconstructing Portugal’s history as a multiracial and multi-continental nation
since its birth. Despite the propagandistic function of the exhibition, its pavil-
ions showcased the novel particularities of Portuguese history (to the point
that the Discoveries pavilion was shaped in the form of the armillary sphere)
alongside designated areas for leisure, such as a Luna Park and small boats for
public use along the river. Both then and now, the 1940 Exposição do Mundo
Português exhibition grounds completely transformed the neighbourhood of
Belém and Lisbon’s relationship to the river and its coastal area.
Chapter nine focuses precisely on the armillary sphere during and beyond
the Exposição do Mundo Português, particularly considering its role as an
aesthetic and political symbol of the dictatorship’s imperial rhetoric during
this period of urban development. Considering the Estado Novo’s economic
dependency on its colonies, chapter 8 interrogates how the Colonial Garden
and the Colonial Agricultural Museum were mobilised as fundamental insti-
tutions for the colonial production of knowledge and education, while rein-
forcing hierarchies of power between the imperial metropole and its colonial
periphery. Parallel to its use of national history, notions of modernity were at
the core of the dictatorship’s attempt to delegitimise the criticisms that por-
trayed Portugal as not-yet freed from its, alleged, historical backwardness. The
Introduction 17
construction of the Lisbon-Cascais coastal road and the Luna Park – covered
in chapters four and fourteen – epitomised the dictatorship’s brand of mod-
ernisation although directed to different publics. While the costal road was a
tourism road targeting the wealth of foreign and domestic elites, the Luna Park
was part of the general strategy of framing popular culture deployed by the
Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional (National Propaganda Board).
The one hundred years of Portuguese history covered in this book (1840–
1940) reveals a complex mosaic of continuities and discontinuities. At first
glance, it is seemingly easy to identify the chief discontinuities, whether they
pertain to changes in politics – the monarchy vs. the republic, the republic
vs. the dictatorship – or economics – debts and chaos vs. financial balance
and budgetary control. Such obvious discontinuities, however, obscure the
complex dynamic of tradition and novelty that is present in, for instance,
the building and consolidation of a modern central state during the latter
half of the nineteenth-century or the recurrent financial instability up until
the 1930s. That said, it is true that historical continuities persist throughout
this period of Portugal’s history: the role of the colonies in the construction of
national identity and for political and economic policy; the attempt to rival the
economic growth of its Western European counterparts; as well as the growing
importance of cities, infrastructures, and experts for the vision of European
modernity at the turn of the century.
It is the city, however, that serves as the point of contact for both the conti-
nuities and discontinuities of Portuguese history. As such, we approach Lisbon
as a specific unit, as an historical and self-contained subject, and conditioned
by a national and international context. Lisbon’s agency is revealed by way
of its urban landscape (real and imaginary), its inhabitants (from people to
germs, from dogs to trees and plants), and its policy makers (politicians, urban
experts, scientists, engineers, and physicians).
3 How to Write an Urban History of Science in Lisbon? Invisibilities,

Socio-technical Imaginaries, and Urban Connections
In Portugal, urban history encompasses reflections of a variety of disciplines

wherein the norm of knowledge production is one of non-communication
and disciplinary insularity, and includes cultural historians, art historians,
urban historians, geographers, architects, and engineers.35 Until recently, few
35 Manuel C. Teixeira, “A história urbana em Portugal. Desenvolvimentos recentes,” Análise

Social 28 (1993): 371–90.
works addressed the urban history of STM in Lisbon.36 In 2005, Tiago Saraiva’s
comparative history of Madrid and Lisbon in the latter half of the nineteenth-
century, demonstrates the profound impact of STM with respect to the evolu-
tion of these cities. Saraiva’s history responds to the historian’s dismissal of
STM as an historical actor by tracing STM in the evolution of the key Iberian
metropoles of Madrid and Lisbon. Saraiva’s research gives the lie to the empha-
sis placed on the scientific backwardness of peripheral countries – e.g. Spain
and Portugal – in both the popular, historical, imaginary, and the national and
international literature.37 More than a decade later, in a paper co-authored
with Ana Cardoso de Matos and in a volume edited jointly with Marta Macedo,
Saraiva and Macedo undertook a study of a select group of STM institutions
over the course of three successive political regimes (Liberal constitutional
regime, First Republic and Estado Novo), revealing the ways in which STM
institutions and experts were central to the construction of contemporary
Lisbon.38 Moreover, in 2019, Álvaro Ferreira da Silva and Maria Luísa Sousa
offered an historiographical analysis of the importance of technical infra-
structures for the city.39 Included in the seminal collection of essays, Urban
Histories of Science (2019), Ana Simões – co-editor and contributing author of
the present volume – revealed the centrality of STM for Lisbon during the first
decade of the twentieth-century. By attending to the circulation of STM related
news and its corresponding coverage in the widely read newspaper, Diário de
36 Pre-dating the first exercises at an urban history of STM in Lisbon, we highlight an internet
database project: Ana Luísa Janeira, “Projecto: ‘Marcas das ciências e das técnicas pelas
ruas de Lisboa com Cesário Verde à descoberta de Lisboa,” Circumscribere, 3 (2007): 43–53
and a scientific tour in Lisbon, see Ana Simões, Maria Paula Diogo, and Ana Carneiro,
“Physical Sciences in Lisbon,” Physics in Perspective, 14, 3 (2012): 335–367, and visit the
site https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1xAE021k4esfDqgYFbn-ntJtsjTo&ll=38.7
22717532487835%2C-9.160686949999981&z=14.
37 Saraiva, Ciencia y Ciudad.
38 Tiago Saraiva, and Ana Cardoso de Matos, “Technological Nocturne: The Lisbon Indus
trial Institute and Romantic Engineering (1849–1888),” Technology and Culture, 2017, 58
(2): 422–458; Saraiva, and Macedo, Capital Científica. The following institutions were
discussed in Capital Científica (Scientific Capital): the Polytechnical School of Lisbon,
the Army School, the Astronomical Observatory of Lisbon, the Geological Services,
the Industrial Institute of Lisbon, the Rilhafoles Hospital for alienated people, the
Bacteriological Institute Câmara Pestana, the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of
Sciences, the Institute Bento da Rocha Cabral, the Free and Popular universities for
the working classes, the Technical Institute of Lisbon, the National Laboratory of Civil
Engineering, the Portuguese Institute of Oncology and the Laboratory of Nuclear Physics
and Engineering. Chapters by several members of the project VISLIS in the context of
which this edited volume was prepared (see Post Scriptum).
39 Silva, and Sousa, “The script”.
Introduction 19
Notícias (Daily News), Simões successfully traces the various ways in which
representations of STM reached a highly illiterate population.40
These examples constitute the first step to counteract the still pervasive
view among experts, non-experts, and general audiences alike, with respect
to the role played by STM in shaping contemporary Lisbon and Portugal’s
landscapes.41 This has been a common justification for taking for granted the
country’s consistent STM backwardness, following the so-called Golden Age of
Discoveries. The present volume stems from an approach to the urban history
of STM in Lisbon, which is based on three methodological axes: the perspec-
tive of invisibilities, the role of socio-technical imaginaries, and urban con-
nections. This framework allows us to account for the effects of STM in the
making of Lisbon, insofar as its main sites of knowledge production diverge
from the institutions typically addressed in standard works of the urban his-
tory of STM – e.g. technical schools, universities, academies, societies, research
laboratories, natural history museums, botanical gardens, and zoos. Thus, we
attend mostly to the less recognisable, predictable, and grandiose places to
show the pervasiveness of STM in the construction of Lisbon, which can be
traced from its most iconic works of infrastructure to its most mundane ele-
ments of public life. If STM profoundly shaped Berlin, London, and Paris, the
same can be said of Lisbon.
3.1 Invisibilities
Due to advances in post-colonial and global studies, as well as approaches to
Europe evidencing a multiplicity of regions, spaces and entities unaddressed
in the past, recent attempts in the history of STM have been made to render
visible the actors (human and non-human), institutions and spaces that have
formerly remained invisible. The effects of this recent set of trends have also
40 Ana Simões, “From Capital City to Scientific Capital.”

41 Various works by historians of STM have counteracted this view. See for example: Tiago
Saraiva, “Inventing the Technological Nation: the example of Portugal (1851–1898),”
History and Technology, 23 (2007): 263–271; Marta Macedo, Projectar e Construir a
Nação. Engenheiros, Ciência e Território em Portugal no século XIX (Lisboa: Imprensa de
Ciências Sociais, 2012); Maria Paula Diogo, and Ana Cardoso de Matos, “Going Public:
The First Portuguese National Engineering Meeting and the Popularization of the
Image of the Engineer as an Artisan of Progress (Portugal, 1931),” Engineering Studies,
4, 3 (2012): 185–204; Marta Macedo, and Jaume Valentines-Álvarez, “Technology and
Nation: Learning from the Periphery,” Technology and Culture, FORUM STEP Matters,
57(4) (2016): 989–997; Ana Simões, and Maria Paula Diogo, “Portugal,” in Hugh Richard
Slotten, Ronald L. Numbers, David N. Livingstone, eds., The Cambridge History of Science,
Volume 8: Modern Science in National, Transnational, and Global Context, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2020), 390–401.
affected the practice of writing urban histories of STM, impacting on those

cities that have been “twice invisible” – to borrow an expression used by Olga
Kuchinskaya when discussing representations of radiation danger following
the Chernobyl disaster.42 First, cities were generally overlooked by the history
of STM insofar as historians have not acknowledged their agency. Second, their
agency was recognized in a few rather marginal and select group of urban cen-
tres, which were considered worthy of attention. Notwithstanding its role as
a global city during the Renaissance, Lisbon continues to be absent from the
latter group, that is, continues to be made twice invisible.43
Borrowing from the discussion of the various meanings of invisibilities by
Kuchinskaya, we extend her proposal to look at the “politics of invisibility”44 at
work in the urban history of STM. We point to the necessity of un-black boxing
epistemological questions behind the invisibility of many topics in formal nar-
ratives by urban STM historians. Our aim is to understand the reasons for the
invisibility of the urban histories of STM particular to Lisbon. It is our convic-
tion that Lisbon’s absence from these histories is due to various factors – e.g.
the availability of sources, the shortcomings of historians’ language skills, the
role of historical asymmetries of actors (including cities and actors within cit-
ies), the role of ingrained preconceptions concerning the residual (or null) role
of STM in shaping Lisbon’s landscape in absolute and/or comparative terms,
and the hegemony of an Anglo-American culture of (urban) historians of STM
in shaping major disciplinary trends vis-à-vis other scholarly communities. We
further propose to reverse this situation by rendering Lisbon “twice visible,”
by accounting for agency of Lisbon while highlighting those instances of the
42 Olga Kuchinskaya, “Twice invisible. Formal representations of radiation danger,” Social

Studies of Science, 43, 1 (2012): 78–96. By saying this we realize that historians of STM
were late in acknowledging the protagonism of cities, while at least since Henri Pirenne
and his famous Pirenne Thesis, historians have been looking at cities as active historical
protagonists: The medieval city and its suburbs was considered a favorable environment
that allowed the rising of the bourgeoisie; the baroque city (fifteenth to eighteenth cen-
turies) provided an urban space planned to assume its role in the exercise of absolute
monarchy and mercantile capitalism’s interests and practices, and to host a new intel-
lectual elite – scientists, engineers, artists – in the service of modern state; the nineteenth
century city was a mirror of industrial growth. See Henri Pirenne, Les villes du Moyen Âge,
essai d’histoire économique et sociale (Bruxelles, Lamertin, 1927) and Lewis Mumford, The
Culture of Cities (Eugene, OR: Harvest Books, 1970).
43 Gschwend, and Lowe, The Global City.
44 Kuchinskaya, “Twice invisible”; Olga Kuchinskaya, The politics of invisibility. Public knowl-
edge about radiation health effects after Chernobyl (Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press,
2014).
Introduction 21
co-construction of STM and Lisbon beyond the institutions and spaces typi-
cally studied in the history of STM.
Following former uses of actor-network theory in urban history, from the
work of Bert de Munck to its recent application to the streets of Lisbon,45
we take seriously Lisbon’s agency and recognize that it shapes how human
and non-human actors interact in urban space, thus establishing complex and
unavoidable relationships among various actors. Moreover, while we acknowl-
edge the role of Lisbon as a node in a dynamic and complex interurban net-
work, we underscore its situated agency within the highly asymmetrical power
relations that inhere in this interurban network as well as within the city itself.
The urban context reveals deep asymmetries of power both among human and
non-human animals, as well as among humans themselves. Even acknowledg-
ing the equal standing of technology, humans, animals, or other non-humans
as historical actors, the power of each actor to shape STM in the urban context
is deeply asymmetrical.
To capture the city’s agency, we purposely shied away from the more tradi-
tional emphasis on well-known major scientific, technical and medical institu-
tions, and focused on lesser known sites: the lazaretto, its customs’ laboratory
and health station, all of which formed part of the renewal of Lisbon’s port
in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century (chapters five, six, and
seven, respectively); the Colonial Agricultural Museum, whose invisibility
emerges when contrasted to other museums such as the National Museum of
Lisbon’s rich zoological section on African fauna (chapter 8); the Estrela gar-
den and the Colonial Garden (chapters ten and eight); the itinerant spaces that
hosted working-class university courses and lectures by STM experts; the 1940
Portuguese World Exhibition, a short-lived Luna Park, and other amusement
parks (chapters thirteen, nine, and fourteen respectively); the Lisbon-Cascais
Coastal Road and related infrastructure projects such as pavements, afforesta-
tion, tree-alignments, and working-class neighbourhoods (chapters 4, 1, 2, and
3 respectively).
Moreover, these studies address urban experts other than the hegemonic
class of engineers, as well as a multitude of other city actors, including not only
intellectuals, often critical and/or visionary of the urban question (chapter 12),
but also anonymous craftsmen (chapter 1) and non-human actors that shaped
the city’s approach toward public health (chapters 11, 5, and 7 respectively).
In each of the examples studied here, we demonstrate how STM played a
45 Bert de Munck, “Re-assembling actor-network theory and urban history,” Urban History 44,
1 (2017): 111–122; Silva, and Sousa, “The ‘Script’.”
determining factor in the construction of modern Lisbon. Thus, by attending

to the (urban) artefacts and actors that remain at the margins of the discipline,
this volume shows how they are, in fact, deeply embedded in the history of
STM and in the politics of the city.
3.2 Socio-technical Imaginaries

In the same way as we extend Kuchinskaya’s invisibilities to the realm of urban
history of STM we appropriate Sheila Jasanoff’s and Sang-Hyun Kim’s concept
of socio-technical imaginaries from STS studies for the purposes of writing this
urban history of STM. Building on G.E. Marcus’ concept of techno-scientific
imaginaries, Jasanoff’s and Kim’s reconceive the term to emphasise the entan-
glements of contemporary science and technology practices in society and
their central role in shaping science policy.46
These insights gain additional significance during the historical period
that delimits the history presented here, which aims to reveal Lisbon as an
urban context that is well suited for the study of the entanglements of science,
technology, medicine, and society that comprise a variety of imaginaries that
shaped urban policies. The proposals and guidelines outlined by scientists,
engineers, physicians, and experts were shaped not primarily by their personal
idiosyncrasies but rather by the norms and values at their disposal and by a
consistent comparison with other urban landscapes, whether real or imagined.
Unsurprisingly, the imaginaries informing each of the chapters in this vol-
ume stem from the hybridity of Lisbon discussed above and belong to one of
three major categories: Lisbon as an imperial metropolis; Lisbon as the gate-
way to Europe; and Lisbon as the scientific capital of Portugal. Taken together,
they provided the ground for two techno-scientific urban utopias put forward
in 1906, one titled “Lisbon in the year 2000,” written by the engineer Melo de
Matos, and the other titled “Monumental Lisbon,” by the writer and journalist
Fialho de Almeida.47 These works are of particular significance insofar as the
46 G.E. Marcus, ed., Technoscientific imaginaries. Conversations, profiles, and memoirs

(Chicago: CUP, 1995); Sheila Jasanoff, and Sang-Hyun Kim, “Containing the Atom:
Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear Power in the United States and South Korea,”
Minerva, 47, 2 (2009): 119–146; Sheila Jasanoff, and Sang-Hyun Kim, eds. Dreamscapes
of Modernity. Sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 2015).
47 Fialho de Almeida, “Lisboa Monumental. I e II,” Ilustração Portuguesa, 36 (1906): 396–
405; 39 (1906): 497–509; José Maria Melo de Matos, “Lisboa no anno 2000. I. O Porto de
Lisboa,” Ilustração Portuguesa, 5 (1906): 129–133; “Lisboa no anno 2000. II. Os cais de
Alcântara e os armazéns de Lisboa,” Ilustração Portuguesa, 6 (1906): 188–192; “Lisboa no
anno 2000. III. A estação de Lisboa-Mar,” Ilustração Portuguesa, 7 (1906): 220–223; “Lisboa
no anno 2000. IV. O tunel para a outra banda,” Ilustração Portuguesa, 8 (1906): 249–252.
Introduction 23
encounter between the editors of this volume with the urban history of STM in
Lisbon was mediated by these two techno-scientific urban utopias in particu-
lar. However, Matos and Almeida’s utopias are of interest for our purposes, not
as “objects of study” per se, but insofar as they reveal the agendas of visionaries,
and ultimately reveal how they “have interpreted their present … with an eye
into the future.”48 This initial impression of the significance of these imaginar-
ies was eventually corroborated in light of the fact that the majority of the pro-
posed projects for the modernisation of Lisbon – most of which never came to
fruition – included central ingredients of the 1906 utopias.
Matos and Almeida both praised the road to industrialization and envi-
sioned modernisation considering advances in the productive capacities of
techno-science. Therefore, their vision of modernity emphasised the (long-
awaited) renewal of Lisbon’s port, the renovation of the (east-west) riverside,
and its expansion along Lisbon’s eventual imperial (north-south) axis, bor-
dered by the “Hill of the Sciences” to the west and the “Hill of Medicine” to the
east. Constitutive aspects of the port and the imperial axis of the city, as well
as of the new scientific capital, are the urban protagonists discussed in various
chapters in this volume.49
In his illustrated paper, Fialho de Almeida depicted a monumental bridge
over the new Haussman-like boulevard, Avenida da Liberdade, the most
emblematic avenue of the renewed city, which connected the “Hill of the
Sciences” to the west and the “Hill of Medicine” to the east – names that stem
from their concentration of scientific and medical institutions, respectively,
and helpfully illustrate how much modernization trends at work in Lisbon in
the second half of the nineteenth century were profoundly shaped by STM.
Besides part of an utopia, the monumental bridge, to give just an example,
was also suggested in urban projects elaborated by P.J. Pézerat, the French
architect, professor of the Polytechnic School and municipal engineer, or by
48 Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash, “Introduction. Utopia and Dystopia
beyond Space and Time,” in Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash, eds.,
Utopia and Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2010), 1–17, 3.
49 Simões, “From Capital City to Scientific Capital.” If one contrasts these two utopias to
the British contemporary environmental garden city vision of Ebenezer Howard it is
possible to go beyond their apparent conflicting perspectives to find that they shared a
vision of the urban-natural dichotomy, which reduces nature to a resource for humans
to explore at their will. This is the argument suggested in the paper Ana Simões, and
Maria Paula Diogo, “Urban Utopias and the Anthropocene,” in Maria Paula Diogo, Ana
Simões, Ana Duarte Rodrigues, and Davide Scarso, eds., Gardens and Human Agency in the
Anthropocene (London, Routledge, 2019), 58–72.
the military engineer Miguel Correia Pais.50 But it was never implemented,
although the relevance of the Hills of the Sciences and of Medicine was rein-
forced with time.
Between Almeida and Matos, it was the latter’s futuristic and techno-
scientific utopias that underscored Lisbon’s port as the mediating site linking
its imperial past to its modernist present. It was for this reason that Matos pro-
vided a new vision for the port of Lisbon, which included new piers, ware-
houses, and a transport and communications network linking Lisbon to other
parts of Portugal and to the world at large. This was a vision that reflected sev-
eral aspects of the various proposals discussed by Pierre-Joseph Pézerat and
Miguel Carlos Correia Pais, the French engineer, Thomé de Gamond, and the
architect and city council consultant, Miguel Ventura Terra.51 Almeida’s and
Matos’s utopias also included plans for a new industrial Lisbon located on the
south side of the river Tagus, replete with airy/healthy neighbourhoods for
the working class and easy access to Lisbon via a two-platform bridge (Almeida)
and an underground tunnel (Matos). Sixty years after “Monumental Lisbon,”
amidst the dictatorship of the Estado Novo, Almeida’s vision of a bridge con-
necting Lisbon to the south side of the river would finally come to fruition.
To be sure, these utopias were not the only imaginaries that reflected on the
potential for Lisbon’s modernisation: several official reports, papers, and books
addressed issues of urban planning, and proposed projects that were only par-
tially implemented, if implemented at all. These contemporaneous proposals
materialised different imaginaries, harbouring different visions for the future,
and established guidelines for their construction. Regardless of their utopian
function, it was the city of Lisbon that served as their referent. Various sorts
of reasons account for their non-realization, including the stringent financial
conditions in which the Lisbon city council and the country found themselves
by the end of the nineteenth century.
In sum, the three classes of socio-technical imaginaries highlighted above –
Lisbon as an imperial metropolis; Lisbon as the gateway to Europe; and
Lisbon as the scientific capital of Portugal – were grounded on the capacity of
STM and its experts in transforming Lisbon into the nation’s scientific capital52
and renewing its port’s status as the gateway of Europe. This was a vision that
was shared by successive political regimes, such that the connection to the
50 Pierre-Joseph Pézerat, Mémoire sur les études d’améliorations et emblissements de

Lisbonne (1865); Miguel Carlos Correia Pais, Melhoramentos de Lisboa e seu Porto (Lisboa:
Typographia Universal, 1882), 2 vols.
51 Ana Barata, Lisboa ‘caes da Europa’ (Lisboa: Colibri, 2010).
52 Simões, “From Capital City to Scientific Capital.”
Introduction 25
Portuguese empire was reinforced during the Estado Novo’s modernisation

plans to incorporate this imperial past into the material and aesthetic com-
position of Lisbon’s urban landscapes. Topics such as these are discussed, in
detail, throughout the various chapters of the present volume.
3.3 Urban Connections

Urban historians of STM have been increasingly attentive to the importance
of shifting from case studies centred on specific cities to (collective) works in
which cities are taken to be nodes of extended networks. These studies aim
at entangled histories (histoires croisés) and the exploration of the intersec-
tion between the urban history of STM and global studies.53 Despite the focus
on Lisbon, urban connections have been chosen as one of the methodological
axes inspiring the chapters in this volume. Although cities are, by definition,
never isolated systems, the nineteenth-century saw the rise of the city as a way
of life, and thus increased the number of intra-urban connections alongside an
expanding network of inter-urban relations.
From 1830 to 1914, urbanization rapidly increased in Europe, leading to
the growth of already existing cities as well as the emergence of new urban
centres.54 This was also the period when the majority of present-day urban
structures – e.g. water, gas and electrical supply, sewage, transportation sys-
tems, gardens, sidewalks, streets, roads – were put in place, and in response to
the problems concerning housing, security, and health of the day. Although the
consumer revolution made possible by mass-production and fast circulation
of goods did not benefit all social classes equally, the consumer experience
and the enjoyment of leisure time became important forms of social life. For
Lisbon’s growing elite, storefront window displays, theatres, the opera, cafés,
restaurants, and, eventually, the cinema functioned as the urban bourgeoi-
sie’s entrance into modernity. Lisbon’s newly widened streets and geometric
urban planning, replete with gardens, squares, fountains, and shops, were syn-
onymous with progress, modernity, wealth, health, and security. Haussmann’s
renovation of Paris was emblematic: to demolish medieval overcrowded and
unhealthy neighbourhoods and to build a network of secure, airy, and healthy
boulevards and parks, and to promote better connections with outer regions
within France and with other countries.55
53 Ash, Science in the Metropolis, Gantner, Hein-Kircher, and Hochadel, Interurban

Knowledge Exchange.
54 Paul Bairoch and Gary Goertz, “Factors of Urbanisation in the Nineteenth Century
Developed Countries: A Descriptive and Econometric Analysis,” Urban Studies 23 (1986):
285–305.
55 Harvey, Paris. Capital of Modernity.
The period under consideration in this volume is largely shaped by Lisbon’s

privileged geographical condition – roughly located at the middle of an
extended Atlantic coast and bathed by a river holding a broad estuary. This
geographical position would prove to be advantageous during a century that
saw the rapid increase in maritime trade and overseas travel. Beginning in the
latter half of the nineteenth-century, Lisbon’s two-fold status of European
capital and imperial metropole, saw its port become a crucial node in a net-
work connecting European cities to other continents – e.g. North and South
America, Africa, and Asia.56 At the end of the nineteenth-century, and assum-
ing its historic character as a world city,57 Lisbon aimed at becoming the gate-
way to the old continent.58
In this volume, the specificities of Lisbon’s hybridism provide the ground
for the exploration of the internal, external, intellectual, and historiographi-
cal connections proper to its urban landscape, thereby stressing the imbri-
cated nature of its spatial, geographical, and theoretical significance. Internal
connections refer to the fabric of the city, the network of infrastructures,
which connect different spaces of the urban framework as so many intersect-
ing threads constitutive of its social fabric. We shift our focus away from the
grey infrastructures (human-engineered infrastructures) commonly found in
urban historians of STM and emphasise the importance of green infrastruc-
tures, or human-engineered infrastructures that aim at implementing con-
trolled ecosystem values. Chapters two, eight, and ten, for example, not only
indicate the existing relations between grey and green infrastructures,59 but
also further Jean-Marc L’Anton’s insight by attending to the novel relationship
that emerged between trees and the city’s underground network.60
56 Carole Hein, Port Cities. Dynamic Landscapes and Global Networks (NY: Routledge: 2011).
57 Saskia Sassen distinguishes cities which held in the past strong connections with the
world at large, and which she calls world cities, from contemporary global cities. Saskia
Sassen, “The Global City. Introducing a Concept,” Brown Journal of World Affairs, 11, 2
(2005): 27–43.
58 Barata, Lisboa ‘caes da Europa’, 70.
59 The terms are now part of the mainstream vocabulary and are often used in blogs and
newspaper articles. For a recent academic review of the terms see Y. Depietri, and
T. McPhearson, “Integrating the Grey, Green, and Blue in Cities: Nature-Based Solutions
for Climate Change Adaptation and Risk Reduction,” in N. Kabisch, H. Korn, J. Stadler, and
A. Bonn, eds. Nature-Based Solutions to Climate Change Adaptation in Urban Areas. Theory
and Practice of Urban Sustainability Transitions (Springer, 2017), 91–109.
60 Jean-Marc L’Anton, “L’arbre comme réseau: de l’hygiénisme à l’écologie,” in Michel
Audouy et al., Le Grande Pari(s) d’Alphand. Création et transmission d’un paysage urbain
(Paris: Éditions de la Villette, 2018), 271–272.
Introduction 27
External connections, by contrast, refer to the network of transport and

communications that enabled the rapid influx of people, commodities, knowl-
edges, and practices, both into and out of the city. This set of external con-
nections not only afforded their circulation but also served as a means of
uniting the local with the global, and thereby expanded the scale of circula-
tion from the local, regional, and national, to the transnational, international,
and intercontinental. In the case of Lisbon’s two-fold function of port city and
imperial metropole, these external connections inevitably affected the nature
of Portuguese colonisation (chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9).61
Insofar as networks of circulation involve both tangible and intangible enti-
ties, intellectual connections refer to the various meanings modernity assumes
during specific historical periods. Through travels of learning, the exchange of
books/printed matter, para-academic dialogue between peers, and the interac-
tion between different associations, urban experts found inspiration abroad
via proposals from likeminded peers and adapted them to their local context.
Through the experiences of urban actors, the specific interventions made
within a particular urban context resulted from the convergence in one single
locality of appropriations brought from a variety of other localities, in a sort of
inspirational urban stratigraphy. It is in this way that urban localities become
“moving localities.”62 Depending on the urban problem in question, particular
terms of comparison were selected while different cities inspired and informed
the choices of urban planners; a combinatory process that, at times, led to sur-
prising results. Thus, if the inspiration of Haussmann’s renewal of Paris or the
appropriation of the Macadam pavement techniques is foreseeable, the global
popularity of the calçadas portuguesa (Portuguese pavement) invites us to be
critical of historiographical preconceptions while attending to the complexi-
ties of circulation. By accounting for the way modernisation trends circulated
on the world market, at the turn of the century, the historian is better placed to
take seriously the existence of a plurality of modernities (chapter 1).63
Lastly, historiographical considerations point to the urban connections
that compel historians of science, historians of technology, and historians
of medicine to abandon inter-disciplinary disagreements and re-establish
the link between science, technology, and medicine in their historiographi-
cal research. Moreover, historians of STM have, at times, been compelled to
embrace a broader view of science; a view that includes historically excluded
61 Hein, Port Cities; Patrick O’Flanagan, Port Cities of Atlantic Iberia, c. 1500–1900 (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2008).
62 Raposo et al., “Moving Localities;” Raposo, Moving Localities.
63 Hochadel, and Nieto-Galan. “How to write an urban history of STM on the ‘Periphery’.”
forms of knowledge involved in the work of artisans and craftsman. Thus, by

taking stock of science, technology, and medicine’s mutual imbrication with
respect to urban development, we can explore the advantages harboured by
this integrated view of the history of STM.64
4 Tripartite Organization
As staunch Lisboners, we could hardly begin this volume without convening a

poem to our help. Many poets have been inspired by Lisbon, from internation-
ally recognised figures such as Fernando Pessoa to lesser-known poets such as
Manuel Alegre, whose recent reflections of the COVID-19 pandemic remain
as poignant as ever. In a few strokes of utmost simplicity, Alegre highlights
three of Lisbon’s constitutive elements: fabric of the city, port city, and daily life.
From the streets, plazas, buildings, restaurants, bars, and cinemas that com-
prise the city’s fabric, to the references of seagulls, canoes, and the openness
characteristic of a port city, and the literary beauty drawn from what is mun-
dane in daily life, Alegre reminds us that cities without people laughing, hug-
ging, and wandering are ghostly shadows of their former selves. Despite such
extreme conditions, Alegre still finds a Lisbon that is “still the Lisbon of Pessoa
both happy and sad.”
The tripartite organization of the present volume – the fabric of the city;
port city (and imperial metropolis); and daily life in the city – mirrors Alegre
poem’s description of Lisbon. Conditioned by the arc of Portuguese history,
this framing of the urban history of Lisbon, reflects three conditions that are
representative of the commonalities and uniqueness proper to the history of
the Portuguese capital: features of its material make-up; how its geographical
and political situation coalesced in its urban layout; and finally, features of its
human (and non-human) make-up, in order to highlight how inhabitants used
and were used by the city in a historical period in which city life emerged. As
an urban history of STM this organization reflects how these three structural
conditions were shaped by STM and in their turn shaped STM. Each part does
so informed by the methodological axes discussed above and includes case
studies associated with the three political regimes, which ruled Portugal in the
period under consideration. It is in this way that the historiography presented
64 John Pickstone, Ways of Knowing. A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); John Pickstone, “Working knowledges
before and after circa 1800. Practices and disciplines in the history of science, technology
and medicine,” ISIS, 98 (2007): 489–516.
Introduction 29
here accounts for the city as a network in which multiple actors intervene and
interact, shaping it and in turn being moulded by it. We centre our analysis on a
set of heterogeneous artefacts that embody the use, management, and control
of the city and its inhabitants, by using a set of variable discursive and non-
discursive elements that interact in a plastic way to enhance and exercise
power.65 Taken separately, the book’s fourteen chapters provide readers with
an engaging picture of Lisbon and its relation to STM and its experts. But it is
the dialogue established across the chapters of this volume and enhanced by
the virtual map available to readers (see Supplement), which highlights the
spatial and temporal intersections, continuities, and discontinuities, that tes-
tify to the interwoven dynamics of the complex and often contradictory city
that is Lisbon.
5 Post-scriptum
The last stages in the preparation of this volume caught us, as the poet Manuel
Alegre, amidst a pandemic of devastating, and global, consequence: it has
left a trail of death with no clear end in sight, upended the lives of everyone
to a greater or lesser extent, and promises to drastically alter forms of life we
once took as “normal.” This volume began during this pre-pandemic period as
part of a research project funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science
and Technology called “Visions of Lisbon. Science, technology and medi-
cine and the making of a techno-scientific capital (1870–1940)” (VISLIS). The
initial research project began in the latter half of 2016, lasted for three and
a half years, and involved mostly members of the Interuniversity Centre for
the History of Science and Technology (CIUHCT).66 Moreover, among the out-
comes from this research project,67 this book occupies a special place. Profiting
from a lively research environment and its lines of research, the book’s outline,
organization, and contents were discussed among authors and benefitted from
65 Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” in Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews

and Other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Vintage, 1980), 194–228.
66 See http://ciuhct.org. The editors of this volume directed jointly CIUHCT from 2007 to
2019.
67 See https://vislisciuhct.wixsite.com/vislis for details. The project VISLIS (PTDC/
IVC-HFC/3122/2014) was organized along four intersecting axes: 1) STM institutions and
spaces, and the embedment of STM practice in the city’s social and material infrastruc-
tures; 2) STM experts and the struggle for hegemony, including the relationship between
the politics of STM expertise and urban policies; 3) The role of STM in the written and
visual cultural representations of the city, including utopian ones; and 4) STM ludic
Lisbon, including STM leisure and amusement facilities.
the guidance of the project’s leader and consultants. Each chapter was pre-
pared via a process that began with the circulation of early drafts, which were
then collectively discussed and revised accordingly. The final organization of
this book also profited from the input of the editors of Brill’s series Cultural
Dynamics of Science.
Benefitting from the information gathered from the VISLIS project and
the methodologies developed by digital humanities scholars, an interactive
virtual map supplements the research presented in this volume and serves as
an inestimable contribution to the practice of historical urban cartography
(See Supplement and map at http://ciuhct.org/vislis-map/). The main STM
sites in Lisbon discussed in the various chapters of this book are identified via
their name and historical date, which allows for a fine analysis of their inter-
connections and relation to successive stages of urban renewal and expansion.
Readers and online visitors can search for specific STM place markers accord-
ing to their type or year and will be able to see them in their historiographical
context through a series of overlaid, high-resolution, geo-referenced maps.
30 May 2020
Part 1
The Fabric of the City
∵
Introduction to Part 1
What is the fabric of a city? In this part of the book, we explore some of the
“hard” structures that make urban spaces recognizable and usable.
In comparison to other European port cities connecting different loca-
tions within Europe as well as linking Europe with other continents, Lisbon
at the end of the nineteenth century was a relatively small city, and not only
in number of inhabitants but in terms of geographical area as well. Following
the Regeneration period’s modernization program driven by technological
advances, Lisbon went through a visible process of urban requalification from
the 1870s onwards.
Resulting from increasing, albeit mild, industrialization and migratory
influxes, the geographical expansion of Lisbon during the nineteenth century
took place along two axes: east-west and north-south. Thus, the city’s eastward
and westward expansion took place along the Tagus River (east-west axis),
which served as the centre of the capital’s main industrial site, was comple-
mented by the northward expansion outwards from the nation’s political, finan-
cial, and commercial centre, Praça do Comércio (Plaza of Commerce). It was
accompanied by an overall urban and aesthetic transformation, in which new
ample rectilinear avenues were built inspired in the boulevards of Haussman’s
public works and beautification projects (1853–1869) that have since become
synonymous with the city of Paris itself. Such projects aimed at reconciling
the ease of circulation, urban embellishment, and proper hygienic conditions,
the most prominent facets of the ideal mid-nineteenth century European city.
Moreover, this new city was shaped by technological developments mate-
rialized in grey and green infrastructures – both above and below ground –
and modern trends in medical theories and hygienic practices. The modernist
gap between Lisbon and its European counterparts began to disappear with
the addition of large technological systems such as pipelines, gas and electric
lighting, and improvements in sewage systems. Now, equally important though
less visible to historians, were the green infrastructures that accompanied such
large-scale projects as described above. These green infrastructures refer to
the novel combination of gardens, parks, tree-lined streets, as well as public
squares and boulevards, that resulted from the urban expansion of a newly
modernized Lisbon.
Together with new transports and communications, profiting from the intro-
duction of novel solutions for paving city streets and implementing updated
© Maria Paula Diogo and Ana Simões, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004513440_003

34 Diogo and Simões
sanitation measures, new neighbourhoods were built, which considered the

needs of Portugal’s growing urban working class. These urban developments
were behind the emergence of a liveable city, further urbanized during the
First Republic (1910–1926) and the dictatorship of the Estado Novo (1933–1974),
in which outdoor spaces became at the reach of inhabitants for leisurely activi-
ties. Urban renovation, together with incoming fluxes of people looking for
work in the newly constructed factories and industrial facilities, account for
a steady increase in Lisbon’s population in the period from 1878 to 1930. In
the period from 1878 to 1900, the city’s population increased from 237,591 to
356,000 inhabitants, while reaching upwards of 431,000 inhabitants in 1911.
Over the next fifty years (1878–1930), Lisbon’s population will have increased
by approximately 250%, surpassing half a million inhabitants.
In the Fabric of the city, authors bring together the more common protag-
onists in urban modernization processes, namely engineers and large infra-
structures such as roads, and less visible actors such as artisans and craftsmen
and techno-scientific infrastructural objects as diverse as pavement design,
tree alignments, and working-class neighbourhoods. Pavements, although
often ignored, are a critical tool for “domesticating” the urban space by delimit-
ing specific areas for the several actors in the city (pedestrians, carriages, cars)
both concerning their physical use, and their role in terms of sociability.
In chapter 1, “Paving the city and urban evolution. Science, technology and
craftsmanship under our feet,” Lídia Fernandes explores the role of different
pavements and the debates and controversies around their choices. The use
of the Portuguese mosaic pavement, which was invented in Lisbon, and the
uniqueness of the technique behind its application also calls for the discus-
sion on the type of experts involved, bringing to the forefront the work of
artisans that relied mostly on their own taste, interest and hands-on skills. In
chapter 2, “Trees, nurseries, tree-lined streets in the making of modern Lisbon
(1840–1886),” Ana Duarte Rodrigues uses tree-lined streets and boulevards in
mid-nineteenth century Lisbon to discuss both the alliances and the tensions,
the autonomy and the dependence among different experts’ agendas, par-
ticularly the disputed leadership of the greening of the city among the often
forgotten gardeners, botanists, agronomists and the omnipresent engineers.
Chapter 3, by Maria Paula Diogo and Ana Simões, “Working-class neighbour-
hoods in Lisbon. Republican hygienist policies, circulation of workers and
capital,” is centered on how the bourgeois city accommodated and controlled
the working class, by looking at instances of reforms of the (sub)urban land-
scape associated with the emergence of working-class neighbourhoods, often
informed by Saint-Simonian and republican ideals, deviating the role played
by engineers on the architecture of the city from big technical infrastructures
and wealthy central neighbourhoods to poor and marginal ones. Roads as

mobility and ideological artifacts are at the core of chapter 4 “Crossing urban
and transport expertise to pave Lisbon’s future urban sprawl (1930s–1940s).”
M. Luísa Sousa analyses the construction of the tourist coastal road from
Lisbon to Cascais, as a critical structuring axis of the urban sprawl in the area
to the west of Lisbon, a tool for promoting tourism, and an instrument to foster
new (auto)mobilities, as part and parcel of the New State propaganda.
The four chapters navigate along the three axes previously mentioned in the
editor’s introduction: they bring to the forefront both human and non-human
actors often invisible in urban history; they discuss their roles in network-
ing the city below and above ground, within and without the city; and they
highlight their interface with more visible actors in different political contexts
united by a common notion of progress meant to bring Lisbon a step closer to
the major European cities.
Chapter 1
Paving the City and Urban Evolution: Science,

Technology, and Craftsmanship under Our Feet
Lídia Fernandes
1 A “Plan to Improve the City of Lisbon”
Pavements leave a specifically human imprint on a given territory, especially

those of cities. In fact, paving, in a broad sense, means acting on nature, “domes-
ticating” it, imposing a structure on the landscape or cityscape. In this sense,
pavements are elements of the civilizing process, in Norbert Elias’ sense, not
only in so far as they measure an elevation of “manners and customs,” but as
they integrate a wider context of humanity’s progress.1 This civic dimension is,
however, not free-floating but strongly attached to specific contexts of power
that become evident if, for example, one maps the gradual appearance of
urban pavements (emerging first within urban spaces reserved for the elites),
or when considering the concept of mission civilisatrice as it was applied to
Europe’s colonies and realised as urban pathways and hinterland roads.
These dynamics of negotiation and use of “domesticated” territories is par-
ticularly evident when we look at cities. Pavements – be they on streets and
roads or on sidewalks – functioned as mediators between the public’s mobil-
ity and urban architecture. Moreover, pavements established borders between
distinctive spaces of circulation for different kinds of actors: the urban vs. the
rural space, the space of the elites vs. the space of workers, the space of what
is perceived and accepted as normality vs. spaces of marginality. As such, a
symbolic order of urban environments is materially realised in the relation-
ship between paved streets, roads, and sidewalks and the city at large, thereby
enabling us to analyse the relation of this material order to its corresponding
social world.
This chapter addresses various solutions put forward during the nineteenth-
century regarding the paving of the city of Lisbon, with a particular focus
on Portuguese pavement. It addresses debates and controversies over dif-
ferent types of pavements and contextualises the emergence of Portuguese
1 Norbert Elias, Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation (Basel, 1939). English version: The Civilizing
Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
© Lídia Fernandes, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004513440_004

Paving the City and Urban Evolution: 37
pavement; addresses its idiosyncratic characteristics at the intersection of arti-

sanry, science and technology, and the arts; and analyses its successful circula-
tion, not only throughout the whole of Portugal, but in cities across Europe,
both Americas, and Asia.
In nineteenth-century Lisbon, major changes were underway as part
of a national agenda of the so-called fontismo,2 based on an aggressive and
dynamic policy regarding industrial and public infrastructure, whether they be
grey or green. This included: transports and communications, buildings, hous-
ing, and public spaces for leisure. The effects of this policy were far ranging and
ultimately shaped the visible and invisible faces of Lisbon, thus affecting the
sanitation, hygiene, and ways of life of a city with an ever-increasing popula-
tion due to increased migration.3
During this period, new institutions and actors emerged, endowing Lisbon
with an increasingly scientific-technological outlook.4 In 1852, the Technical
Division of the Municipality of Lisbon was created to manage the city’s
infrastructures and urban aesthetic. In 1864, the engineer, João Crisóstomo
de Abreu e Sousa, who was the then-current Minister of Public Works and a
long-time supporter of the material improvements program carried out by the
central government, issued a law that, within a wider plan of national infra-
structures (e.g. railways, telegraphs, roads, and harbours), established detailed
rules concerning public roads including those within cities and villages. In
these cases, roads were at the core of an integrated urban vision that dealt not
only with mobility issues, but also decoration, traffic, safety, and public health
(e.g. water supply and sewage systems). Regarding Lisbon, Abreu e Sousa dedi-
cated a specific section that included a “general plan for improvements in the
capital”5 that was to be elaborated by a commission formed by an architect,
two engineers (one from the Lisbon Municipality), and a public health expert.
The Municipality of Lisbon appointed Pierre-Joseph Pezerat, an engineer who
2 António Maria de Fontes Pereira de Melo (1819–1887) was a Portuguese statesman and engi-
neer and a leading figure of his time (the Regeneration period). He was six times Minister
of Finance and Minister of Public Works. From 1871 to 1886, he served three times as Prime
Minister of Portugal, for a total of 11 years. His policy of favouring industrial and public infra-
structures became known as Fontismo (after his name).
3 José Augusto França, Lisboa. História Física e Moral (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 2008); Tiago
Saraiva, Ciencia y Ciudad. Madrid y Lisboa, 1851–1900 (Madrid: Ayuntamiento de Madrid, Area
de Gobierno de las Artes, 2005).
4 Tiago Saraiva, and Marta Macedo, eds., Capital Científica: A Ciência Lisboeta e a Construção do
Portugal Contemporâneo (Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2019).
5 Decree dated 31 December 1864 and published in the Diário da República on the 13 January 1965,
Part III, section 1, articles 34 to 49.
38 Fernandes
would go on to author a memoir on the subject in 1865.6 However, due to mul-

tiple circumstances (financial restraints, illness – Pezerat eventually died in
1872 – and a fire at the City Hall), Pezerat’s plan never got off the ground.
In 1874, Frederico Ressano Garcia, a young engineer trained at the École des
Ponts et Chaussées, was appointed to serve the Municipality of Lisbon, became
its first “town planner,” and would play a central role in the profound changes
about to take place in Lisbon.7 Garcia was familiar with both Georges-Eugène
Haussmann’s urban renewal of Paris during the 1850s and 1860s, and the 1864
Portuguese plan for improving Lisbon. At the age of 27, Garcia became head of
the Technical Division of the Municipality of Lisbon and oversaw two areas –
(i) Urban Works and (ii) Sewage, Pavements and Similar Works – both critical
to the plans for improving Lisbon’s urban infrastructures. Immediately after
receiving his appointment, Garcia proposed a new regulation for the Technical
Division (revised in 1879)8 that gave rise to the Municipal Commission
of Public Works and Improvements of Lisbon, with the stated mission of
(re)designing a general “Plan to Improve the City of Lisbon.” Under the super-
vision of the Municipal Commission of Public Works and Improvements –
composed by a mix of politicians and experts, but under Ressano Garcia’s
direct orders – the Technical Division set in motion what is considered the
first urban plan for Lisbon and defined a set of priorities for action, topped by
the project and construction of the Haussmanian-like boulevard of Avenida
da Liberdade (Liberty Avenue), which was inaugurated in 1879 and marked the
city’s northward expansion.9 The city council’s investment in infrastructural
works and urban improvements was such that, from 1870 onwards, its debt to
banks escalated until the 1886 crisis and the 1892 bankruptcy.10
6 Pierre-Joseph Pezerat, Mémoire sur les études d’améliorations et emblissements de Lisbonne

(1865).
7 Raquel Henriques da Silva. “Lisboa de Frederico Ressano Garcia 1847–1909,” in Lisboa
de Frederico Ressano Garcia 1874–1909, ed. Câmara Municipal de Lisboa (Lisboa: Câmara
Municipal de Lisboa/Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1989), 17–38; Rita Gago, “O surgi-
mento do conceito de urbanismo: teorias e práticas na Câmara Municipal de Lisboa,”
Cadernos do Arquivo Municipal 1ª Série, nº 8 (2005): 81–95. http://arquivomunicipal.cm
-lisboa.pt/fotos/editor2/85.pdf.
8 Regulamento da Repartição Técnica. Approved at the City Council Meeting dated
21 May 1874.
9 Gago, “O surgimento do conceito,” 94.
10 Álvaro Ferreira da Silva, “Running for Money: Finance and Municipalisation in Lisbon
(1850–1914),” in Urban Growth on Two Continents in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Technology,
Networks, Finance and Public Regulation, ed. Andrea Giuntini, Peter Hertner, and Gregorio
Núñez (Granada: Editorial Comares, 2004), 87–116.
Notwithstanding the influence of urban trends from either Haussmanian

Paris or elsewhere, it is important to highlight the fact that one specific fea-
ture of the original urban plan for the modernization of Lisbon pre-dated
Haussman’s influence: the use of calçada portuguesa (Portuguese pavement),
or what is sometimes referred to as mosaic pavement. To acknowledge this
fact is, for the historian, to reassess the discipline’s entrenched dichotomies
between urban centres and their peripheries, and foster a sensitivity to, and
attunement for, the multifarious meanings of modernity insofar as their signif-
icance depends on both locality and time period.11 Since 1842, Portuguese, or
mosaic, pavement was a material whose use was a source of experimentation
and would eventually become, following the city council’s decision of 1895,
the standard pavement of sidewalks of main streets and squares of Lisbon. The
visual impact of this rather artistic material – composed of small, coloured
stones of different shapes and assembled in such a way as to create various
geometrical or figurative patterns – would eventually become one of the urban
hallmarks of the city of Lisbon. However, despite such a central role in mak-
ing up the identity of nineteenth-century Lisbon, Portuguese pavement did
not remain a feature that belonged to Lisbon alone. Soon after its integration
into Lisbon’s plans to modernise the city’s existing infrastructure, Portuguese
pavement started to appear in other Portuguese cities as well, and after 1895,
began to appear in various cities across the globe, especially in the major cities
of Portugal’s former colonies.
The building of pavements in Lisbon brings together, in a unique way, two
opposite instances of a relation of mutual exchange between science and the
city. On the one hand, the conception of pavements and their urban evolution
is the result of an expert-driven agenda that was mainly headed by engineers.
On the other hand, the actual work of laying the pavement – choosing the
materials, determining the correct blend of “recipes,” deciding on questions of
decoration – is an example of craft-based knowledge, i.e. a form of knowledge
that is “both practical knowledge and knowledge [of a] practice at the same
time,”12 and, therefore, is at odds with the dialectical relationship between
theory and practice in recent models of scientific knowledge.
11 Oliver Hochadel, and Agustí Nieto-Galan, “How to write an urban history of STM on
the ‘Periphery’,” FORUM Step matters, Technology and Culture 57(4) (2016): 978–88;
Agustí Nieto-Galan, and Oliver Hochadel, “Urban Histories of Science. How to Tell the
Tale” in Agustí Nieto-Galan, and Oliver Hochadel, eds., Urban histories of science. Making
12 Diederick Raven, “Artisanal Knowledge,” Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum,
1 (2013): 5–34, 8.
40 Fernandes
Derived from hands-on experience and reliant on the so-called rules of

thumb (traditionally used in various trades and ars), craft knowledge does not
intend to be strictly accurate or reliable for every situation. Rather, it is a kind
of knowledge that aims at being sufficiently efficient to be used in standard
procedures. At the core of the formation of craft knowledge is the practice of
“tinkering,” which is a process of knowing through the gradual accumulation
of experience via imitation and peer-monitored participation. It is in this sense
that the workers (calceteiros) who paved Lisbon’s city streets are the embodi-
ment of a knowledge that is acquired outside of formal training institutions.
Pavements allow us to engage in an archaeology of the process of co-
construction of science and the city,13 and point beyond the role of techno-
scientific experts to unveil other layers of knowledge – often known as
non-cognitive knowledge – without which the former would prove to be pow-
erless. Much is to be learned from looking at how science, technology, and
craftsmanship interacted as complementary components of urban solutions,
which have themselves become literally an integral part of the ground beneath
our feet.
2 Made in Portugal
2.1 Mapping the Portuguese Pavement in Lisbon

After the 1755 earthquake, under the leadership of Marquis of Pombal, prime-
minister of King José I, the entire neighbourhood of “Baixa” (located in down-
town Lisbon, near the river Tagus and the most affected area) was razed to
“lay out new streets without restraint.”14 The engineers Manuel da Maia and
Eugénio dos Santos, tasked with the responsibility of rebuilding the heart of
the city to reflect Enlightenment principles, opted for a geometrically grided
design of parallel roads and perpendicular streets. To avoid the interruption
of the increased flow of traffic, some of its central arteries were given a tripar-
tite structure, including a central artery with a length of 40 hands (spans), for
carriages and people on horseback, bordered by two lateral pathways with a
length of 10 hands (spans), for passers-by and sedan chairs.15
13 Sven Dierig, Jens Lachmund, and J. Andrew Mendelsohn, eds., Science and the City, Osiris,
18 (2003).
14 Nicholas Shrady, The Last Day: Wrath, Ruin, and Reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of
1755 (New York, London: Viking/Penguin Books, 2009), 152–155.
15 José Augusto França, Lisboa Pombalina e o Iluminismo (Lisboa: Bertrand Editora, 1977),
307.
In contrast to other European cities, the creation of sidewalks was a rela-

tively late innovation. Despite their being mentioned in the reconstruction led
by the Marquis of Pombal as early as 1756, they were practically non-existent
until the 1840s, with the exception of some main streets in the downtown area
(in London, regulations on the building of specific areas for pedestrians date
back to 1670, after the Great Fire; in Paris’ Pont Neuf, built in the beginning
of the seventeenth-century, included raised sidewalks separating pedestrians
from the road traffic).16
Pebble pavements, which are still preserved in some of Lisbon’s historic
neighbourhoods, were the longstanding convention regarding the paving of
urban space and, despite their shortcomings, were suitable for both streets
and the ground floor of residential buildings, regardless of their size and own-
ers’ wealth. At times, they involved compositions of different coloured stones
in geometrical patterns.17 Pebble pavements were a simple and easy solution
that used traditionally local materials and was rivalled only by clay pavements,
which were typically reserved for interior spaces. Nevertheless, and despite
their simplicity, pebble pavements were expensive both in terms of raw mate-
rials and labour and continued to pose the problem of durability – particularly
with respect to the composition of the sediments that involved the lithotypes.
Although the correct combination of clay and lime, abundant water and fine
sand, and the use of mallets to finish setting the stones, were relevant factors
regarding questions of durability, the morphology of the stone, especially its
height, was the crucial element for a long-lasting pebble pavement.18
In 1842, and no longer confined to spaces of domesticity, Portuguese pave-
ment or mosaic pavement would be used to coat the central parade of Castelo
de São Jorge (Castle of Saint George), and its eastern front housing the Quartel
de Caçadores 5 (Barracks of Hunters 5).19 It was due to the inventiveness of the
military engineer, Euzebio Pinheiro Furtado, a lieutenant general of the Royal
Engineering Corps, who, after fighting in the liberal ranks during Portuguese
Civil War (1832–1834) opposing liberal constitutionalists and conservative
absolutists, was appointed governor of Castle of Saint George, in Lisbon, and
remained in office until 1846.
16 Linda Clarke, Building Capitalism: Historical Change and the Labour Process in the
Production of Built Environment (Abingdon, New York: Routledge, 1992).
17 Miguel Pais, Melhoramentos de Lisboa e seu Porto (1882), 415.
18 The study of archaeological sites dating from the sixteenth- and seventeenth centuries
confirms this. See Lídia Fernandes, Jacinta Bugalhão, and Paulo Almeida Fernandes, eds.,
Debaixo dos nossos pés, Pavimentos Históricos de Lisboa (Lisboa: ML/EGEAC, 2017).
19 Augusto Vieira da Silva, O Castelo de S. Jorge em Lisboa (Lisboa: Tip. Empresa Nacional de
Publicidade, 1937), 110–112.
42 Fernandes
Figure 1.1a Zigzag pavement in the castle’s parade, circa 1900

Paulo Guedes. Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa, PT/AMLSB/CMLSBAH/
PCSP/004/PAG/000530
Figure 1.1b Calceteiros, 1907

Joshua Benoliel. Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa, Public Domain
To circumvent the lack of workers and funds, Furtado used prisoners (known
as “shackles” (“grilhetas”) of the oldest and nearby prison in the city (Limoeiro
Prison), which was already in charge of some public works in the neighbour-
hood. Moreover, Furtado petitioned for the support of the city council in bor-
rowing some pavers (calceteiros) to teach and train them.20 The motif Furtado
used was a simple zigzag design, which gave the pavement its striking and novel
aesthetic. The unusual motif and morphology of the stones arouse both great
admiration and critical comments. In O Arco de Sant’Ana (1845, 1850), Almeida
Garrett referred to this pavement as “candid pebbles and fine Eusebian arts,”21
denouncing his criticism of the governor’s work and emphasizing its excep-
tional and unusual features. In the poem “Cristalizações” (1887), Cesário Verde
described the bustle of city life and the hardships of the working class, and
especially its pavers: “Squatting, pavers in line,/Slowly, earthy and coarse,/Pave
the long street from side to side.”22 In other accounts, Lisboners were said to
have organized informal excursions with the sole objective of seeing and
20 Pais, Melhoramentos, 416.

21 Almeida Garrett, O Arco de Sant’Ana (Porto: Imprensa Nacional, 1845–50).
22 Cesário Verde, O Livro de Cesário Verde (Lisboa: Typographia Elzeveriana, 1887).
44 Fernandes
Figure 1.2 Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro’s political cartoon

In Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro, “Hoje,” Pontos nos ii, 23 Out (1890),
390–391`
Figure 1.3 Map with the indication of sidewalk pavements

Courtesy José Avelãs Nunes
1. Praça D. Pedro IV (Rossio); 2. Largo do Carmo; 3. Jardim do Príncipe Real; 4.
Praça do Município; 5. Praça Luís de Camões; 6. Rua Nova do Almada;
7. Largo de S. Julião; 8. Rua Augusta; 9. Rua Garrett; 10. Avenida da Liberdade;
11. Praça Marquês de Pombal
walking on this pavement.23 Later, the visual impact of pavers was such that
they would eventually become protagonists in the cartoons and political satire
of the famed Portuguese caricaturist Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro, and published
in Pontos nos ii in 1890. That the pavers became a culturally significant symbol
was not lost on Bordalo Pinheiro, who criticized the king’s ignorance regarding
the needs of the people by comparing the government’s actions to protect the
crown with the work of levelling and covering the pavement done by pavers.24
Recognising the quality and novelty of Furtado’s approach, Lisbon’s city
council soon ordered their use in several streets and squares. These civil engi-
neering decisions would eventually lead to Portuguese pavement becoming
one of Lisbon’s chief symbols of urban identity. The newly paved sidewalks
first materialized in Rua de Santa Cruz do Castelo, a street near the castle,
23 Pais, Melhoramentos, 416. José de Monterroso Teixeira et al., “Tapetes de Pedra, redes
viárias, pavimentos, incorporações artísticas,” Tapetes de pedra. Stone carpets (Rio de
Janeiro: 19 Design e Editora Lda, 2010): 71.
24 Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro, “Hoje,” Pontos nos ii, 23 Out (1890), 390–391.
46 Fernandes
but rather than the original zigzag design, the motif chosen featured scales,
and was also used, in 1844, for the paving of Calçada do Marquês de Tancos.25
Moreover in April 1848, the city council took the decision to use Portuguese
pavement to coat Praça D. Pedro IV (Square of Pedro IV), which is today a large
public square known as Rossio; the National Theater D. Maria II located on one
of the sides of the square with its main entrance facing both the square and the
river had been inaugurated two years prior to its re-paving.
In 1847, when the circulation of vehicles and horseback riding was prohib-
ited within the central square itself, the problem of how best to find a digni-
fied solution to the now empty square became, once more, the most urgent of
matters. However, on 31 December 1849, the mosaic pavement of Rossio finally
coated the square, whose grandiosity was equal to that of the imposing build-
ing of the National Theater (see chapter 2 in this volume). The job fell to none
other than Furtado himself. As Júlio de Castilho recounts, Furtado proposed
“to the city council an original and bold solution of black and white waves, the
Wide Sea (Mar Largo), so that in July 1848 the council approved the project,
requesting that he ordered the wooden moulds as well as the necessary funds
for the work.”26
With a surface area of 8,712 square meters (158,4 m × 55 m), the pavement of
the square embodied a visionary decision on the part of the city council execu-
tives, not only on account of the area involved but also due to the emblem-
atic status of this city square. Construction work began on 17 August 1848
and ended on 31 December 1849, a period (sixteen months) that did not go
without criticism. Involving a very time-consuming work, Furtado once again
employed prison-labour, paying each prisoner 40 reis per day, alongside addi-
tional workers paid for by the municipality. Having in mind that the total bud-
get involved amounted to 300,000 reis (that is 100 reis per day, and 37 reis per
square meter), total labour costs were unbeatably cheap, whose total price, it
was said, wouldn’t “be matched in the future by any city council.”27
Catherine Charlotte Jackson, an Englishwoman who visited Lisbon in 1873,
recalled the originality of the pavement, whose motif formed “a kind of undu-
lating bands that produce a strange effect due to the regularity of their con-
tours on such a large area.”28
25 Synopse das pricipaes actos administrativos da Câmara em 1844, Lisboa. CML. 1845, p. 12.
26 Júlio de Castilho, Lisboa Antiga – Bairros Orientais, Vol. IX (Lisboa: Câmara Municipal de
Lisboa., 1937), 111.
27 Castilho, Lisboa Antiga, 111; Pais, Melhoramentos, 417.
28 Catherine Charlotte Jackson, A Formosa Lusitânia. Portugal em 1873 (Lisboa: Caleidoscópio,
2007), 38 (1st Edition, Porto: Livraria Portuense Editora, 1877).
Figure 1.4 Wide Sea Portuguese Pavement at Plaza Dom Pedro IV-Rossio, 1977
Estúdio Mário Novais, PT/AMLSB/CMLSBAH/PCSP/004/MNV/001832
With the pavement work of Rossio far from finished, in December 1848, offi-
cials approved plans for the paving of the Square of Romulares, or what is the
present-day Square Duque da Terceira. However, the work on the square would
only begin in 1850. Notable among the planned renovations was the inclusion
of the “Romulares Meridian” – a sundial placed atop a plinth and located in
the centre of the square itself.29 Despite the cost of renovation approximating
four times the average cost for ordinary pavement work, it was met with such
29 In 1872, the municipality removed the sundial, replacing it by the statue of the Duke of
Terceira. See Eduardo Bairrada, Empedrados artísticos de Lisboa (Vila da Maia: Gráfica
Maiadouro, 1985), 232.
48 Fernandes
admiration that the square “was reproduced in various books and newspapers
abroad.”30
Soon, a succession of pavement renovations was implemented: in 1863,
Largo do Carmo was paved with a Portuguese pavement; in 1870, Portuguese
pavement was used on the sidewalks of Jardim do Príncipe Real (Garden of
Principe Real); in 1876, this mosaic pavement was chosen for the planned reno-
vation of in Praça do Município (Plaza of the Municipality); and once more, in
1882, for the Jardim da Graça (Garden of Graça).
Then, in 1886, plans were put in place for the paving of Praça Luís de
Camões (Square Luís de Camões), located in Chiado, one of the most emblem-
atic plazas of late nineteenth-century Lisbon. According to an extant illustra-
tion, dated 23 August 1886, it was composed of a central medallion that framed
the statue of the poet Camões, and a lattice motif covering the entire square
topped by a border of stylized finials.31 With an unexpectedly striking visual
effect, the completed project was a demonstration of the mosaic pavement’s
capacity for adapting to any surface. For instance, the asymmetrical plan of the
square did not cause any inconvenience and was accommodated into a design
that managed to cover the entirety of the public square. This factor accounts
for the leading position of mosaic pavement in Lisbon during the late nine-
teenth and early-twentieth century.
Still in 1886, the pavement of Rua Nova do Almada was carried out, as well as
that of Largo de São Julião. They were followed, in 1887, by the sidewalks of Rua
Augusta, and by those of Rua Garrett. In 1889, the southern part of Avenida da
Liberdade (Liberty Avenue) was also paved, up to the intersection with Rua das
Pretas, completed, from 1900 to 1908, until Praça Marquês do Pombal (Plaza
Marquis of Pombal). Many more were to follow.
In 1895, almost fifty years after Furtado first used Portuguese pavement to
coat the central parade of Castle of Saint George, the city council took the
decision to standardize the pavement used for the sidewalks of Lisbon’s main
streets and public squares, stating that “from now on the use of Portuguese
stone pavement shall be mandatory.”32
30 Pais, Melhoramentos 412, 417: It amounted to 2,500 reis per m2 including material and
labor, compared with 600 reis per m2 for ordinary pavements.
31 AML, PT/AMLSB/CMLSB/UROB-PU/11/829.
32 “Empedrados e Mosaicos,” Arte Portuguesa: revista de archeologia e arte moderna 2
(1895): 42.
Figure 1.5 Pavement of Plaza Luís de Camões, n/d

António Passaporte. PT/AMLSB/PAS/002025
Despite its being more expensive than other paving materials that were being
experimented with abroad (e.g. limestone plaques,33 natural asphalt,34 or
cement mass with granitic powder35), mosaic pavement presented certain
practical advantages: durability and ease regarding application, maintenance,
and repair, even when involving the installation or repair of water, gas, elec-
tricity, and sewage pipelines. To these were added its aesthetic advantage of
clearly demarcating urban space. As the author of the seminal work from
1882, Melhoramentos de Lisboa e do seu Porto (Improvements of Lisbon and of
its Port), and military engineer/urban expert, Miguel Pais, confided: “Asphalt,
masses/mixtures, tiles, or plaques of various materials can be found on the
streets and passages of the main cities in Europe and America: limestone
33 Limestones’ plaques were expensive, slippery, difficult to repair, and were unconge-
nial to the application of water and gas pipelines, repair of the sewage system. Pais,
Melhoramentos, 411.
34 Experiments with natural asphalt existing in the country did not result due to the deform-
ability of the pavement, cracking easily and wearing quickly. Pais, Melhoramentos, 411.
35 Portland cement mass with granitic powder imported from England also brought disad-
vantages in the repairment of pipes. Pais, Melhoramentos, 413.
50 Fernandes
plaques and mosaic sidewalks are only to be found on the sidewalks of Lisbon’s
streets. Let us then disseminate this true national system.”36 Portuguese pave-
ment was domestically produced as an historically innovative solution to an
equally historical, and longstanding, problem of urban design. For these rea-
sons, Portuguese pavement became a symbol of the new urban landscape of
nineteenth-century Lisbon; a symbol that was made more iconic since it was
not to be found in any other country.
2.2 Building the Portuguese Pavement in Lisbon

What is made clear in the historical reliance on prison labour for the laying
of the first Portuguese pavements in Lisbon, was the time-/labour-intensive
aspect of a construction process that was, itself, largely reliant on more tradi-
tional instruments. It did not require any specific qualifications, although it
depended on the practical and hands-on knowledge of the pavers employed
by the city council to train their prison counterparts in both the technical and
practical aspects of their specific craft.
According to extant records, there was neither a corps of pavers nor a school
for training artisans or technicians to master the artistic patterns and techni-
cal work. Moreover, and given the available historical records, the existence
of something akin to a formal workshop culture was itself, highly unlikely.
Standing in place for this formal workshop culture as the medium of trans-
mitting knowledge was a set of informal, non-institutional, relations for the
exchange of non-cognitive skills: imitation, adaptation in situ, taste, interest,
and hands-on skills. What such empirical apprenticeships lacked in formal
rigor was merely an appearance, since they were even capable of accounting
for one’s ranking by translating hands-on experience into specific rankings of
seniority (e.g. master, officer, etc.).37 As such, authors’ “signatures” assumed the
form of graphic signs traditionally employed by the mason’s guilds in the late
Middle Ages and early Renaissance.38 Today, sketches disclosing an individual
36 Pais, Melhoramentos, 141, italics mine.

37 The coexistence of cognitive and non-cognitive knowledge referred in the introduction is
always tense, as the former tends to impose its rules and standards, eventually leading to
changes in the learning process of the latter. It is in this context that one should envision
the creation in 1986 of a school of pavers at the City Council in order to preserve the secu-
lar know-how of pavers-artists and secure generational reproduction. A.M.E. Henriques,
A.A.C. Moura, and F.A. Santos, Manual da Calçada Portuguesa (Lisboa: Direcção Geral de
Energia e Geologia, 2009) is a handbook summarizing all facets of the Portuguese pave-
ment, and a contribution to its preservation.
38 Examples can be found in Henriques, Moura, and Santos, Manual, 64–67.
author’s name and rank can still be found in magazines39 and the Armazéns de
Moldes da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa (The City Hall of Lisbon’s Warehouse
of Moulds/Casts), which houses the city’s collection of preserved sketches.40
Although it is possible to trace Portuguese pavement back to the seventeenth-
century “embrechados” – decorative sets of shells/whelks encrusted in grouts,
fountains, or Roman mosaics composed of small rectangular tesserae and dec-
orated with intricate designs and patterns – I argue that Portuguese pavement
is not directly related to either the decoration of grouts and fountains or to
their use in Roman mosaics. Portuguese pavement provided an original solu-
tion, different from its predecessors, but which appropriated former coating or
paving experiences.41
In the process of producing Portuguese pavement, craftsmen pavers (calce-
teiros) used a technique that was akin to older methods employed in the laying
down of pebble pavements. Thus, the workers prepared a bed of gravel upon
a well-compacted trench of argillaceous materials, which accommodated the
tessera stones, and acted in a manner like cement. Prior to their placement,
watering, and compression, each stone would be cut according to the specific
dimensions required by a given pattern, the majority of which were cut into
cube-shaped pieces, with the cutting of other geometrical shapes appearing
with less frequency.42 Regardless of their variety in shape, the paving stones
themselves were exclusively cut from black and white limestone (with the
39 Século Ilustrado, 22 September 1945. Commenting on the engineer and minister of Public
Works Duarte Pacheco’s decision of applying Portuguese pavement systematically in
the urban plan to expand Lisbon, the magazine mentioned that “the works have been
directed by master Joaquim Rodrigues who has been for forty-five years – almost half a
century – a pave artist.”
40 Examples: “Pave artist officer Armindo Loureiro” or “drawn by Armindo Marques
Loureiro.” Armazéns de Moldes da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa (Unidade de Intervenção
Territorial Oriental).
41 In 1826, in the city of Horta, in the Azorean island of Faial, the military officer and gov-
ernor of the island, Lieutenant Colonel Diogo Tomás Rexelebém ordered the residents
to pave the sidewalks right in front of their houses. The result was so pleasing that the
Municipality of Faial restricted their use to pedestrians, prohibiting their use by ox carts,
for instance, in order to prevent their damage. Teixeira, Tapetes de Pedra, 72; R.C. Teixeira,
S.G. Costa, and V.G. Moniz, Grupos de Simetria. Identificação de Padrões no Património
Cultural dos Açores (Associação Ludus/Apenas Livros, 2015). It is probable that Furtado
heard about it while stationed in Azores at the same period, and part of the same military
circles and was inspired by this experience. As the Azores are rich in black volcanic stone,
the chromatic scale of the pavement was/is inverted when compared with the Lisbon
pavement (white motifs against a black background vs black motif against white back-
ground) and it was laid using the malhete technique, that is an irregular application of
stones with wide space between them.
42 Henriques, Moura, and Santos, Manual, 42–55.
52 Fernandes
rare exception of the use of basalt), due to the limestones’ proximity to Lisbon
(black and white limestone was easily found and accessed in quarries on the
outskirts of Lisbon) and for the stone’s relative softness, making it ideal for
the paving of a variety of urban landscapes.43 These qualities of black and
white limestone gained an added significance given the fact that the instru-
ments used for the entirety of the paving process were very traditional, manual
and low-tech tools – e.g. fork, pick, hammer, shovel, watering can, mallet, and
tamper.
While Portuguese pavement is typically composed of intricate arrange-
ments of black and white stone cubes, the paving stones themselves may be of
other geometrical forms and may have upwards of five colours, such as rose or
two hues of grey. Regardless of their difference in colour, the arrangement of
the paving stones produces the visual experience of the repetition of a particu-
lar geometric design or figurative motif, and with various symmetries.
Except for the brief period during which craftsmen would simultaneously
lay down both the pavement and its pattern, moulds were used to mark spe-
cific areas reserved for different colours and the repetition of motifs in linear
sequences (friezes) or in two dimensions (patterns or rosettes). While different
application techniques largely depended on the artistic style used, the stan-
dard procedure was to work around the mould’s border, beginning with the
placement of stones of a given colour and completing the process by filling
the mould’s interior.44 Moulds were initially made in wood, and later in iron.
Independent of any city-backed program of formal training, whether pri-
vately or publicly funded, this labour-intensive low-tech process of the laying
of paving stones remained a highly artistic craft. The quality of a calceteiros’
work was time-consuming but also long-lasting, involving a specific order of
steps to be performed sequentially, and in accordance with a pre-established
division of tasks. Over time, the craft underwent refinements, while increasing
specialization, and was supported by the visionary urban experts involved in
leading the city council’s approach to the challenges posed by the modernisa-
tion of nineteenth-century Lisbon. These urban planners were visionary inso-
far as they were able to see beyond the immediate expenses incurred by a city
council always struggling to make ends meet and take suitable decisions on a
broad range of techno-scientific questions to create one of Lisbon’s most mes-
merizing features.
43 António Miranda, “As novas pavimentações na Lisboa dos séculos XIX e XX,” in Debaixo
dos nossos pés, Pavimentos Históricos de Lisboa, eds. Lídia Fernandes, Jacinta Bugalhão,
Paulo Almeida Fernandes (Lisboa: ML/EGEAC, 2017), 36–39.
44 Henriques, Moura, and Santos, Manual, 58–66.
Figure 1.6 Moulds at the warehouse of Lisbon’s city council, 1940–1

António Passaporte. Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa. Referência: PT/
AMLSB/PAS/015229
54 Fernandes
Despite originating from non-institutional, experience-based knowledge

craftsmanship displayed in Lisbon’s use of Portuguese pavement along with
its decorative elements merit their study from an abstract point of view. In its
use for sidewalks and public squares decorative elements may be represented
mathematically as a one-dimensional space or friezes when they extend in the
same direction, or as two-dimensional spaces – i.e. patterns or rosettes – when
extended along a given plane and expressive of particular properties of symme-
try. Thus, while friezes reveal translational symmetry, patterns reveal transla-
tional symmetry in two perpendicular directions, and rosettes show symmetry
by rotation without foreclosing the possible inclusion of lines of symmetry.45
Moreover, geometry allows for a limited number of possible symmetries in a
plane: seven for friezes, 17 for patterns, and two for rosettes. Interestingly in
Lisbon’s sidewalks and squares, five friezes and 12 patterns were identified,
besides various examples of rosettes.46 It is still to be clarified if this is an acci-
dent or the result of contingent choices; or if this was the outcome of specific
directives for the restrictive use of friezes and patterns. If one finds an histori-
cal justification for the absence of two friezes and five patterns in the sidewalks
and pavements of Lisbon, there is an additional feature, characteristic of this
product “made in Portugal,” that is yet to be accounted for.
2.3 The Portuguese Pavement and New Spaces of Sociability

Nineteenth-century Lisbon was a city in transformation. The urgent need to
improve the overall health of the city first began with improvements to the
quality of pedestrian traffic, after which followed renovations that benefitted
the increase in vehicular traffic (i.e. newly paved roads, the cleaning and light-
ing of public spaces, and an emerging discourse concerning urban furniture
in both streets and squares). Mosaic pavement was quickly adopted by the
city council as the pavement par excellence of elegant areas and squares and
were seamlessly integrated as part of a more general, city-wide, modernisation
45 Classic examples are stained glass windows, but there are also various examples of
rosettes in Lisbon’s pavements. One such example can be found at the Avenida da
Liberdade (Liberty Avenue). Jorge Nuno Silva, “Geometria a seus pés. A Calçada,” in Lídia
Fernandes, Jacinta Bugalhão, and Paulo Almeida Fernandes, eds., Debaixo dos nossos
pés, Pavimentos Históricos de Lisboa (Lisboa: ML/EGEAC, 2017), 58–61; Ana Cannas Silva,
Calçadas de Portugal. Simetrias passo a passo (CTT, 2016).
46 A recent work by young Portuguese students, encouraged by the Portuguese Mathematics
Society (www.spm.pt), registered 5 types of friezes and 12 types of patterns on the Lisbon
sidewalks. A project between Lisbon Municipality and the Society is underway that aims
to increase the geometric richness of the Lisbon sidewalk, completing it with the missing
types of symmetries. Silva, “Geometria a seus pés,” 60.
program led by a city hall under the influence of Haussman’s renovated Paris
and Davioud’s innovations regarding urban furniture. With equally modern
designs for Lisbon’s urban furniture, another form of sociability and bour-
geois culture began to emerge and would take the form of literally “inhabit-
ing the street.”47 Social aspects were indeed decisive in these transformations,
often illustrated in various publications, engravings, and paintings. The use of
streets and public squares for the organization of parties, games, and meetings,
embodied new forms of sociability, which were at times encouraged and some-
times restricted due to the kind of pavements Lisboners stepped on. Pavements
reflected specific urban organizational and hierarchical dimensions.
The modernization trends at work in nineteenth-century Lisbon gave rise
to not one but several “Lisbons,” each of which was defined by a particular set
of publics, and sociabilities.48 This is perhaps best seen in the construction
and use of the Liberty Avenue. While Liberty Avenue was, in principle, acces-
sible to the entirety of Lisbon’s social strata, its predominance within the new
urban landscape caused the growth of other elitist urban centres that were
intentionally located away from Liberty Avenue and its surrounding public
spaces. For this new urban elite, there was only “Baixa (Downtown), Chiado
and the rest.”49 As Chiado became the epitome of what José Augusto França
has called the “mundane street,”50 the mosaic pavement of the square Luís de
Camões (described above) signalled a vision of urban space corresponding
to Lisbon’s newly emergent elites. Thus, Chiado became the privileged place
where intellectuals, journalists, artists, and politicians could enjoy an evening
stroll, engage in lively debates on a variety of pressing issues, or frequent any of
the neighbourhoods’ recreational spaces and theatres or “clubs” (see chapter 12
in this volume).
Chief among the aesthetic consequences of this renewal and renovation of
Lisbon’s urban landscape was the desire for similarly novel kinds of ornamen-
tation. The mosaic pavement was accompanied with decoration of building
facades with colourful tiles that have since become synonymous with Lisbon
47 Pedro Bebiano Braga, Mobiliário Urbano de Lisboa (1838–1938), (MA Dissertation, FCSH/
NOVA, 1995), 4.
48 Maria Alexandra Lousada, “Uma cidade em mudança: população e sociabilidades em
Lisboa, finais do século XVIII – início do século XX”, in Lídia Fernandes, Jacinta Bugalhão,
and Paulo Almeida Fernandes, eds., Debaixo dos nossos pés, Pavimentos Históricos de
Lisboa (Lisboa: ML/EGEAC, 2017), 40–7, 40.
49 José Augusto França, O Romantismo em Portugal. Estudo de factos socio-culturais (Lisboa:
Livros Horizonte, 1999), 843.
50 José Augusto França, Lisboa: Urbanismo e Arquitectura (Lisboa: Biblioteca Breve, 1980),
157.
56 Fernandes
but were, themselves, originally used only within religious spaces and the
homes of Portuguese nobility.51 However, the drive to modernise Lisbon gave
way to the use of mosaic pavement and traditional tilework outside of the tra-
ditional sites of religious or secular power, thereby replacing the old smooth
facades of monotonous colours.
The overall effect of this combination of tile and pavement was one of
renewed appreciation for, and new modalities of experiencing, the every-
day social life of the city itself. Moreover, new norms of sociability began to
take hold, insofar as the function and utility of the city’s streets was no longer
reduced to its utilitarian function as a medium of passage. Streets would now
become urban localities in their own right; spaces to be literally “inhabited,”
to live in, to socialize, to see and be seen. What is more, these changes in the
meaning and function of Lisbon’s public spaces would also be redefined, given
that spaces outside the home were now experienced as one element in a con-
tinuum that included one’s living room, the halls of social clubs, and even the
carpets used in literary associations. Thus, it is no coincidence that the artistic
designs characteristic of mosaic pavements is reminiscent of the designs used
in the textiles used in the objects of one’s private life – e.g. carpets, lace embroi-
deries, and napkins.
Here we return, once more, to the striking example set by Praça Luís de
Camões in Chiado. An attentive look at the mosaic pavement surrounding the
statue of the poet Camões is enough to notice its intimate and homely dimen-
sion. In fact, mosaic pavements reproduced, after all, ingredients typical of tra-
ditional mores, appropriated and moved from interior and private spaces to
exterior, public and open spaces.52
Being “a true national system,” Portuguese pavement became during the
Estado Novo a nationalistic symbol. This is particularly evident in the mon-
umental entrance of the Instituto Superior Técnico (Technical Institute) in
Lisbon. The Instituto Superior Técnico is an architectural complex designed
by the influential, modernist, architect Porfírio Pardal Monteiro, built in 1930
to host Lisbon’s first school entirely dedicated to engineering. Commissioned
by Duarte Pacheco – the Institute’s inaugural director and the future Minister
of Public Works under the dictatorship of the Estado Novo – the Instituto
Superior Técnico was itself an example of this use of designs and materials
that historically were reserved for spaces of domesticity. For instance, the
51 Miranda, “As novas pavimentações.”

52 Presently, in Portuguese cities the use of the mosaic pavement is waning while it is
increasingly being used indoors, in commercial buildings, buildings of companies or even
private houses of wealthy citizens.
Institute’s large access ramp leading to each of its main buildings is paved with
Portuguese calçada, and features an art-deco inspired, triangular, motif that is
itself repeated in terms of the aesthetic design of its windows.
The Portuguese pavement was also used in a strong nationalist context in
the urbanization of the riverside area in the neighbourhood of Belém, near the
Jerónimos Monastery, symbol of the so-called golden age of Portuguese explo-
rations. Both the construction of the permanent Praça do Império (Empire
Square), and the temporary Exposição do Mundo Português (Portuguese World
Exhibition) used the Portuguese pavement for ideological purposes, that is to
glorify the Estado Novo (New State) dictatorship. The motif used was a large
armillary sphere framed by the Cross of Christ. The armillary sphere was an
astronomical object which became the symbol of Portugal used on the sails of
the Portuguese ships involved in the Portuguese discoveries during the Age
of European Exploration and was incorporated in the Portuguese flag since
1911 with the onset of the Republic. Its symbolic appropriation was in total har-
mony with the authoritarian nationalistic agenda of the regime (see chapter 9
in this volume).53
2.4 The Portuguese Pavement Goes Global

Just as travel constitutes a fundamental element of the history of experts
and craftsmen, so too does circulation, both as mere transfer, as adaptation
or as appropriation, constitute a central feature of knowledge.54 Lisbon’s
geographical location compelled people to move, and perhaps unexpectedly
the Portuguese pavement and its associated craft knowledge on a person-to-
person basis entailed a compulsion toward circulation.
53 The use of the Portuguese pavement in relevant public spaces in Lisbon to be enjoyed
by passers-by continued along the twentieth century and until today. One of the most
striking examples of more recent uses are the sidewalks and major squares of the Expo 98
(1998 Lisbon World Exposition), the World’s Fair held in Lisbon in 1998, now part of the
new neighborhood of Parque das Nações.
54 The bibliography on circulation is immense and addresses different instances of this com-
plex process. Examples are: James A. Secord, “Knowledge in transit,” ISIS 95 (2004): 654–
72; Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in
South Asia and Europe 1650–1900 (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Lissa Roberts,
“Situating Science in Global History: Local Exchanges and Networks of Circulation,”
Itinerario, 33(1) (2009): 9–30; Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj and J. Delbourgo,
eds., The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820 (Sagamore
Beach: Watson Publishing International – Science History Publications, 2009); Kapil Raj,
“Beyond Postcolonialism … and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of
Science,” ISIS, 104(2) (2013): 337–347.
58 Fernandes
The Portuguese pavement’s appearance resulted from the shift from its use
within interior spaces to public spaces of a modernised and urban Lisbon.
From both an engineering and an aesthetic point of view, Portuguese pave-
ment played a key role in the renewal of Lisboner’s everyday experience of
urban life, and, with every new sidewalk, plaza, and public square, these lime-
stone pavements laid the foundations for newly emerging forms of sociability
and leisure. Moreover, and during this period of Lisbon’s hierarchical reorgan-
isation of public space, cities in both Portugal and abroad began using mosaic
pavement for their own plans for modernising urban space, a process whose
chief consequence was the global circulation of Portuguese pavement itself.
This global process of circulation continues into our present, wherein the use
of Portuguese pavement has become common practice in Lisbon and abroad.
That said, and with respect to Lisbon, mosaic pavement has come full circle,
and is increasingly used for the interiors of commercial spaces, company build-
ings, and even the private homes of the city’s wealthy citizens.
In 1895, Portuguese pavement was used in Barcelona following the proposal
of the Portuguese businessman Júlio César Augusto Cordeiro, who presented
a technical report to the Municipality of Barcelona praising the resistance of
this pavement solution, much higher than those previously used, as well as
its low cost.55 Cordeiro suggested testing the Portuguese pavement on the
sidewalks of Salón San Juan (currently Passeig Lluís Companys), thus cover-
ing around 500 m². Despite the pavement’s success, it was considered to be a
temporary, rather than permanent, solution due to its reliance upon a foreign
(i.e. Portuguese) labour force whose availability could not be guaranteed by
Barcelona’s Municipality. In 1906, Barcelona introduced its “panot” or “baldosa”
project, which was a program to produce small cement tiles or “hydraulic tiles.”
This new solution preserved the decorative aspect of its Portuguese counterpart
with the “flower of Barcelona” and the four-tablet panot serving as the design
for most cement tiles produced. When compared with Portuguese pavement,
the two main advantages of these cement tiles were pedestrian safety and the
relative ease of locally accessing raw materials and expertise. While the former
case was a consequence of the exact levelling of the cement tiles to a given
terrain, by using local raw materials and expertise, the Municipality benefitted
from weather resistant materials fit for the city’s weather conditions.56
55 Antoni Remesar, and Danae Esparza, “Una identidad en reconstrucción. La calçada a por-
tuguesa,” Revista de História da Arte 11 (2014): 305–317.
56 Danae Esparza, Barcelona a ras de suelo (Barcelona: Univesitat de Barcelona Edicions,
2017).
It was only after Ventura Terra’s exhibition for the 1900 Universal Exhibition
in Paris that mosaic pavement would confirm its status as a globally circulated
commodity. Included as part of its Portuguese pavilion were depictions of typi-
cal Lisbon sidewalks and thereby officially introducing the world to a series of
innovations – equal parts technical, aesthetic, engineerable, design-oriented,
and adaptable – that only Portugal could rightly claim as its own.57
Brazil, once a Portuguese colony, was particularly receptive. In 1900, and
following the strong urbanization triggered by the exploitation of rubber,
Portuguese pavement was used as part of the modernisation of Amazonia’s capi-
tal, Manaus. In addition to the durability of its raw material, Amazonia’s newly
renovated urban landscape demonstrated the engineerable and aesthetic
potential of Portuguese pavement. This is perhaps best seen in Manaus’ repro-
duction of the emblematic Wide Sea pattern, first used in Lisbon’s Rossio
Square, and consisting of alternating black and white bands echoing the
rhythm of waves. In 1904, Rio de Janeiro soon followed suit following the pro-
posal of then-mayor, Pereira Passos, regarding the use of Portuguese pavement
and his eventual hiring of 33 Portuguese pavement workers. In less than a year,
one 170 more Lisboners emigrated to Rio de Janeiro for the construction of
1,800 meters of sidewalk for the Avenida Central (Main Avenue), and officially
inaugurated in November 1905.58
Decades later, in 1970, the Brazilian architect, Burle Marx, appropriated the
original Wide Sea pattern of the Main Avenue, in what came to be known as
the famous Calçadão of Copacabana. Presently, 1,218 million square meters of
Portuguese pavements decorate the city. In the city of São Paulo, the Avenida
Paulista (the “Fifth Avenue of Brazil”) was inaugurated in 1891, the first in the
city to have asphalt, and also the first to become known for its sidewalks of
mosaic pavements, dating from the early 1970s. That said, mosaic pavement
was already being experimented upon by the local artist Mirthes Bernardes,
whose mosaic pavement designs were selected for several São Paulo’s side-
walks. Moreover, while planning the construction of Brazil’s new capital of
Brasília, artists were employed to design calçadas according to the original,
Portuguese, style while retaining an overall contemporary feel.
The Wide Sea pattern has also been used in Macau, a former Asian
Portuguese colony until 1999. It was applied by Portuguese pavers in its urban
centre, the Leal Praça do Senado (Loyal Senate Square) (1992). Other patterns
57 Teixeira, Tapetes de Pedra, 75.

58 Exhibit Tatuagens Urbanas e o Imaginário Carioca (Urban tattoos and the Imaginary
of Rio) https://www.conexaolusofona.org/a-calcada-portuguesa-do-rio-de-janeiro-em
-exposicao/.
60 Fernandes
of Portuguese pavements decorate various sidewalks and squares of Macau’s

historic city centre. Unique in Asia, they integrate a UNESCO World Heritage
Site. Aside from Spain, Brazil and Macau, Portuguese pavement would be used
from Argentina to Mozambique, and even appearing as the rosette that com-
prises the John Lennon memorial in New York City’s, Central Park.
Originating from a form of knowledge based upon processes of trial and error
in select areas across Lisbon, the eventual global distribution of Portuguese
pavement was equally due to the flexibility, durability, cost-efficiency, and
aesthetic qualities resulting from the combination of raw materials and work-
ers’ knowledge during the labour process. Moreover, by virtue of this success-
ful intermingling of artisanal, artistic, and techno-scientific practices, the
Portuguese pavement was a central parameter of the complex equation which
came to define what it meant for Lisbon to be a modern capital city in the sec-
ond half of the nineteenth century. Additionally, the Portuguese pavements’
features also account for its successful appropriation in many cities around the
world, inviting historians to rethink former dichotomies opposing urban cen-
tres and urban peripheries. As a capital city of a peripheral European country,
Lisbon responded to many modernizing trends coming from abroad, while at
the same time became the hub of a paving experiment which was success-
fully appropriated worldwide. Thus, one of the specificities of Lisbon has been
shaped bottom-up, in original pavements carved by gifted craftsmen.
3 A New Kid on the Block: Pavements for the Automobile
During the second half of the nineteenth century the paving of the city’s
streets and roads was regularly discussed in the meetings of the Municipal
Commission. Discussions ranged from issues of durability to considerations
regarding their sanitary and functional properties. In 1860, José Tedeschi, a city
councilman stated:
Almost all streets are dangerous both for walking people and for those
who travel on horses or in carriages! Pedestrians not only get a soft mass
under their feet, which bogs them down and dirties them up to their
knees but are also in great danger of falling due to slippery lanes; those
who use carriages, in addition to witness their animals falling, get also
dirty with the mud accumulated on the outer walls of the carriages which
they clean with their suits upon getting out.59
59 AML, Actas das Sessões da Comissão Municipal, (1860–1861) (Minutes of the Sessions of the
Municipal Commission), April 1861, 3.
Descriptions by foreigners visiting Lisbon corroborated the desolate sce-

nario depicted by urban experts. One particularly striking case was that of
the Square Terreiro do Paço (also known as Praça do Comércio), the political,
financial, and economic center of the capital city, located close to the river
Tagus. In 1821, the English traveller and poet Marianne Baillie came to Lisbon,
only returning to England two and half years later. Her extended stay was time
enough to become acquainted with Praça do Comércio, which she described
as a brazier, both for the eyes and for the feet.60
However, it was only after the paving of Praça do Comércio in 1850 that
Tedeschi was able to voice his criticism. To make matters worse, the square was
paved with ‘Macadam,’ a new kind of material named after its inventor, John
Loudon McAdam, who was trained as a civil engineer and, after briefly living in
the United States, returned to Scotland and, in 1816, was appointed as surveyor
to the Bristol Turnpike Trust.61 As surveyor, he approved the use of crushed
stone, bound with gravel on a firm base of large stones, for the re-pavement of
all the roads under his jurisdiction. In addition, McAdam introduced the cam-
ber as part of his designs; and despite their now slightly convex shape, cambers
ensured rapid drainage of rainwater, thus avoiding water damage within the
roads’ foundation.
This efficient and economical way of building roads, which became known
as the Macadam system, was not without problems. As Ramalho Ortigão – the
influential Portuguese writer, journalist, and literary critic – rightly observed,
Lisbon’s summertime heat combined with frequently windy days, left the city
covered in a layer of white dust from the crushed stone, which functioned as
the roads surface.62 In response, the municipality put forward several possible
solutions: placing “splinters of stone or sand, on the busiest streets;” consulting
with “experts on the best paving system;” and, the most urgent of all, “fixing the
degree of inclination in which the Mac Adam system should be used, avoiding
it on flat or just slightly sloping streets.”63
To make matters worse, the macadam road’s maintenance and longevity
became a site of heated disagreement. Most of its problems resulted from the
incorrect use of the macadam system, which required a specific order in which
the stones were layered: the lower 20-centimeter road thickness was restricted
60 Lousada, “Uma cidade em mudança,” 46.

61 The turnpike trusts were bodies set up by individual acts of Parliament, with powers to
collect road tolls for maintaining the principal roads in Britain from the seventeenth cen-
tury onwards, but especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
62 Ramalho Ortigão, As Farpas. Crónica mensal da política, das letras e dos costumes (Lisboa:
1872, reprinted by Clássica Editora 1992) vol. XII, 143–144.
Municipal Commission), April 1861, 3.
62 Fernandes
to stones no larger than 7.5 centimeters; the upper 5-centimeter layer of stones
was limited to 2 centimeters size (the stones of this layer needed to be much
smaller than the c.10 centimeters width of the iron carriage wheels); the small
surface stones should be spread on the surface over a sizeable space, one
shovelful at a time. A solution was eventually reached by field testing differ-
ent materials and comparing their performance. And yet, city council sessions
continued to be mired in debate, this time about the kind of stone that should
replace the surface of macadam roads and resulting in a split between those
in favour of limestone and those championing basalt. Thus the municipality
sought out scientists from the Polytechnic School of Lisbon and urban experts
from the Conselho de Obras Públicas (Public Works Council) for consulta-
tion purposes. While no answer ever arrived from the former institution,64 the
reply from the Public Works Council was no more of an assurance: although
they were in support of the use of limestone with preference to basalt, the
Council was forced to admit that they could not provide any evidence in sup-
port of their opinion since no “experiments had been done so far by squeezing
the crushed stone with a large diameter and then compact it with a compres-
sor roller,”65 so that they could not “support their preference.”
By the early 1880s, the deterioration of macadam roads became a pressing
issue for the municipality. Thus, a “total amount of 657,000 réis”66 was allo-
cated for the reconstruction of macadam roads in specific locations. At the
same time, the city council increased the number of roadmen (from 26 to 34)
while acquiring new rollers to meet the technical demands given the proposed
renovation.67
Contemporaneous with the issues presented by macadam roads was the
urgent need for improving the sanitation conditions of urban life, and par-
ticularly with respect to the offensive odours that were natural by-products
64 Pedro José da Cunha. A Escola Politécnica de Lisboa: Breve Notícia. Lisboa. Faculdade de
Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, 1937.
Municipal Commission), April 1861, 669,
66 AML, Actas das Sessões da Comissão Municipal, (1880) (Minutes of the Sessions of the
Municipal Commission), 1880, 249. Parecer nº 701. Three of the streets were near the
river Tagus (Rua da Esperança, Calçada do Castello Picão and Travessa das Izabeis) and
Travessa dos Inglezinhos is in the upper part of Lisbon. As for the budget involved in 1881
a metallurgical industry worker earned a salary of 800 réis per day (average), i.e. 24,000
réis per month and 288,000 réis per year (Maria Filomena Mónica, “Indústria e democra-
cia: os operários metalúrgicos de Lisboa (1880–1934)”, Análise Social, Vol. XVIII (72-72-74),
1982 (3, 4, 5): 1231–1277.
Municipal Commission), 1880, 258–259. Parecer nº 701.
of streets and sidewalks alike. Thus, in 1880, the city council called for the use
of phenol, an aromatic organic compound, as the preferred means of improv-
ing Lisbon’s sanitation and public health.68 In the end, experts, technicians,
and city councillors would request a budget of 5,480,000 réis to reconstruct
the “… Rua Aurea [currently Rua do Ouro] between the intersection of streets
Conceição Nova and Victoria, using granite parallelepipeds from Porto, and to
replace the sidewalks by asphalt sidewalks such as those in Chiado.”69 Other
materials such as asphalt or cobblestones were tested not only for streets but
also for sidewalks.
Of all the materials tested, asphalt was, and continues to be, decisive with
respect to Lisbon’s urban landscape.70 Asphalt (bitumen) is a natural product
that is derived from petroleum, heated to procure asphalt’s most liquid state,
which is the state in which asphalt can be used (compared to its solid state
when cooled). Asphalt concrete pavement mixes are typically composed of 5%
asphalt cement and 95% aggregates (stone, sand, and gravel) and are applied
at high temperatures so asphalt can mix with the aggregates.71 The addition of
a layer of asphalt on former “macadam” pavements made them suitable to car
traffic, preventing dust to rise from the macadam roads’ surfaces.
Cobblestone pavements of different materials (granite, black basalt, or
stoneware) had been under discussion by the municipality for two decades.72
Their application was subjected to various delays. Finally, a technical report
justified the choice of stoneware cobblestones in some streets in downtown
Lisbon.73 Comparatively to the other cobblestone pavements, the durability
and low maintenance costs of the stoneware cobblestone pavements compen-
sated for the initial higher investment.
By the end of the nineteenth-century, Lisboners were forced to share urban
space with their modern and non-human, machinic, counterparts: whether
animal-drawn modes of transportation, known as “omnibus” and “Americans,”
Municipal Commission), 1880, 464–465.
Municipal Commission), 1880 607. Parecer nº 791.
70 Clay McShane, “Transforming the Use of Urban Space: A Look at the Revolution in Street
Pavements, 1880–1924,” Journal of Urban History 5, 3 (May 1979): 279–307.
71 The first extant record of an asphaltic road is the one connecting Paris to Perpignan,
France. It dates from 1852, and used modern macadam construction with Val de Travers
rock asphalt; the first stretch of asphalt roadway in London was laid at Threadneedle
Street in 1869, also using Val de Travers rock asphalt.
Municipal Commission), April 1861. 696.
73 Rua de S. José, Rua de Santa Martha, Calçada da Bica Pequena, Rua dos Romulares.
64 Fernandes
or even automobiles. The city’s inhabitants eventually found themselves rel-

egated to secondary spaces, so as not to disturb the increasingly frenetic flow
of traffic. Thus, by the beginning of the twentieth century, many mosaic pave-
ments were destroyed on behalf of asphalt, and the new non-human occu-
pants of the city.
The concept of traffic – initially developed by municipal engineers in the
United States – favoured “efficient” circulation, and prioritised vehicles rather
than pedestrians on public roads.74 Indeed, a traffic regulation issued in Lisbon
treated pedestrians as “special vehicles,” which states that the “parking” of
pedestrians on sidewalks was not allowed during the busiest hours of the day,
while restricting the permissible amount of time spent window shopping.75
These were also the days of the emergence of “refuges,” a term indicating cir-
cumscribed areas in high traffic urban zones, where passers-by could stop, and
protect themselves until they gathered the courage to cross the road. The most
famous ones were the Refuge of Diana (Refúgio de Diana), in Rossio, paved
with cobblestone mosaics in black and white concentric circles, reminiscent
of a dartboard, or the refuge “Island of the Galicians” in Chiado, where migrant
workers from Galicia running errands could seek protection while resting.76
The arrival of cars as non-human urban actors redefined the meaning and
use of streets, roads, and sidewalks, and established a new norm for navigat-
ing public space reflected in the spatial division of heterogenous flows of
traffic, such that streets and roads were, now, restricted to automobile traffic
while foot-traffic was relegated to the sidewalk.77 For instance, Rossio Square’s
iconic pavement featuring its Wide Sea design was dismantled 60 years after
its completion in order to accommodate the needs of automobile traffic.
Requalification works completed in 2001, finally restored it, offering back to
the city its impressive mantle of water waves.78
With the advent of the automobile, the macadam system faced new
demands that concerned, on the one hand, the dust clouds created by the low
air pressure areas under fast-moving vehicles, and on the other, a gradual dete-
rioration of the road material.79
74 Maria Luísa Sousa, A Mobilidade Automóvel em Portugal, 1920–1950 (Lisboa: Editora

Chiado, 2016), 56.
75 Maria Luísa Sousa, “O automóvel: alteração da percepção da rua como espaço público,” in
Lídia Fernandes, Jacinta Bugalhão and Paulo Almeida Fernandes, Debaixo dos nossos pés.
Pavimentos históricos de Lisboa (Lisboa: Museu de Lisboa, 2017), 54–57.
76 Braga, Mobiliário Urbano, 12.
77 Sousa, “O automóvel.”
78 Teixeira, Tapetes de Pedra, 71.
79 José Barros Rodrigues, A Implantação do Automóvel em Portugal (1895–1910) (Lisboa:
Caleidoscópio, 2018).
The automobile was the “perfect” addition to the nineteenth-century para-

digm of industrial capitalism, facilitating demographic/urban growth while
increasing the rate of the circulation of both commodities and persons. Having
established a novel division of public space – roads for cars and sidewalks for
pedestrians80 – city planners sought to render this new paradigm of traffic
and transportation intelligible from the vantage point of the city’s inhabitants:
hence the use of different pavements both for technical reasons and to demar-
cate the spaces for different groups of users. In turn, these specific spaces gen-
erated new needs and new uses: macadam roads were friendly environments
for cars, and thereby contributing to an increase in their use, while sidewalks
were protected areas for pedestrians and giving rise to a new spatial form of
public sociability.
4 Final Remarks
In line with the European wave of urban modernisation led by the most recent
developments in science and technology, Lisbon gave priority to issues con-
cerning public hygiene, the city’s water supply, sanitation conditions, improve-
ments to both housing and movement; and all of this was accomplished via
a reorganization of the city’s spatial hierarchy housing and circulation. By
being Haussmanized by a technocracy of urban experts who were trained and/
or influenced by the Saint-Simonianism of the École des Ponts et Chaussées
and the École Politechnique, Lisbon embraced the concept of infrastructure-
driven urbanism.
Pavements were part of this new urban regularization and as such they are
part of a wider scientific and technological rationale. In most cases, and par-
ticularly as far as the process of macadamization is concerned, foreign techni-
cal practices, mostly from France and the UK, were adopted in Portugal with
minor changes mainly dependent on the availability of materials. However,
when it comes to the Portuguese pavement, one of the main characteristics
of Lisbon’s urban landscape, a reverse process occurred. The Portuguese pave-
ment is a local invention that travelled around the world, thus contradicting
the standard reductionist opposition between centres and peripheries, and
highlighting the complexity of the processes of circulation. Moreover, the
Portuguese pavement, a nineteenth-century urban object, brings to the stage
80 Álvaro Ferreira da Silva, and Maria Luísa Sousa, “The ‘Script’ of a New Urban Layout
Mobility, Environment, and Embellishment in Lisbon’s Streets (1850–1910),” Technology
and Culture, 6 (2019): 65–97.
66 Fernandes
craftsmanship as an alternative albeit influential form of knowledge, summon-

ing it to be part – even if unexpectedly – of the building of the new techno-
scientific city.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to VISLIS project’s members and especially to the editors of this

volume for their comments. This work was supported by Fundação para a
Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal, under grant PTDC/IVC-HFC/3122/2014 and
under projects UID/HIS/UI0286/2013, UID/HIS/UI0286/2019, UIDB/00286/
2020 UIDP/00286/2020.
Chapter 2
Trees, Nurseries, and Tree-lined Streets in the

Making of Modern Lisbon (1840–1886)
1 Introduction
In contemporary cities, it is not uncommon for its inhabitants and visitors to

walk under the shade of trees. Thus, it is easy to forget that tree-lined streets
are a relatively recent addition to the design and everyday life of urban spaces.
Tree-lined lanes were inspired by the long avenues of the formal gardens found
in Italy or France, by the walk’s allées and the alamedas of Spain, which existed
in urban contexts since the early modern period.1 They punctuated landscapes
along countryside roads, villas and private gardens, and eventually reached
the cities on a hitherto unprecedented scale during the nineteenth century.
Aligned trees would come to decorate every boulevard, avenue, street, square-
garden or plaza.2
In Portugal, during the nineteenth-century, the Liberal government enacted
a series of techno-scientific reforms that fundamentally transformed the infra-
structure of transportation, and communication at the national level. Besides
these grey infrastructures, reforms included a series of green infrastructure
projects,3 which were particularly visible within urban contexts. Therefore,
1 On tree-lined streets see Mark Johnston, Trees in towns and cities: a history of British Urban
Arboriculture (Bollington: Windgather Press, 2015), pp. 112–149. And for the Spanish case see
A. Collantes de Terán, R. Gutiérrez, A.J. Albardonedo, S. Carazo, M. Fernández, J. Jiménez,
A. Moreno, P. Nieto, and M. Torres, Las Alamedas, Elemento urbano y función social en ciu-
dades espanolas y americanas (Seville: Ediciones del Serbal, 2019).
2 Although without any clear meaning or unique design/layout, major streets were usually
named as “avenues” or “boulevards,” “promenades,”, “allées,” or “esplanades” in Sweden or
Finland; and “alamedas” in Spain. Thomas Hall, Planning Europe’s Capital Cities. Aspects of
Nineteenth Century Urban Development (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 300.
3 The terms gray and green infrastructures are commonly used in history of technology,
environmental history, and urban history, as well as in blogs and newspaper articles. See,
for instance, John Talberth and Craig Hanson, “Green vs. Gray Infrastructure: When Nature
Is Better than Concrete,” Blog of the World Resource Institute (June 19, 2012) or John
Talberth, Erin Gray, Logan Yonavjak, and Todd Gartner, “Green vs. Gray: Nature’s Solutions
© Ana Duarte Rodrigues, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004513440_005

68 Rodrigues
Lisbon’s modernisation involved, not only hydraulic and sewage systems and
secure public lighting via gas and electricity, but the introduction of green
spaces as well. To do so, the reform of the Lisbon municipality was brought
about in 1840, including the creation of the Department of Gardens and Green
Grounds, together with other departments indispensable to the construction
and management of modern Lisbon. Prior to the 1800s, the streets of Lisbon
contained neither pavements nor curbs that separated pedestrians from vehic-
ular traffic.
With modernisation projects such as these came new ways of circulating
within urban space and new ideas on hygiene, street lighting, the systematic
house numbering, regulating architectural norms for the facades of buildings,
and, of course, the prominence of tree-lined streets. Orchards, olive groves and
kitchen gardens became things of the past due to an increased number of pub-
lic gardens, parks and tree-lined streets. The unprecedented scale of Lisbon’s
modernisation projects, which involved fundamentally transforming both nat-
ural and human-made landscapes, shaped the bourgeois way of life.4
This chapter aims at interweaving the boundaries between the urban his-
tory of science and gardens and landscape studies. It does so by addressing
the emergence of tree-lined streets in Lisbon, during the mid-nineteenth
century, and their initial appearance against the political backdrop of the
Liberal regime. This chapter focuses on what is known as the Regeneration
period (circa 1851), the reform of the Lisbon City Council, and the creation of
the Department of Gardens and Green Grounds, in which agronomists and
gardeners appear as urban experts. Just as urban historians have addressed
the genesis of a myriad of public spaces and urban amenities,5 historians
of science and technology have studied gardens and green spaces from a
techno-scientific perspective.6 Moreover, while the discipline of Gardens and
to Infrastructure Demands,” Blog of the Ecology Global Network (March 14, 2013). For a
recent academic review of the terms see Y. Depietri, and T. McPhearson, “Integrating the
Grey, Green, and Blue in Cities: Nature-Based Solutions for Climate Change Adaptation and
Risk Reduction,” in N. Kabisch, H. Korn, J. Stadler, and A. Bonn, eds. Nature-Based Solutions
to Climate Change Adaptation in Urban Areas. Theory and Practice of Urban Sustainability
Transitions (Springer, 2017), 91–109.
4 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: on Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990).
5 Peter C. Baldwin, Domesticating the Street: The Reform of Public Space in Hartford, 1850–1930
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999); Victoria Kelley, “The streets for the people:
London’s street markets 1850–1939,” Urban History (2015): 391–411.
6 Antoine Picon, “Nature et ingénierie: Le parc des Buttes-Chaumont.” Romantisme 150, 4 (2010),
35–49; Oliver Hochadel, and Laura Valls, “Civic Nature: The Transformation of the Parc de la
Trees, Nurseries, and Tree-lined Streets 69
Landscape Studies has produced a vast amount of literature on public parks

and green grounds, it has done so to the detriment of the tree-lined streets.7
Therefore, I position myself at the intersection of these disciplines, and look
at tree-lined streets as a key instance of the co-construction of science and the
city, revealing the role of techno-scientific urban expertise in the construction
of nineteenth-century Lisbon and the new modalities of experiencing urban
space with which it comes.
I show how afforestation and tree-lined streets were the main task of the
Department of Gardens and Green Grounds. Throughout the Regeneration
period,8 guided by a strong techno-scientific agenda,9 forestry was promoted
alongside agriculture and horticulture, to such an extent that afforestation
became also an integral part of urban modernisation.10 Due to the negative
Ciutadella into a Space for Popular Science,” in Oliver Hochadel, Agustí Nieto-Galan, eds.,
Barcelona. An Urban History of Science and Modernity, 1888–1929 (London: Routledge, 2016),
25–45; Ana Duarte Rodrigues, “Greening the city of Lisbon under the French influence
of the second half of the nineteenth-century,” Garden History, 45, 2 (2017): 224–250; and
chapter 10 in this book.
7 George Chadwick, The Park and the Town (London: Architectural Press, 1966); Hazel
Conway, People’s Parks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Public Parks
(Princes Risborough: Shire, 1996); R. Rosenzweig and E. Blackmar, The Park and the
People (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Françose Le Cunff, Parques e Jardins de
Lisboa, 1764–1932. Do Passeio Público ao Parque Eduardo VII (Master thesis on Art History,
Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas. Lisboa, 2000).
8 On Regeneration see: Vítor Quaresma, A Regeneração: Economia e Sociedade (Lisboa:
Dom Quixote, 1988); Joel Serrão, Da ‘Regeneração’ à República (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte,
1990); David Justino, Fontismo: liberalismo numa sociedade liberal (Alfragide: D. Quixote,
2016.) On the construction of the techno-scientific nation by engineers, military men,
and politicians see Tiago Saraiva, “Inventing the Technological Nation: the example of
Portugal (1851–1898),” History and Technology, 2007, 23: 263–271; Marta Macedo, Projectar e
Construir a Nação. Engenheiros, Ciência e Território em Portugal no século XIX (Lisbon: ICS
Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2012); Maria Paula Diogo, Ana Cardoso de Matos, “Going
Public: The First Portuguese National Engineering Meeting and the Popularization of the
Image of the Engineer as an Artisan of Progress (Portugal, 1931),” Engineering Studies, 2012,
4 (3): 185–204.
9 On the techno-scientific agenda of the Liberal regime see Tiago Saraiva, “Inventing the
Technological Nation: the example of Portugal (1851–1898),” History and Technology, 23
(2007): 263–271; Marta Macedo, Projectar e Construir a Nação. Engenheiros, Ciência e
Território em Portugal no século XIX (Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2012); Maria
Paula Diogo, and Ana Cardoso de Matos, “Going Public: The First Portuguese National
Engineering Meeting and the Popularization of the Image of the Engineer as an Artisan
of Progress (Portugal, 1931),” Engineering Studies, 4, 3 (2012): 185–204.
10 For discussions on urban afforestation see City Trees: A historical geography from the
Renaissance through the Nineteenth Century (Charlottesville and London: University of
70 Rodrigues
consequences of industrialization and deforestation, afforestation became

a key topic during this period of modernisation, due to its benefits to pub-
lic health, hygiene, and overall improvement to the quality of life of the city’s
inhabitants. Planting trees became the daily routine of the Department of
Gardens and Green Grounds, which accompanied the city’s expansion, and
the building of new streets, with their attendant lighting, paving, cleaning,
and planting of trees.
Sven Dierig, Jens Lachmund and J. Andrew Mendelsohn, in the edited vol-
ume Science and the City, argued for the co-production of science and the city
and suggested promising research avenues, including, for instance, the rise of
urban expertise.11 Extending their analysis to more diverse urban contexts,
Agustí Nieto-Galan and Oliver Hochadel have also stressed the importance
of science in everyday life, the fruitfulness of comparing modernities, and of
unveiling urban connections.12 This chapter seeks to follow and extend the
work of these scholars, and brings their insights to bear upon the particulari-
ties of the production of a Lisbon fit for modernity.
Science and the city have always been interconnected by experts (whether
technicians or scientists) who contributed to shaping urban space by partici-
pating in commissions and voicing their opinions to municipal councils and
aiding in the eventual passage of specific regulations or decrees. Moreover,
this specialised form of knowledge stemming from techno-scientific training
was reflected in their political and administrative agendas.13 Going beyond the
range of specialities usually considered when discussing the expert-knowledges
constitutive of urbanism – doctors, engineers, architects, city councillors, and
political actors – and with respect to the Department of Gardens and Green
Grounds of Lisbon’s City Council, this chapter demonstrates that gardeners,
botanists, agronomists were the main actors behind the greening of the city
between 1840 – when the Department of Gardens and Green Grounds was
created – and 1886, when the inauguration of the Avenue of Liberty effectively
brought an end to the Department.
Virginia Press, 1995); Cecil C. Konijnendjik, The Forest and the City: The Cultural Landscape
of Urban Woodland (Springer, 2008); and Johnston, Trees in towns and cities.
11 Sven Dierig, Jens Lachmund, and J. Andrew Mendelsohn, eds., Science and the City,
Osiris 18 (2003). Besides urban expertise, they highlight the following topics: science in
the city as local practice, science and the representations of the city, places of knowledge
and their urban context, and knowledge from the street.
12 Agusti Nieto-Galan, and Oliver Hochadel, eds., Urban Histories of Science. Making
13 Dierig, Lachmund, and Mendelssohn, 6.
By looking at the French urban model which inspired the modernisation

trend behind the greening of Lisbon from mid-nineteenth century onwards,
I argue that the Department of Gardens and Green Grounds offered institu-
tional stability to experiments related to tree-lined streets, including botany,
horticulture, afforestation, irrigation systems, and contribute, in the process, to
the founding of a new genre of urban expertise. Just as the Department’s task
grew over time, so too did the body of knowledge of this heterogeneous group
of experts and practitioners who gathered empirical knowledge while having
simultaneous access to the most up-to-date theoretical literature, which was
stored at the Department’s library. The techno-scientific solutions proposed by
these municipal actors enable us to look at the Department as a laboratory, at
gardening knowledge as a product of the joint work of experts and politicians,
and specifically at tree-lined streets as places of negotiation, in which actors
with different know-hows exchanged and shared knowledge, fostering urban
expertise in the process.
Urban green grounds are sharply distinct from rural spaces or from wil-
derness, conveying a specific idea of order. Moreover, concern for the well-
being of the city’s inhabitants allowed for the introduction of a new ordering
of urban space, wherein tree-lined streets became essential features of mod-
ern urban design. In sum, the modernization of Lisbon in the second half
of the nineteenth-century included tree-lined streets as a main protagonist,
which was itself a product of several factors – from politics to administration,
the legal to the technological, scientific to social, and from the natural to the
artificial.
The argument of this chapter proceeds in three parts, each of which
addresses key, synchronic, processes of Lisbon’s development. The first sec-
tion focuses on Lisbon’s northward expansion and how it was signalled by
tree-lined streets and boulevards. The second section focuses on the govern-
ment and the municipality’s initiatives to modernize Lisbon, highlighting the
role of urban experts and the heterogeneity of their disciplinary backgrounds.
The chapter’s third and final part is dedicated to aligned trees and nurseries,
and analyses how horticultural and techno-scientific expertise contributed to
transforming the city and giving shape to new forms of urban life.
2 Tree-lined Streets and Boulevards and the City’s Growth

to the North
In the second half of the nineteenth-century, the renewal of Lisbon followed

its northward expansion along the Haussmanian-like boulevard Avenida da
72 Rodrigues
Figure 2.1 Map of Lisbon with tree lined streets and boulevards
1. Avenida da Liberdade; 2. Avenida 24 de Julho; 3. Rua do Século; 4. Rua da
Estefânia; 5. Rua de Sta. Bárbara; 6. Rua dos Anjos; 7. Rua Pascoal de Melo; 8. Rua
Nova do Palma
Courtesy of José Avelãs Nunes
Liberdade (Avenue of Liberty).14 However, expansion to the north did not

come about without discussion. Following Marquis of Pombal’s reconstruction
of the city after the 1755 earthquake, and the recent Haussmanian renewal of
Paris,15 it was argued that the city’s modernization should be achieved, not by
14 On the transformation of the Public Promenade into the Avenue of Liberty see Raquel
Henriques da Silva, “O Passeio Público e a Avenida da Liberdade”, in Irisalva Moita, ed., O
Livro de Lisboa (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 1994), and Le Cunff, Parques e Jardins de Lisboa.
15 David P. Jordan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (New York:
Free Press, 1995); Michel Carmona, Haussmann: His Life and Times and the Making of
Modern Paris (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002); David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New
York and London: Routledge, 2006); Stephanie Kirkland, Paris Reborn. Napoléon III, Baron
Haussmann, and the Quest to Build a Modern City (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014);
Rupert Christiansen, The making of modern Paris. City of Light (New York: Basic Books,
2018).
expansion, but via the reorganizing of its historical site.16 For the proponents
of reorganisation, development via northward expansion was seen as three
counts of betrayal: a betrayal of Lisbon’s older areas, a betrayal of the heart of
the city, and ultimately a betrayal of the history of Lisbon itself.17 For them a
boulevard-like avenue parallel to the river fulfilled the long-dreamed marginal
road from East (Santa Apolónia) to West (Belém), and should be accompa-
nied by the transformation of the banks of the river into public promenades.
For those who discarded this hypothesis, the only solution for the population
growth – Lisbon’s inhabitants increased from 169,823 in 186018 to 356,009 in
190019 – was the expansion of the city. The struggle for the construction of the
Avenue of Liberty as an axis that pushed the city to the north was recounted by
a former City Councillor on the date of its inauguration in 1886. According to
the former councillor, the avenue was conceived to be “the great communica-
tion artery to the north of the city,” replacing the streets of S. José, Santa Marta
and S. Sebastião, which were “very narrow and dangerous,” and inhibited the
establishment of rails for trams.20
The need to embellish Lisbon and enhance its position as a leading
European capital was the concern for both politicians and urban experts
during the nineteenth-century. Following the victory of the Liberals over the
Absolutists in 1834, Lisbon’s City Council put an end to the old administra-
tive system and instituted the practice of the direct election of municipal
bodies modelled on the French system of legislation and its administrative
reforms.21 In this context, the first thirteen councillors were elected to the
Lisbon City Council, which was divided into five committees – Works, Meat,
Administration, Reform and Health. Moreover, following the reorganization of
1840 several departments were created, each specialising in a particular form
of urban infrastructure, for the purposes of modernising Lisbon and improving
the overall living conditions of its citizens: the Department of Sidewalks was
established to cater to the need for paving the city; Department of Gardens
16 This question will be widely debated by Abel Botelho, “A apologia da curva,” Arquitectura
Portuguesa, 5 (1908).
17 Botelho, Arquitectura Portuguesa.
18 Serrão, Da ‘Regeneração’ à República: 203.
19 Olegário Ferreira and Teresa Rodrigues, “As cidades de Lisboa e Porto na viragem do
século XIX – características da sua evolução demográfica: 1864–1930,” Revista de História,
XII, JNICT (Porto: Centro de História da Universidade do Porto, 1993), 301.
20 Francisco Simões Margiochi, Duas palavras acerca da avenida da Liberdade (Lisboa: Typ.
Portugueza, 1886).
21 Eduardo Freire de Oliveira, Elementos para a Historia do Município de Lisboa (Lisboa:
Typographia Universal, 1887), vol. I: 39–40.
74 Rodrigues
and Green Grounds, to create public gardens and secure the city’s afforesta-
tion; the Department of Lighting dealt with the illumination of public space;
the Department of Cleaning was in charge of clearing away the filth and detri-
tus that accumulated in Lisbon due to the lack of piped water and sewage;
the Department of Water was in charge of supplying water to the population
and curbing water shortages; the Department of Markets regulated the sale of
food products; the Department of Cemeteries faced the serious public health
problem created by the lack of proper burials; the Slaughterhouse Department
regulated meat sales; the Firefighting Department answered to incendiary
actions against mostly wooden built neighbourhoods; the Department of
Health and the Hospital of S. Lázaro cared for the sick and lepers; and, finally,
the Department of the Treasury supervised and regulated the budgets of all the
other departments.22
From 1840 onwards, many government officials and municipal experts felt
the growing need for a general plan for the city’s improvement. At issue was
the need to decide on what had to be demolished, preserved, and perfected,
or built, to endow the city with the appearance fit for a national European
capital and the metropole of an extended empire. Convinced that “the public
buildings of any nation are a mirror of its values and state of civilization,” both
the government and municipal powers held a strict obligation to deliver such
works for the public’s general comfort.23
Several attempts to materialize a general plan took place over time. In 1855,
a City Councillor insisted that the general plan of the city should be a guide
for the opening of new streets, squares, sidewalks and gardens.24 However, the
inexistence of such a plan did not deter the implementation of partial improve-
ments. Tree-lined streets were included in these plans, signalling urban growth
to the north, while their planting accompanied successive discussions. While
there were 2,791 trees in Lisbon in 1858,25 this number increased by a factor of
ten over the next fifty years with 20,000 trees in 1907.26
22 Oliveira, Elementos para a Historia do Município de Lisboa; Miguel Gomes Martins, A

Evolução Municipal de Lisboa: pelouros e vereações (Lisboa: CML, pelouro da cultura –
divisão de arquivos, 1996), 25.
23 Letter from A.M. Couceiro, 17 August 1840, in Le Cunff, Parques e Jardins de Lisboa, 142.
24 Letter of Aires de Sá Nogueira. 13 December 1855, in Le Cunff, Parques e Jardins de Lisboa,
142.
25 Table of the afforestation of Lisbon in 1858, by species of trees, AML, Correspondence
received by the Technical Division, 1834–1864, PT/AMLSB/AL/CMLSB/UROB-E/23,
Cx. 48 do SGO, 1858, published in Ana Duarte Rodrigues, O Triunfo dos Jardins. O pelouro
dos Passeios e Arvoredos de Lisboa (1840–1900) (Lisboa: Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal,
2020), document nr 5.
26 Sousa Viterbo, A jardinagem em Portugal: apontamentos para a sua história (Coimbra:
Imp. da Universidade, I Série, 1908), 291.
Tree-lined planting in Lisbon started out in plazas and square-gardens and

proceeded to streets and boulevards. One of the first squares to be arborized
and paved in mid-nineteenth century Lisbon was the Plaza King D. Pedro IV
(also called Rossio). Damaged by the 1755 earthquake, and still including ruins
of buildings in situ, the proposal to rebuild Rossio Square became a topic of
parliamentary debate. One proposal claimed that it should be improved in
the manner of the Palais Royal of Paris; that is, as a garden with a vast lake
in the middle surrounded by two or three rows of trees.27 This initiative ben-
efitted from the existence of a surplus of underground water within this area of
Lisbon, and the City Council’s eagerness for acquiring a steam engine (with the
power of four to six horses) to raise the water for the irrigation of the proposed
garden. Such comparisons with other capital cities, and not just Paris, were
constant: it was “a great improvement for Lisbon in general, and of great con-
venience to the square’s inhabitants, as London’s square-gardens are for their
inhabitants.”28 Following these resolutions, by the mid-nineteenth century, the
construction of Rossio began, with the formation of a rectangular square lined
by buildings on every side. Between 1848 and 1849, Rossio square was paved
with calçada portuguesa (Portuguese pavement, see chapter 1 in this volume),
followed by the planting of trees and the installation of lighting, benches, and
kiosks. While some inhabitants complained that treetops hindered their views,
Rossio was re-planted in 1862 at the request of other residents. To complete this
work with ease and perfection, a tree transplantation machine was ordered
from France.29 Following the inauguration of the monument dedicated to the
Liberal King D. Pedro IV – a huge neoclassic column topped by the king’s fig-
ure – in 1870, more rows of trees joined those already in place.30
To the east and the west of two of the hills of Lisbon – Campo Santana (or the
Hill of Medicine) to the east and the neighbourhood of Príncipe Real to
the west (or the Hill of the Sciences) (see chapter 13 in this volume) – many
new trees were planted. In 1858, at Campo Santana which housed the Hospital
of S. José, 438 trees of 16 different species of autochthonous and exotic trees
were planted in tree alignments, including 201 mulberry trees, 58 acacia trees,
two ailanthus, two trees of paradise, nine poplars, seven poplars from Canada,
29 weeping trees, 17 bastard sycamores, five eucalypts, 21 ashes, five lynx trees,
15 Judas-trees, nine paulownia trees, ten plane trees, 16 pepper trees, and
27 AHP, Viscount of Sá da Bandeira, Parliamentary Debates, 10 August 1848, Câmara dos

Pares do Reino.
28 AHP, Viscount of Sá da Bandeira, Parliamentary Debates 10 August 1848.
29 António Esteves de Carvalho, Relatorio do Excelentissimo Senhor Presidente da Camara
Municipal de Lisboa António Esteves de Carvalho por ocasião da posse da nova vereação em
2 de Janeiro de 1862, (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1862), 7.
30 AML, Session of the Lisbon City Council, 17 March 1879.
76 Rodrigues
Figure 2.2 Project for the embellishment of King D. Pedro IV Plaza

AML, PT/AMLSB/CMLSB/UROB-PU/11/776
36 elm trees.31 The greening of the Hill of Medicine’s surrounding area con-
tinued in the 1870s and 1880s, following the inauguration of the Hospital D.
Estefânia – the first hospital exclusively dedicated to children – in 1877 and the
renewal of the Anjos and Arroios neighbourhoods. Linked to the Hospital and
the Travessa do Pintor via Rua da Estefânia, begun in 1861,32 the Arroios neigh-
bourhood was afforested in 187833 and in 1884.34 Santa Bárbara Street, near
Anjos Street, received tree-lined lanes of mulberries, beech trees, and ashes in
1858.35 Moreover, in 1884, 228 tree pits were opened in Anjos, evidence that the
same number of trees were to be planted.36
In the Hill of the Sciences – where the Polytechnic School of Lisbon was
established since 1837 and occupied the premises of the eighteenth-century
College of Nobles for the purpose of education in the sciences – new trees
were planted, while plans for an associated botanical garden, which began in
1843, would only be completed in 1873. In 1833, the city hall inherited a nearby
piece of land37 where it planned to build the Erário Régio (ancient Ministry
of Finances in Portugal), and where the garden square of Príncipe Real took
shape. In 1864, 54 trees of different species were planted.38 A lake sat in the
centre of the garden and a magnificent Cedar-of-Buçaco, today one of the
centennial trees in Lisbon, was planted in 1869.39 Moreover, near the garden
of Príncipe Real, trees were planted for the beautification of Formosa Street –
i.e. present-day Século Street – ending at the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon
in 1858.40
31 Table of the afforestation of Lisbon in 1858, by species of trees.

32 Raquel Henriques da Silva, Lisboa Romântica: Urbanismo e Arquitectura, 1777–1874, PhD
Thesis on History of Art (Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova
de Lisboa, Lisboa, 1997), 430.
33 Table of the afforestation of Lisbon in 1878, by species of trees, AML, Correspondence
received by the Technical Division, 1834–1864, PT/AMLSB/AL/CMLSB/UROB-E/23,
Cx. 49 do SGO, 1878, in Rodrigues, O Triunfo dos Jardins, document nr 30.
34 AML, Session of the Lisbon City Council, 21 February 1884.
36 AML, Session of the Lisbon City Council, 17 January 1884. They were located between the
street of Santa Barbara and Pascoal José de Melo Street.
37 Francisco Santana and Eduardo Sucena, eds., Dicionário da história de Lisboa (Lisboa:
Mem Martins, 1994), 738.
38 Archivo Municipal de Lisboa, nº 8, 1864: 1717.
39 Graça Amaral Neto Saraiva and Ana Ferreira de Almeida, Árvores na Cidade. Roteiro das
árvores classificadas de Lisboa (By the Book, 2018).
78 Rodrigues
On 31 December 1864, the Law-Decree including city’s general improve-

ments plan was announced as part of Portugal’s overall national development
scheme. Included were plans involving both the layout of extant and new
streets, squares, gardens, and buildings for Lisbon, along with discussions of
duly appropriate conditions of hygiene, decoration, and free public transit.41
To oversee the plans execution, the French engineer and municipal expert,
Pedro José Pezerat, Head of the Technical Division of the City Council created
in 1852,42 published Mémoire sur les études d’Amérioration et embellissements
de Lisbonne, wherein he narrated his vision for Lisbon in detail (1865). Under
Pezerat’s leadership, this municipal service came to rival the Ministry of Public
Works, dependent on the central government, and therefore managed to secure
greater autonomy for the City Council in matters of urban development.
In the 1870s, discussions continued and, in 1876, a committee was appointed
to put the general improvements plan into practice.43 The construction of the
boulevard-like Avenue of Liberty, named after the Liberals, began in 1879 and
was inaugurated in 1886, thus materialising the vision of those who conceived
the city’s northward expansion perpendicular to the river Tagus. What is more,
this development plan was such that other streets helped reinforce this newly
added axis. For example, the street of Nova da Palma, planned in 1859 and
planted with white mulberry trees in 1869,44 was to be prolonged by the major
street Almirante Reis.
Along the southern waterfront, the long sought-after marginal road (men-
tioned above), Avenida 24 de Julho, was finally built. It was erected on the
Boavista swampy landfill, which began to be sanitized following the cholera
epidemics of 1855 and 1856, thereby solving a major urban sanitary issue. In
1878, 353 trees of three different species were planted along the avenue – 208
acacia trees, 48 Judas-trees, and 97 elm trees.45
41 Law-decree of 31 December 1864.

42 Rui Alexandre Gamboa Paixão, “Vida e obra do engenheiro Pedro José Pezerat e sua ativi-
dade na liderança da Repartição Técnica da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa (1852–1872),”
Cadernos do Arquivo Municipal, 1ª Série, nº 9, (2007): 100–113. In Portuguese “pelouro”
corresponds to a committee of the city hall in charge of a certain area of administration.
I opted to translate “pelouro” as department to contrast with regular committees which
corresponded to a different reality – a group of experts gathering temporarily to deal with
a specific issue. Moreover, the “Repartição Técnica”, translated as “Technical Division” is
neither a department nor a committee, but a permanent unit that deals with all depart-
ments of the Lisbon City Council and oversees the municipality public works.
43 Archivo Municipal de Lisboa, 8 May 1876: 571.
44 Silva, Lisboa Romântica, p. 429.
In sum, afforestation accompanied the designs of these new areas as well

as being included in the beautification of new streets, and thereby shaping
the expansion of Lisbon. By 1907, the historian and journalist Sousa Viterbo
acknowledged that “the work of Lisbon’s municipality accounting for the
extraordinary expansion of the city was accompanied by a parallel afforesta-
tion and gardening movement….”46
3 Planning a Green Lisbon. The Role of Urban Experts
The disagreements between the Technical Division and the Department of

Gardens and Green Grounds, came from afar, and were several. The transfor-
mation of the Passeio Público (Public Promenade) – an ancient public garden
built by the Marquis of Pombal in the late-eighteenth century – into the Avenue
of Liberty exposed underlying tensions between the Viscount of Carriche,
councillor of the Department of Gardens and Green Grounds, and Frederico
Ressano Garcia, the chief-engineer of the Technical Division of Lisbon’s City
Council. The source of these tensions: the cutting down of several trees on the
evening of 17 January 1884.47 This incident followed the 1882 decision by the
municipally appointed committee, suggesting the transplanting of most trees
from the Public Promenade to the Avenue of Liberty, including specifications
as to which species were best suited to be transplanted.48 On one side, the
Viscount of Carriche guaranteed that no trees had been cut by the Department
of Gardens and Green Grounds, which complied with the committee’s deci-
sion. On the other side, Ressano Garcia criticized the committee for holding a
City Council session on 28 December 1882, while omitting the meetings reso-
lutions from its minutes.49 Following this initial disagreement, the committee
revoked the resolution to plant some of the trees in Praça dos Restauradores
(Restauradores Plaza), but did not communicate this decision to the Technical
Division, thus leading Ressano Garcia to complain, once again, that he only
46 Viterbo, A jardinagem em Portugal, 290–291.

47 AML, Session of the Lisbon City Council, 17 January 1884.
48 Committee’s opinion on the species to grow at the Avenue of Liberty. AML, Correspondence
received by the Department of Public Works, Gardens and Groves, 1865–1881, PT/AMLSB/
AL/CMLSB/UROB-E/23, Cx. 49 do SGO, 1882.
49 Disagreements between the Technical Division and the Department of Gardens and
Green Grounds, AML, Correspondence received by the Department of Public Works,
Gardens and Groves, 1865–1881, PT/AMLSB/AL/CMLSB/UROB-E/23, Cx. 49 do SGO,
1884, doc. 26.
80 Rodrigues
became aware of this change in the beginning of 1884. According to Ressano

Garcia, all trees from the Public Promenade should be transplanted to a nurs-
ery, while work on Avenue of Liberty was being completed, to be transplanted
safely to their destination. Since a temporary nursery was not used, Ressano
Garcia stressed that the Technical Division complied with the City Council’s
orders to proceed with the works, and accused the Department of Gardens and
Green Grounds for failing to take the necessary steps to deliver the committee’s
report.50 Although he never stated it explicitly, it is surmised that some trees
had to be cut in the process to allow the works to proceed, an act which could
have been avoided had all the trees been transplanted as suggested.
As conflict mounted, not only was the committee’s decisions criticized but
so too was the authority of its experts. Ressano Garcia accused the committee
of being composed by the “councillor for the gardens, the municipal gardener
and three other gentlemen stranger to the municipal service.”51 This was an
unfair accusation as one of the gentlemen said to be a “stranger to the munici-
pal service” was none other than Francisco Simões Margiochi, part of the coun-
try’s political elite, member of the City Council from 1870 to 1875, and Head
of the Department of Gardens and Green Grounds from 1872 to 1875. In this
way, Ressano Garcia delegitimised not only the committee’s authority but the
technical competence of the most prestigious members of the Department of
Gardens and Green Grounds as well. While this episode illustrates the tension
between Ressano Garcia and the Department of Gardens and Green Grounds,
it also ushers in a moment of transition between that period when gardens
were under the decision-making power of gardeners to the following period,
in which they were at the behest of engineers.
Established in 1840, the Department of Gardens and Green Grounds was
itself an absolute novelty. For the Liberals, it was as essential as the depart-
ments that secured the making of grey infrastructures, but it was dependent
on the expertise of gardeners. Moreover, it predated its French counterpart,
established six years later in 1854 under the tutelage of Adolphe Alphand,
an engineer who had studied at the École des Ponts et Chaussées, just like
Haussmann before him.52
Green Grounds.
Green Grounds.
52 Chiara Santini, “Construire le paysage de Paris. Alphand et ses équipes (1855–1891),” in
Michel Audouy, and Jean-Pierre Le Dantec, Yann Nussaume, and Chiara Santini, eds., Le
In the 1850s and 1860s, a committee composed of “apt people, such as

Engineers, Architects, and some members of the Municipality, was charged
with creating a general system of improvement of the city of Lisbon.”53 The
concern for a general plan for the city improvement grew and even included
discussions regarding specific suggestions for upgrading extant streets, plazas,
squares, gardens, and for opening new ones, securing appropriate conditions
of hygiene, decoration, and mobility.54 To illustrate the dominance of garden-
ers’ decision-making power at the Lisbon City Council, one can take a look at
the committees that were called upon to help decide on both the planting of
the Public Promenade in 1858 and of the Avenue of Liberty in 1882.
In December 1858, the grove of the Public Promenade was in a deplorable
state, to such an extent that it even constituted a danger to visitors in the event
of a storm.55 There were two ways to circumvent this issue, the first of which
was supported by the technicians of the Agricultural Institute, who advo-
cated that old trees should be cut down and, in their intervals, holes should be
opened to plant new trees. The second, and ultimately chosen, approach had
the support of the municipality’s gardener João Francisco; the horticulturist
Julio Levoy Waigel; the king’s gardener, Bernard; the gardener of the Count of
Farrobo, P. Mourier; and the gardener of the Dukes of Palmela, Jacob Weiss,
and involved the renovation of the soil prior to plant.56 This latter approach
additionally profited from the joint action of national and international
experts – foreign gardeners, who came to Portugal to work for the elites after
studying at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris played a key-role in the development
of the garden aesthetic in Lisbon. They established close connections with the
Department of Gardens and Green Grounds or integrated its personnel. Thus,
it is no wonder that, in time, the Department of Gardens and Green Grounds
acted as a school of practitioners: municipal gardeners were distinguished pro-
fessionals who designed, studied, delivered lessons on botany and horticulture
and when visiting the Potager du Roi in Versailles, discussed with the chief gar-
dener on a par.
In 1882, the committee in charge of deciding on the tree species coming from
the Public Promenade to be planted on the Avenue of Liberty, and criticized
grand Pari(s) d’Alphand – Création et transmission d’un paysage urbain (Paris: Éditions de
la Villette, 2018), 33–37.
53 AHP, Parliamentary Debates, Câmara dos Pares do Reino, nº 083, 18 July 1850, p. 1262.
54 Letter of Aires de Sá Nogueira, 13 December 1855, in Le Cunff, Parques e Jardins de Lisboa,
142; Law-Decree of 31 December 1864.
55 Annaes do Municipio de Lisboa, 1858: 190.
56 Le Cunff, Parques e Jardins de Lisboa, 176.
82 Rodrigues
by Ressano Garcia, included a combination of Portuguese and non-Portuguese

experts: the Department’s councillor, the Viscount of Carriche; the agronomist
and former councillor of the Department, Margiochi; the French gardener-in-
chief of the botanic garden of the Polytechnic School of Lisbon, Jules Daveau;
Weiss, who also collaborated with the municipality since the 1850s; and, the
gardener-in-chief of the Department of Gardens and Green Grounds, João
Francisco da Silva.57
In sum, following from the work of Dierig, Lachmund, and Mendelsohn,
while moving beyond them, the present study shows that urban experts
included not only politicians, technicians, architects, doctors, or engineers, but
also by botanists, agronomists, horticulturists, and gardeners, whose profes-
sional status was equivalent to present day landscape architects.
The French literature existing in the specialized library of the Department
recommended the use of just one variety of trees on tree-lined boulevards, an
indication that was followed on the Champs-Elysées. The committee, however,
was faced with a dilemma: what to do with the 822 trees of 41 different species
surviving the dismantling of the Public Promenade?58 Theoretical principles
recommended that tree-lined boulevards be composed of just one species in
order to secure their similar growth and simultaneous flowering, thereby con-
veying an orderly aspect to the city.59 However, following these precepts would
prevent the use of most trees. In the end, a compromise between a botani-
cal, pragmatic, and economic solution was implemented, and emerged from
a rather wise adaptation to local circumstances: 12 species were selected, six
to be used along the plots in which the avenue was divided, in such a way that
only one species was used in each plot, and the other six on the extremities
of the avenue at the Restauradores Plaza (to the south), and what came to be
known as the Marquis of Pombal plaza (to the north).60
Therefore, 519 specimens from the Public Promenade could be used.
Moreover, the pragmatic accommodation of trees coming from the Public
Promenade exemplified how “sustainability” principles shaped the local
appropriation of the French model epitomized by the Champs-Élysées, and
the urban renewal carried out by Haussmann and Alphand in Paris during
57 Committee’s opinion on the species to grow at the Avenue of Liberty. On João Francisco
da Silva see chapter 10 in this book.
58 Committee’s opinion on the species to grow at the Avenue of Liberty.
59 See, for example, Jules Nanot, Guide de l’ingénieur pour l’établissement et l’entretien des
plantations d’alignement sur les voies publiques (Paris: Librairie Centrale d’Agriculture et
de Jardinage, 1885), 97.
60 Committee’s opinion on the species to grow at the Avenue of Liberty.
Figure 2.3a Public Promenade, in Illustração Portugueza, 1913, p. 718
Figure 2.3b View from the Park of Liberty towards the Avenue of Liberty and the
river Tagus
in Occidente, 1914, p. 102
84 Rodrigues
the second half of the nineteenth century. Contrary to the French model, a
huge variety of trees adapted to a Mediterranean climate were planted on the
Avenue of Liberty,61 coming from municipal and commercial nurseries.
As we have seen, over the course of several decades the decision on key
green infrastructures of Lisbon – the Public Promenade and the Avenue of
Liberty – was dependent on the expertise of gardeners, agronomists, horticul-
turists, and botanists. However, their primacy was about to end. The profile of
the urban experts affiliated with the City Council changed with the growing
influence of the engineer Ressano Garcia, giving way to a clear dominance of
engineers vis-à-vis other experts. As chief-engineer of the Technical Division
associated with the General Plan for the Improvement of the City, Ressano
Garcia was increasingly interested in urban gardening projects. Following the
death of Pezerat, he was appointed to head the Technical Division in 1874, con-
tributing to the empowerment of the Technical Division and its impact on the
city’s improvement. In the 1870s, the Technical Division regulated buildings
and sidewalks’ construction,62 and with the completion of the boulevard-
like Avenue of Liberty, Ressano Garcia became as one of Lisbon’s hegemonic
experts and politicians. While the project to transform the Public Promenade
into a boulevard dated far back, Ressano Garcia led its long-awaited con-
struction. He was the perfect choice to build all the infrastructures needed.
However, as the boulevard also required planting new trees and included
some garden areas, the collaboration with the Department of Gardens and
Green Grounds was mandatory, giving rise to a situation wherein two differ-
ent services of the City Hall were taking decisions on the same issues. From
1884 onwards, Ressano Garcia started to interfere in the management of the
Department of Gardens and Green Grounds to such an extent that the council-
lor of the Department, Viscount of Carriche, no longer knew if he continued
to direct the works of his Department or if, instead, this was the purview of
the Technical Division.63 Despite the fact that the president of the City Hall
considered the seat of authority to rest with the Councillor of the Department
61 Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus glandulosa), black locust (Robinea-pseudo-acacia), white mul-

berry (Morus alba), paper mulberry (Brussonetia papyrifera), honey locust (Gleditsia tria-
canthos), silver poplar (Populus alba), European nettle tree (Celtis australis), Judas tree
(Cercis siliquastrum), Old World sycamore (Platanus orientalis), elm tree (Ulmus camp-
estres), common ash (Fraxinus Excelsior), Japanese pagoda tree (Sophora japonica), in
Committee’s opinion on the species to grow at the Avenue of Liberty.
62 A.A.V.V., Lisboa de Frederico Ressano Garcia 1874–1909 (Lisboa: Câmara Municipal de
Lisboa, 1989).
of Gardens and Green Grounds, he was no longer able to transmit his orders
directly to the gardener-in-chief: The president, now, had to transmit his
orders to the Technical Division or an engineer, who, in the meantime, was
allocated to the Department of Gardens and Green Grounds.64
The clash between the two services reflected a clash between two differ-
ent classes of urban experts, with the engineers taking the Department by
storm. Their decision-making power over the city’s gardens is best exempli-
fied by the jury of the competition for the Park of Liberty in 1887, which was
almost entirely composed of engineers, save one architect, and Jules Daveau,
the Chief-gardener of the Polytechnic School’s Botanical Garden. Engineers
included Ressano Garcia as the chief-engineer of the Technical Division, as
well as a forest engineer, an especially novel specialization in engineering.65
This change was aligned with the French model. The contrast between the
composition of this committee to those appointed in 1858 and 1882, to decide
on matters concerning the greening of the city, highlights the rise of experts
on grey infrastructures to the detriment of experts on green infrastructures
following Ressano Garcia’s actions.
Ressano Garcia was trained at the École des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris when
Haussmann’s urban renewal was already underway. Haussmann’s public works
projects took into consideration not only the façades and thoroughfares but
also the location of green grounds, from the local to the urban scale, from the
layout of green grounds above ground – squares, parks, gardens, tree-lined
plantings along avenues – to the underground space housing tree roots and
sustaining trees. In Paris, prior to Haussmann’s action, tree-lined boulevards
were handed over to entrepreneurs, a fact widely criticized by Haussman’s close
associate, Alphand, in charge of the construction and maintenance of public
gardens.66 He criticized their focus on the initial planting and maintenance of
public gardens without giving any consideration to the trees’ longevity, which
required constant and sustained care over long periods of time. For Alphand,
this sustained care and attention was a task for the municipality. Accordingly,
he advocated that the planting of rows of trees on public thoroughfares should
be supervised by the Department of Gardens and Green Grounds.67

65 The committee included the engineer António Maria de Avelar, the City Council’s archi-
tect José Luís Monteiro, the forest engineer Pedro Roberto da Cunha e Silva. In Le Cunff,
Parques e Jardins de Lisboa, 177–179.
66 Adolphe Alphand, “Les plantations d’alignement,” Les Promenades de Paris, vol. 1 (Paris:
Rothschild, 1867–1873), 243.
67 Alphand, “Les plantations d’alignement,” 243.
86 Rodrigues
If Lisbon’s Department of Gardens and Green Grounds antedated its

Parisian counterpart, its rise to prominence was built on the appropriation of
French models, knowledges, and practices. It was nurtured by the presence
of French engineers and gardeners at the Lisbon City Council, by the
exchange of reports and journals between the Lisbon City Council and the
Prefecture of the Seine, and by the acquisition of French texts on garden
design for the Department’s specialized library, under Margiochi’s supervision.
Moreover, in what relates to tree-lined streets and boulevards, Alphand’s Les
Promenades de Paris (1867–73) played a dominant role: the techno-scientific
expertise discussed in this book was followed not only by the Department’s
practitioners but by technicians of the Technical Division as well.68
4 The Multiple Faces of Tree-lined Lanes
Trees provide shade, temper the climate by cutting off winds and thus cooling
streets, reduce noise, and, above all, improve the city’s air quality. That said,
trees were recent additions to Lisbon during the nineteenth-century and they
often fell victim to acts of vandalism and mal-practice, both above and below
ground. In 1855, on the “Hill of Medicine” – in the area around the Convent
of Santa Ana, where there was a curtain of trees to delimit the Campo de
Santana – 46 trees were found severed with several others damaged.69 Above
ground, trees could be damaged by the public or by stray dogs and goats roam-
ing around the city.70 To avoid such situations the presence of guards, gate-
keepers, and police in public gardens and the city’s parks was required (see
chapter 10 in this book), alongside a variety of public measures including leg-
islation, the condemnation of tree harvesting, and City Council budgets, each
serving as clear testimony regarding the concern of the City Council towards
acts of vandalism.
68 List of books and engravings that were borrowed by the Department of Gardens and
Green Grounds to the Technical Division, 1879, AML, Correspondence received by the
Division of Public Works, Gardens and Groves, 1865–1881, PT/AMLSB/AL/CMLSB/
UROB-E/23, Cx. 49 do SGO, 1879, doc. 13.
69 AML, Correspondence received by the Division of Public Works, 1834–1864, PT/AMLSB/
AL/CMLSB/UROB-E/23, Cx. 48 do SGO, 1857, doc. 6.
70 AML, Session of the Lisbon City Council, 5 May 1873. Francisco Simões Margiochi, the
Department of Gardens and Green Grounds councillor, wanted to prohibit stray dogs and
goats in the city. On this topic see also chapter 10 in this book.
Figure 2.4 Profiles of public streets

in Alphand, Les Promenades de Paris, without page number
By contrast various conditions had to be met regarding the protection and

maintenance of the portion of the trees below ground, including the neces-
sary space for the full development of tree roots, the neutralization of nox-
ious elements – specifically those resulting from leaks in gas pipes – or the
non-interference of tree roots and clay shackle plumbing carrying water to
fountains.71 As Jean-Marc L’Anton argues, trees and tree-lined streets were
part of an extended urban network, which included sewage, drainage, and gas
infrastructures, together with street cleaning and the maintenance of trees.72
Viewed in this light, tree-lined streets posed a lot of issues both above and
below ground that had to be identified and solved by municipal experts.
Thus, it is no exaggeration to say that the maintenance of trees in urban
public spaces was a complex task. It required a great deal of knowledge in
terms of botany, horticulture, forestry, and hydraulic engineering, together
71 Archivo Municipal de Lisboa, nº 17, April 1860, 130. The department councillor solved such
issues by requesting that clay pipes be replaced by others made from cast lead.
72 Jean-Marc L’Anton, “L’arbre comme réseau: de l’hygiénisme à l’écologie,” Le Grande Pari(s)
d’Alphand, 271–272.,
88 Rodrigues
with empirical knowledge accumulated through consistent practice. Forestry

questions included choice of tree species to be planted in each location,
knowledge of trees’ growth and diseases, knowledge regarding their behav-
iour in urban spaces, and reactions to threats to which they were exposed.
Horticultural questions included knowledge of the distances between trees,
techniques to transplant trees from nurseries to streets, gardens, and plazas,
and between each of these places. Furthermore, projects for the greening of
the city also required nurseries capable of providing trees for various, reserved,
spaces along streets and in public squares and gardens.
It was in response to these concerns that municipal nurseries dedicated
to the care of trees were established at Campo Grande and in the gardens
of Estrela, São Pedro de Alcântara, and Picoas. The first established nursery
of the City Council at Campo Grande was unlike any other in terms of scale.
Moreover, it was the main source of forest and fruit trees, and since the 1840s
it played a fundamental role in the afforestation of Lisbon and neighbouring
towns. For example, 474 trees, mostly mulberries, were sent to private houses,
public locations and other municipalities in 1841.73 And by 1848, the nursery
at Campo Grande nurtured a total of 17,900 trees.74 According to the nurs-
eries catalogues, from 185775 to 188176 autochthonous trees and vegetables
dominated its production, with a substantial presence of forest trees for the
afforestation of Lisbon, including French fruit trees that were in the process of
being acclimatized to Lisbon.
In 1860, the management of Campo Grande, including its nurseries,
was transferred from the jurisdiction of the City Council to the Institute of
Agriculture.77 Simultaneously, the nursery of the Estrela Garden – the first
public garden created by the Liberal government and located close to the
Portuguese parliament (see chapter 10 in this volume) – became the main
municipal nursery for ornamental plants. Many other varieties were grown
at the nursery at the Garden of São Pedro d’Alcântara, which was itself near
the square-garden of Príncipe Real and part of the Hill of the Sciences. Due to
73 Synopse dos principaes Actos Administrativos da Camara Municipal de Lisboa no anno de

1841 (Lisboa: Empresa de Candido Antonio da Silva Carvalho, 1841), 105.
74 Synopse 1848, table 15.
75 List of the products cultivated at Campo Grande nursery in 1857, manuscript. AML,
Correspondence received by the Division of Public Works, 1834–1864, PT/AMLSB/AL/
CMLSB/UROB-E/23, Cx. 48 do SGO, 1856, C. 20, in Rodrigues, O Triunfo dos Jardins, docu-
ment nr 4.
76 Catalogo Descriptivo das Plantas Florestaes á venda nos viveiros da Tapada do Campo
Grande (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1881).
77 Archivo Municipal de Lisboa, nº 1, 1860, 5.
the limited dimensions of the two municipal nurseries and the city’s increased
demand, in 1863, another nursery was built in the northeast neighbourhood of
Picoas. By the 1880s, the Picoas nursery played a key role in the battle against
the threat of phylloxera (see chapter 5 in this volume), a threat that arose fol-
lowing the City Council’s decision to establish a nursery of American strains
for later distribution, either free of charge or at a low price.78
As greening the city became a municipal priority, trees from Lisbon’s munic-
ipal nurseries were freely supplied both to city institutions as well as to pri-
vate owners.79 Every year, hundreds of trees were offered by the Department
of Gardens and Green Grounds to military barracks, hospitals, religious
enclosures, citizens, and other municipalities and even to Portugal’s colonies.
However, by the late 1880s, the practice of tree donations by Lisbon’s nurseries
would come to an end after the Department’s councillor proposed to establish
prices for each tree in order to mitigate the costs incurred by the nurseries.80
The commercialization of trees was eventually made official when the City
Council drafted a tree price table for potential clients.81 This trend does not
mean that the municipality alienated its public functions and rather strove
to make ends meet by turning trees into commercial objects. Ultimately, this
move toward the commercial sale of trees helped circumvent the worst effects
of the city’s mounting financial crisis (though it could not avoid declaring
bankruptcy in 1891).
Despite these measures, alignment streets in Lisbon still took a consid-
erable amount of time to be implemented, and in part due to geographic
reasons. Lisbon is a hilly city, and its streets, besides being narrow and wind-
ing, had steep inclines and were sometimes interrupted by stairs.82 The first
Portuguese Administrative Code, enacted on the last day of 1836,83 already
foresaw “the need for municipalities” to regulate the façade of buildings and
institute the alignment of streets.84 However, it was only with the decree of
31 December 1864, which regulated the General Plan of Improvements of the
city, that the specified specific proportion between the width of streets and
78 AML, Session of the Lisbon City Council, 21 September 1882.

79 The quantities, species as well as the recipients of these offerings are described with
details on the City Councils’ Synopses.
80 AML, Session of the Lisbon City Council, 5 April 1880.
82 Jules Daveau. À travers de L’Espagne et Le Portugal (Montpellier: Imprimerie Centrale du
Midi, 1902), 23.
83 Portuguese Administrative Code, Lisbon, 1837.
84 Sandra Pinto, “A regulação jurídica das fachadas em Portugal (séc. XIV–XIX)”, in Revista
de Estudios Histórico-Jurídicos, XXXVIII, Valparaíso, Chile (2016): 168.
90 Rodrigues
the height of buildings was enforced. Thus, in nineteenth-century Lisbon, the

new streets were literally designed with cord and opened perpendicularly to a
horizontal plane. Such designs also included tree planting along their entire
length, to such an extent that the famous novelist Eça de Queirós stated that in
“Portugal there are no streets but garden alignments.”85
At the Department of Gardens and Green Grounds, the afforestation
of Lisbon was carried out “in harmony with all the rules” of town planning,
architectural and landscape design, afforestation, as well as a host of techno-
scientific regulations.86 According to the extant literature available in French
regarding tree lined streets87 – which was itself used by the Department of
Gardens and Green Grounds – trees should be neither too large nor have their
canopies too compact in order to promote air circulation; a minimum distance
between trees should secure convenient sunlight; and the possibility of other
plants to grow on the same ground. Moreover, literature concerning gardens
established that trees should not be planted unless the distance between
the façades of buildings, on both sides of the street, was at least 23 meters:
10 meters for central thoroughfare and 6.5 meters for each sidewalk, as the
tree lines should be 1.5 meters away from the edge of the sidewalk and 5 m
away from the building façades.88 This was precisely the rule applied by the
Department to such an extent that the municipal architect, Domingos Parente
da Silva, argued against the proposal to install lines of trees on the recently
opened street Nova da Palma (referred to above), as it was only 14.5 meters
wide. Parente da Silva defended the view that tree alignments should only be
planted in the capital’s streets that were between 25 and 30 meters wide, with
6 m of sidewalks and at a distance of 5 m from buildings, with about 13 to 18
meters for traffic.89 These measures ensured that the full maturation of trees
did not cause obstacles to traffic, disturb nearby dwellings or block sun’s rays
and air currents.90
85 Eça de Queirós, Correspondência, vol. I (Lisboa: Planeta DeAgostini, 2006), 80.

87 Such as Alphonse Du Breuil. Manuel d’arboriculture des ingénieurs – plantations
d’alignement, forestières et d’ornement (Paris: Victor Masson et Garnier Frères, 1860); Jules
Nanot. Guide de l’ingénieur pour l’établissement et l’entretien des plantations d’alignement
sur les voies publiques (Paris: Librairie Centrale d’Agriculture et de Jardinage, 1885);
Adolphe Chargueraud. Traité des plantations d’allignement et d’ornement dans les villes et
sur les routes départementales … (Paris: Rothschild, 1896); Georges Lefebvre. Plantations
d’alignement, promenades, parcs et jardins publics. (Paris: P. Vicq-Dunod et C.e, Éditeurs,
1897).
88 Nanot, Guide de l’ingénieur, 108.
89 AML, Correspondence received by the Division of Public Works, 1865–1881, PT/AMLSB/
AL/CMLSB/UROB-E/23, Cx. 49 do SGO, 1869, doc. 13.
90 Nanot, Guide de l’ingénieur, 108.
Figure 2.5 Distances between aligned trees in streets

in Jules Nanot, Guide de l’ingénieur pour
l’établissement et l’entretien des plantations
d’alignement sur les voies publiques, p. 272
Such were the rules that were common to most European capitals during this
period. Thus it was common practice for the residential streets of European
capitals to range anywhere from 16 to 23 meters in width; and on a 20 meter
street, the pavement’s width was usually less than 5 meters, still allowing for a
92 Rodrigues
row of aligned trees.91 In nineteenth-century Barcelona, to take but one exam-

ple, 20 meter-wide streets were considered very large, while Swedish streets
spanned at least 18 meters, and their Viennese counterparts ranged between
16 and 23 meters.92
Above all, the quality of soil was of paramount importance to secure
a healthy tree. As city soils were full of debris, the first precaution involved
installing layers of artificial soil in which the roots could develop, digging
trenches of appropriate width and depth and filling them with proper soil. In
Paris, for example, a boiler was dug around the trees and covered by a grat-
ing to ensure that the soil remained permeable. Therefore, digging trenches
3 meters in width for every meter in depth, then filling them with proper soil,
became a mandatory approach. Secondly, one had to secure their drainage.
However, as the roots spread away from the tree trunk, water does not eas-
ily penetrate areas further away from the tree trunk, especially whenever the
vicinity around the tree has become impermeable following its paving. Thus,
humidity must rise up through radiales aided by a drainage system mutually
interlinking all the trees to the city’s sewage system. This linkage between the
drains and the sewer transforms the network’s purpose and serves as an exten-
sive drainage system during abundant rainfall.93 Finally, the arrangement of
streets included placing pits around each tree, whose function was two-fold:
to enable the convenient watering of trees and for beautification purposes of
defining orderly and symmetrical spaces around the trees and ensuring a clean
environment for walkers and strollers. It is for these reasons that, for exam-
ple, the Lisbon City Council ordered 2,000 curved stones for the borders of
tree-pits, in 1882,94 while raising pedestrian pavements 10 centimetres above
ground level.95
Tree alignments contributed to the qualitative transformation in the expe-
rience of moving through urban space for the city’s inhabitants – one could
stroll in a clean environment, surrounded by restaurants, shops, cafés, wherein
one could see and be seen. As a place for socializing and meeting, street cafés
offer a unique setting in which people can leisurely sit and watch the world
around them. In this situation, life on café sidewalks was both the reason for
its own existence and the main attraction. This is perhaps best illustrated by
the cafe chairs themselves; a well-positioned piece of urban furniture for the
91 Hall, Planning Europe’s Capital Cities, 299.

92 Hall, Planning Europe’s Capital Cities, 135, 299.
93 Alphand, “Les plantations d’alignement,” 243–246.
94 AML, Session of the Lisbon City Council, 12 October 1882.
95 Hall, Planning Europe’s Capital Cities, 299.
observation and involvement with urban life given their orientation toward
the most active nearby public area. Therefore, in addition to the relation already
established by Nieto-Galan and Hochadel between technology and the urban
history of science and recreation, this chapter shows how tree lined streets
connected urban science and everyday life, not only in what relates to circula-
tion but also to people’s use of public open spaces.96 The alignment of trees
attracted inhabitants to hygienic walks, guaranteed by newly cleaned streets,
which were prepared to provide comfort to citizens while ensuring access to
the various attractive storefronts that showed their products in a major com-
mercial city. Streets became central to the new way of life in which consumer
culture expanded to urban middle classes. The separation of space for traffic
and for passers-by, paved with Portuguese pavement, and including benches to
rest, lamps to illuminate the night and lined trees that created shade, all made
this new street experience possible. Associated with tree lined streets and bou-
levards, a new practice of walking around the city arose, linked to the new
social attitude of “seeing and being seen,” to such an extent that the famous
French intellectual Baudelaire argued that new types of passers-by appeared:
the flâneur and the flâneuse (see chapter 12 in this book). Their performance
on the streets totally transformed the concept of walking understood as circu-
lation to walking as an act of fruition and recreation.
5 Final Remarks
Lisbon was depicted by nationals and foreigners, alike, as a modern city where
nothing was quite what it had previously been; a city in which “new neigh-
bourhoods, comprising wide avenues” were built to make the “capital more
beautiful and more hygienic.”97 While tree-lined streets became a feature of
modern cities in the nineteenth century, in Portugal, this took place in the spe-
cific context of Liberalism, which profoundly reformed Lisbon’s municipality
with the creation of the Department of Gardens and Green Grounds and other
departments responsible for ensuring a seamlessly articulated urban network
of gray and green infrastructures for the modernisation and beautification of
the Portuguese capital.
Thus, besides the planning and construction of gardens and parks, the city’s
afforestation was the main task of the Department of Gardens and Green
Grounds. Consequently, the tree itself was no longer viewed as a specific
96 Nieto-Galan and Hochadel, eds., Urban Histories of Science.

97 Viterbo, A jardinagem em Portugal, 291.
94 Rodrigues
component of forests and rural environments; it became an integral element

of the city. Driven by the desire to create orderly spaces, tree-lined plantings
became key features in championing a model of urban design that distin-
guishes the Portuguese capital from its rural counterparts in the countryside.
Tree-lined streets and boulevards in Lisbon followed the growth of the city to
the north. In addition, techno-scientific knowledge appropriated mainly from
France, circulating in Portugal through specialized literature, was adapted to
local circumstances by the urban experts at the Department of Gardens and
Green Grounds of the Lisbon City Council. Behind tree-lined streets lies not
only knowledge of the growth and management of trees, but also knowledge
regarding their connection to gray infrastructures, and the need to build nurs-
eries to meet the needs of a growing city. As such the Department of Gardens
and Green Grounds acted as a laboratory for the application and development
of urban techno-scientific expertise. Simply put, the alignment of trees mate-
rialized a new instance of the co-construction of science and the city, and one
that has so far escaped the gaze of the urban history of science.
Acknowledgments
I thank Ana Simões and Maria Paula Diogo for their suggestions and revisions. I
also thank the National Library of Portugal and Lisbon’s Municipal Archive for
their support throughout research. This work was supported by the Portuguese
Foundation for Science and Technology under the research projects VISLIS –
PTDC/IVC-HFC/3122/2014 and UIDB/00286/2020 and UIDP/00286/2020.
Chapter 3
Working-Class Neighbourhoods in Lisbon.

Republican Hygienist Policies, Circulation
of Workers and Capital
1 Introduction
In the last years there has been a growing interest in crossing urban social
history and history of science, technology and medicine (STM) encompass-
ing different typologies of cities in Europe and other continents.1 Within this
framework, Lisbon poses a particularly challenging case study as it allows for
exploring both the general characteristics attributed to modern cities and the
specificities of urban peripheries.2
As extensively discussed by historians of economy and historians of tech-
nology alike, Portugal was a latecomer to the industrialization process.3 It was
1 The foundational work is undoubtedly Sven Dierig, Jens Lachmund, and J. Andrew
Mendelsohn, eds., Science and the City, Osiris, 18 (2003). For mainstream cities see: Miriam
Levin, Sophie Forgan, Martina Hessler, Robert Kargon, and Morris Low, Urban Modernity.
Cultural Innovation in the Second Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press,
2010). For a review of literature see: Michael Hard, and Thomas Misa, eds. The Urban
Machine. Recent Literature on European Cities in the twentieth century. A Tensions of Europe
electronic publication (July 2003) www.iit.edu/~misa/toe20/urban-machine/. Examples of
works addressing cities other than mainstream ones include Oliver Hochadel, and Agustí
Nieto-Galan, eds., Barcelona. An Urban History of Science and Modernity, 1888–1929 (London:
Routledge, 2016); Agustí Nieto-Galan, and Oliver Hochadel, eds., Urban histories of science.
Making Knowledge in the City 1820–1940 (London: Routledge, 2019).
2 Challenging the contrast between urban centers and peripheries, the following authors
show how scientific experts and engineers played a leading role in the modernization of
Lisbon, turning the city into the scientific capital of the country. Tiago Saraiva, Ciencia y
Ciudad. Madrid y Lisboa, 1851–1900 (Madrid: Ayuntamiento de Madrid, Area de Gobierno de
las Artes, 2005); Tiago Saraiva, and Marta Macedo, eds., Capital Científica: A Ciência Lisboeta
e a Construção do Portugal Contemporâneo (Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2019); Ana
Simões, “From capital city to scientific capital. Science, technology and medicine in Lisbon
as seen through the press, 1900–1910,” in Agustí Nieto-Galan, Oliver Hochadel, eds., Urban
Histories of Science. Making Knowledge in the City 1820–1940 (London: Routledge, 2019),
141–163.
3 Portuguese historians have used the concept of surto industrializador (industrial outbreak)
to characterize the limited industrialization attempts (in time and efficacy) prior to the

not until the mid-nineteenth century that Fontes Pereira de Melo, an engineer
and leading figure of the phase of the Portuguese Liberal regime known as
Regeneração (Regeneration) put forward an ambitious program of material
improvements largely based on a network of railway lines that aimed to indus-
trialize the country as a whole.
In the transition of the nineteenth to the twentieth century Portugal’s capi-
tal was being reshaped along Haussmanian lines. Lisbon expanded towards
the north and away from the river Tagus, backed by investments from capital-
ists who lived in the city’s newly constructed neighbourhoods for the elites.4 At
the same time, a steady industrialization process, accompanied by the migra-
tion of workers from the countryside into the city, led the new capitalist city
to grow. These two processes of industrialization and the migration of labour
eventually gave rise to two industrial areas, one situated to the west, in the
Alcântara valley, and the other to the east, in the Xabregas/Beato axis.5 By the
end of the century, a new industrial area – Almada and Barreiro – acquired
prominence on the south side of the river Tagus, opposite central Lisbon.6 As
mid-nineteenth century. The bibliography in Portuguese is extensive. As examples see the

classic Victorino Magalhães Godinho, Prix et Monnaies au Portugal (Paris: Armand-Colin,
1955) as well as works by authors such as David Justino, Manuel Villaverde Cabral and Jaime
Reis; or more recently Pedro Lains, and Álvaro Ferreira da Silva, eds. História Económica de
Portugal 1700–2000, Volume II, O século XIX (Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2005).
Touching the topic in the context of history of science see: Ana Simões, and Maria Paula
Diogo, “Portugal,” in Hugh Richard Slotten, Ronald L. Numbers, and David N. Livingstone,
eds., The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 8: Modern Science in National, Transnational,
and Global Context, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 390–40; Maria Paula
Diogo and Tiago Saraiva, Inventing a European nation. Engineers for Portugal from Baroque to
Fascism (Milton Keynes, UK: Morgan and Claypool Publishers, 2021).
4 Álvaro Ferreira da Silva, “A construção residencial em Lisboa: evolução e estrutura empre-
sarial (1860–1930)”, Análise Social, xxxi (136–137), 1996 (2.°–3.°) 599–629; Ana Barata, Lisboa
« caes da Europa ». Realidades, desejos e ficções para a cidade (1860–1930) (Lisboa, Edições
Colibri, 2010); José-Augusto França, Lisboa. História Física e Moral (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte,
2008); Saraiva, and Macedo, Capital Científica.
5 Jorge Custódio, “Reflexos da industrialização na fisionomia e vida da cidade” in O livro de
Lisboa, ed. Irisalva Moita (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 1994), 435–492; Renato Pistola, Alcântara,
A Evolução Industrial de Meados do Século XIX ao Final da I República, Master Dissertation,
NOVA University of Lisbon, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, 2009; Ana Alcântara,
Espaços da Lisboa Operária. Trabalho, habitação, associativismo e intervenção operária na
cidade na última década do século XIX, PhD Dissertation, NOVA University of Lisbon, School
of Social Sciences and Humanities, 2019.
6 Maria Paula Diogo, População e Indústria na Margem Sul do Tejo da Regeneração ao Estado
Novo – os Concelhos da Almada, Barreiro, Moita e Seixal, Master Dissertation, NOVA University
of Lisbon, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, 1989.
Working-Class Neighbourhoods in Lisbon 97
a result of urban development, and improvements in infrastructures, pub-

lic health, and hygiene (see chapters 5 and 7 in this volume), the number of
Lisbon’s inhabitants grew by 45 percent from 1890 to 1910. From 1900–1911, the
city’s population grew from 356,000 to 436,000, with manual workers account-
ing for 20 percent of total population growth.7 However, mortality rates still
surpassed birth rates despite the privileged climatic conditions from which the
city benefitted.8
Various working-class neighbourhoods, known as pátios or vilas, emerged at
such a rate that, by 1902, approximately 200 vilas existed in various locations of
Lisbon. Initially built by private owners, some of these neighbourhoods were
erected by industrialists and factory owners to house their workers close to
their workplaces.9
Culminating a period of deep political instability caused both by national
and international events, and most notably the ‘Scramble for Africa,’ and the
1890 British Ultimatum to Portugal, Portuguese monarchy collapsed and gave
way to a Republican regime, founded on 5 October 1910. Republican ideals,
which affirmed the primacy of science and social justice, had long fermented
amidst Portuguese intelligentsia, often mingling with anarchism, socialism,
and particularly, Saint-Simonianism.
Of all the issues discussed among the urban intelligentsia, it was the over-
all wellbeing of a recently urbanized working class that was of central impor-
tance. Informed by international trends taking place in several European and
North-American cities,10 republican-leaning politicians and citizens oriented
discussions, both at the municipal and parliamentary level, towards the need
7 José Augusto França, Lisboa: Urbanismo e Arquitectura (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 2005),
63, 68, 72, 83. See also Miriam Halpern Pereira, Demografia e desenvolvimento em Portugal
na segunda metade do século XIX (Lisboa: Associação Industrial Portuguesa, 1963); Teresa
Rodrigues, Nascer e Morrer na Lisboa Oitocentista. Migrações, mortalidade e desenvolvim-
ento (Lisboa: Edições Cosmos, 1995).
8 The situation was so worrisome that statistical comparisons were voiced in a high circula-
tion daily newspaper – Diário de Notícias. In 1 July 1910, it offered a comparison of mortal-
ity rates per 1000 inhabitants in various cities: Amsterdam, 13,8; Brussels, 14,5; London,
15,6; Hamburg, 15,6; Buenos Ayres, 15,9, and Lisbon, 24,0.
9 Nuno Teotónio Pereira, “Pátios e vilas de Lisboa, 1870–1930: a promoção privada do aloja-
mento operário,” Análise Social, 29 (1994): 509–524.
10 For a list of international meetings on this topic attended by Portuguese representa-
tives see Gerbert Verheij, The Aesthetics of Lisbon: Writing and Practices during the early
20th century, PhD Dissertation, University of Barcelona, School of Fine Arts, 2017. See
also Nicholas Bullock and James Read, The Movement for Housing Reform in Germany and
France, 1840–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), particularly the exten-
sive bibliography and sources on this topic.
Figure 3.1 Map with working-class neighbourhoods

Courtesy João Machado
for building new cheap housing facilities for the working class, integrated in
various typologies of airy neighbourhoods that were, generally speaking, free
from disease, and tuberculosis in particular.11 Despite the lobbying efforts of
citizens and politicians alike, no laws were passed before 1918.12
11 Maria Antónia Pires de Almeida, “As epidemias nas notícias em Portugal: cólera, peste,
tifo, gripe e varíola, 1854–1918,” História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos, 21, 2 (2014):
687–708.
12 A review of the various attempts can be found in Caeiro da Mata, Estudos Económicos
e Financeiros, Habitações Populares vol. III (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade, 1909),
174–235.
The welfare of Lisbon’s working class was also addressed by physicians,

engineers and architects, who exercised their public use of reason in newspa-
pers and journals, drawing attention to the central importance of the physical
and moral health of the city’s working poor.13 The inclusion of gardens and
the proximity of parks were also discussed as central pieces in promoting a
healthy lifestyle among the working class; encouraging outdoor activities
both for children and adults and replacing the vice of alcohol abuse typical
of the pub’s sociability with the virtues of outdoor exercise, ostensibly leading
to a more family-oriented mode of conviviality. Behind the concept of livable
space stood the more general belief that society should be a coherent living
organism. Thus, by reforming one’s physical environment, the life of a group
in all its dimensions would also change for the better, regardless of scale (e.g.,
whether a neighbourhood, a city, or even society itself).14
In this chapter, we take a different approach from that of Portuguese his-
torians, architects, and urban scholars who have looked at workers’ neigh-
bourhoods in Lisbon as part of a revolutionary agenda of the proletariat, or as
architectural actors in their own right (identification, classification in typolo-
gies, plants), or as forces shaping the urban landscape.15 By taking the history
of STM framework, we focus on the socio-technical imaginaries that informed
the utopian proposals of an engineer and a physician (and also a journal-
ist), to uncover the input of these groups of experts in the debate on how to
approach the problem posed by working-class housing and neighbourhoods.
We purposefully shifted our attention away from experts’ participation in vari-
ous major STM institutions in Lisbon – the Polytechnic School, the Industrial
Institute, or the Medical School – in order to better understand how the pres-
ence of STM shaped less visible aspects of Lisbon that have thus far been
ignored. This approach enriches current STM scholarship by accounting for
previously ignored factors that shaped the relation of physicians and engineers
to the science of their day – i.e. the ideological commitments that informed
their agendas and were imprinted in their discourses and actions. It is also for
13 Maria Antónia Pires de Almeida, Saúde Pública e Higiene na Imprensa Diária em Anos de
Epidemias, 1854–1918 (Lisboa: CIUHCT/Edições Colibri, 2013).
14 Ana Simões, and Maria Paula Diogo, “Urban utopias and the Anthropocene,” in Gardens
and Human Agency in the Anthropocene, ed. Maria Paula Diogo, Ana Duarte Rodrigues,
Ana Simões and Davide Scarso (London: Routledge Environmental Humanities Series,
2019), 58–72.
15 See also Manuel C. Teixeira, “As estratégias de habitação em Portugal, 1880–1940,”
Análise Social 27 (1992): 65–89; Manuel C. Teixeira, “A história urbana em Portugal.
Desenvolvimentos recentes,” Análise Social, 28 (1993): 371–90.
this reason that we look at an integral part of experts’ discourses specifically

concerned with the financial means to fund the construction of low-cost hous-
ing in the emerging capitalist Lisbon.
Our starting point are two utopias, one authored by the engineer and port
expert Melo de Matos (1856–1915), titled “Lisboa no ano 2000” (Lisbon in
the year 2000), the other authored by the physician, and writer/journalist of
socialist leanings, Fialho de Almeida (1857–1911), titled “Lisboa Monumental”
(Monumental Lisbon), and both published in 1906 in the recently created illus-
trated magazine Ilustração Portuguesa (Portuguese Illustration).16 Theirs were
socio-technical imaginaries that incorporated contemporary science and tech-
nology practices in their overall approach to issues of urban planning, while
encompassing not one but two Lisbons.17 The modern, capitalist, Lisbon was
connected to the world by a renovated port accommodating a booming circu-
lation of people, goods and commodities. It was also connected to its imag-
ined industrial sister city-to-be at the other side of the Tagus River by imposing
technical structures (a bridge in one case and an underground tunnel in the
other). Thus, the two Lisbons were reflections of the social hierarchization of
space. The renovation of Lisbon by means of “monumental” buildings, techno-
scientific institutions and wealthy neighbourhoods on the capital stand in
stark contrast with the urban landscape of industrial Lisbon to its south, where
working-class neighbourhoods conforming to hygienist trends blossomed
together with green spaces and institutions for collective activities.
We specifically contrast their utopian visions, in so far as they deal with
industrial and capitalist Lisbon and specifically with low-cost housing, and
with practical instances of reforms of the (sub)urban landscape associated with
the emergence of working-class neighbourhoods, together with the creation of
private initiative associations (by opposition to speculative ones) to cope with
the financial means for their construction. In such a way, we highlight how
16 José Maria Melo de Matos, “Lisboa no anno 2000. I. O Porto de Lisboa,” Ilustração
Portuguesa, 5 (1906): 129–133; “Lisboa no anno 2000. II. Os cais de Alcântara e os armazéns
de Lisboa,” Ilustração Portuguesa, 6 (1906): 188–192; “Lisboa no anno 2000. III. A estação
de Lisboa-Mar,” Ilustração Portuguesa, 7 (1906): 220–223; “Lisboa no anno 2000. IV. O tunel
para a outra banda,” Ilustração Portuguesa, 8 (1906): 249–252. Fialho de Almeida, “Lisboa
Monumental. I e II,” Ilustração Portuguesa, 36 (1906): 396–405; 39 (1906): 497–509.
17 G.E. Marcus, ed., Technoscientific imaginaries. Conversations, profiles, and memoirs
(Chicago: CUP, 1995); Sheila Jasanoff, and Sang-Hyun Kim, “Containing the Atom:
Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear Power in the United States and South Korea,”
Minerva, 47, 2 (2009): 119–146; Sheila Jasanoff, and Sang-Hyun Kim, eds. Dreamscapes
of Modernity. Sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power (Chicago: Chicago
fluxes of people, capital and techno-scientific expertise served as the consti-

tutive elements of urban renewal projects, often informed by Saint-Simonian
and republican ideals.
Saint-Simonianism and republicanism framed the material grid underly-
ing Matos’s and Almeida’s proposals. Saint-Simonianism had become part
of the professional rationale of Portuguese engineers since the middle of the
nineteenth century through the influence of the École Polytechnique and the
École des Ponts et Chaussées, considered the top institutions for engineering
training, and which were attended by many Portuguese engineers. As such
Saint-Simonianism celebrated the industrial gospel by highlighting the rel-
evance of infrastructures of communication as part of a larger plan to unify
humankind through the unrestricted circulation of goods, people, and ideas.18
On the other hand, the republican project aimed at imposing a new concept
of citizenship anchored on the role of science and technology as driving forces
in the reform society and the emergence of a “new man” (see chapter 13 in this
volume).
2 Using Fiction to Approach Reality
Given the historical and scholarly remit set out above, 1906 is unique for the
richness of the events that would transpire. On the one hand, the Lisbon city
council was reorganized, taking seriously the role of urban experts (engineers,
scientists, technical personnel, etc.), and thereby providing the appropriate
conditions for the elaboration of a plan of urban improvements.19 On the other
hand, the inauguration of various buildings, including the Medical School, and
the National Assistance to those Afflicted with Tuberculosis, uphill at Campo
de Santana, which came to be known as the Colina da Medicina (“Hill of
Medicine”), on the east side of the recent Haussmannian Avenida da Liberdade
18 For the Portuguese case see Maria Paula Diogo, Ana Simões, and Ana Carneiro, “Political
entanglements and scientific hegemony. Rectors-Scientists at the University of Lisbon
under the I Republic and the Dictatorship (1911–1974)”, in Cultural Hegemony in a Scientific
World. Gramscian Concepts for the History of Science, eds. M. Badino, P.D. Omodeo
(Leiden: Brill, 2020), pp. 274–293. For Saint-Simonianism see Antoine Picon, Les saint-
simoniens (Paris: Belin, 2002) and Pierre Musso, Télecommunications et philosophie des
réseaux (Paris: PUF, 1998).
19 I. Morais Viegas, and A.A. Maia Tojal, eds., “Lisboa, entre a monarquia e a República,
no seu contexto urbanístico – administrativo,” Levantamento das Plantas da Cidade de
Lisboa, 1904–1911 (Lisboa: CML, 2005).
(Liberty Avenue), signalled the modernization of the city and its response to
hygiene and medical problems. At the same time, the organization of the inter-
national congress of medicine on the premises of the new building assumed
a variety of social functions: it aimed at boosting the aspirations of physicians
who were pushing forward an experimentally based medicine able to legitimize
their socio-professional group, and it also aimed at enhancing their credibility
abroad. Finally, the foundation of the Sociedade de Propaganda de Portugal
(Society for the Promotion of Portugal) aimed at the intellectual, moral, and
material development of the country, and at propagandizing abroad its natural
and urban landscapes with a view to attract tourists.20
Matos and Almeida firmly grounded their visions on scientific and techno-
logical breakthroughs.21 Both envisioned Lisbon as a metropolis deeply shaped
by a growing industrial economy, with a new geographical profile anchored in
the river Tagus. This was a Lisbon that upheld the Saint-Simonian celebration
of the rhythm of newly introduced transport and communication technol-
ogy. Both used utopias as a way of criticizing simultaneously past and pres-
ent, and pointing out solutions for a better future, following a well-established
European tradition, much alive during the nineteenth century. That the uto-
pias of Matos and Almeida also deal with industrialization, mobility, the circu-
lation of goods and people, and the development of infrastructure – not only
bear traces of techno-scientific utopianism, since they evidence Matos and
Almeida’s proximity to two other, important, utopian works that, too, belong
to the Saint-Simonian tradition: Prosper-Barthelemy Enfant’s Mémoires d’un
industriel de l’an 2440 (1828), and Ebenezer Howard’s To-Morrow: A Peaceful
Path to Real Reform (1898).22
In fact, Matos and Almeida’s imagined scenarios reflected pressing prob-
lems faced by the city of Lisbon at the beginning of the twentieth-century, so
that the boundaries between reality and prophecy were purposefully blurred,
and the vivid style of copiously illustrated fictional narratives was convened
20 Ana Cardoso de Matos, and Maria Luísa F. N. dos Santos, “Os Guias de Turismo e a
emergência do turismo contemporâneo em Portugal (dos finais do século XIX às pri-
meiras décadas do século XX,” Scripta Nova, 8, 167 (2004), http://www.ub.edu/geocrit/
sn/sn-167.htm, accessed on 2 April 2014; Maria Luísa Sousa, A mobilidade automóvel em
Portugal 1920–1950 (Lisboa: Chiado Editora, 2016).
21 Paul Alkon, Science Fiction before 1900: Imagination discovers technology (University of
Michigan: Twayne, 1994); Mark Bold, A.M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint, eds.,
The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 2009); Ana Simões,
“From capital city to scientific capital.”
22 Prosper-Barthelemy Enfant, Mémoires d’un industriel de l’an 2440 (1828); Ebenezer
Howard, To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898).
to captivate the attention of the audience for urgent contemporary issues. As

Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash argue in the introduction
to the edited volume Utopias/Dystopias, utopias are not just “objects of study”
per se but “historically grounded analytic categories” in the sense of futuristic
projections which tell us a lot about the present agendas of visionaries, that is
“with which to understand how individuals and groups around the world have
interpreted their present tense with an eye into the future.”23
2.1 Melo de Matos’ “Lisbon in the year 2000.” Capitalist Lisbon

and its Industrial Sister City
Matos was an engineer who specialized in the construction of ports and light-
houses.24 In four successive installments, Matos depicted Lisbon in the year
2000 as a city centred on the future port; the kernel uniting a cosmopolitan
Lisbon to the world, the wharf of Alcântara the city’s warehouses, the train sta-
tion, and the tunnel linking Lisbon to the southern margins of the river Tagus.
Lisbon in the year 2000 would be a truly unified European capital, linking the
capitalist modernity characteristic of its urban center to its industrialized,
though no less developed, periphery just south of the river. Modern Lisbon was
crossed by faster transports and communications, made possible due to the
successes of electromagnetic applications. It ticked at the pace of a huge and
very precise clock, simultaneously “the brain and the heart”25 of its downtown
central station, around which the ministries of commerce, industry and com-
munications were located, as well as main banks, credit institutions, various
societies, and insurance companies, all fundamental to secure the transactions
behind the construction of a thriving capitalist city.26
On the south side of the river Tagus, an imposing industrial complex with
25 factories for processing canned fish, and various buildings capped with
tower chimneys expelling heavy fumes composed the highly industrialized
23 Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash, “Introduction. Utopia and Dystopia
beyond Space and Time,” in Utopia and Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility, eds.
Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley, Gyan Prakash (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2010), 1–17, 3.
24 He also projected modifications to the port of Aveiro. See José Maria Melo de Matos,
“Memória sobre a arborização das Dunas de Aveiro,” Revista de Obras Públicas e Minas 23
(1892), 268–270.
25 Matos, “Lisboa no anno 2000. III,” 221.
26 He referred explicitly to the Agricultural Bank (Caixa Geral Agrícola), Industrial
Credit (Crédito Industrial) and General Construction Cooperative (Cooperativa Geral
Edificadora).
Figure 3.2a A view of industrial Lisbon at the other side of the river Tagus
In Melo de Matos, “Lisbon in the year 2000,” 1906
background to the renewed capital city.27 An underground aerodynamic tun-

nel for trains connected the port of Lisbon to the industrialized south side, and
specifically to the village of Seixal in just three minutes. Thus materialized a
techno-scientific prowess convening the expertise of foreign and Portuguese
scientists, who were raised to the status of heroes.28 By linking the two cit-
ies – one real and the other imagined – by an underground tunnel, the utopian
vision of Matos heralded the association of political power with industry, very
much embodying the Saint-Simonian faith in infrastructures as the corner-
stone of industrial societies, and carrying with it the support of a bourgeois-
industrial political order.
Three years later, while reporting on the transformation of the old train sta-
tion into modern workshops just south of the river in the village of Barreiro,
Matos conceded that his vision for industrial Lisbon could be closer to reality
than he initially expected.29 For it was in these workshops, filled with scien-
tific instruments and the siege of various experimental precision tests, that the
27 Matos, “Lisboa no anno 2000. I.,” 133.

28 Matos, “Lisboa no anno 2000. IV.”
29 José Maria Melo de Matos, “Os caminhos de ferro do Estado. As oficinas de Sul e Sueste no
Barreiro,” Ilustração Portuguesa, 157 (1909): 249–56.
Figure 3.2b Underwater tunnel and train connecting Lisbon to Seixal

IN MELO DE MATOS, “LISBON INTHE YEAR 2000” 1906
modernization of various components of the train system and carriages used

in the south of Portugal were taking place.
2.2 Fialho de Almeida’s “Monumental Lisbon.” Low-Cost Housing

Almeida attended the Polytechnic School and the Medical School, hav-
ing graduated in medicine in 1895, but his professional life centred on jour-
nalistic and writing activities, often of a critical, pamphlet-like, and satirical
bent. They included the criticism of urban choices for the capital, which he
considered still far from major European cities.30 In “Monumental Lisbon,”
Almeida developed a utopian model whose future was neither distant nor out
of reach, but an imminent future intimately connected to his present. Contrary
to Matos’s utopia, which described Lisbon in a century’s time, Almeida’s uto-
pia delved into then-current concerns and problems of the city as a whole.
Comparing present-day Lisbon with underdeveloped or peripheral cities such
as those existing in Morocco, Spain, or Africa31 he depicted a modern, socialist,
republican, and cosmopolitan Lisbon, which entered the “cooperativist and
collectivist period in which associations aim at fixing the prerogatives of law
and become the force.”32 This socialist Lisbon was commanded not only by
technology, as in Matos’ bright and electric city, but also by aesthetic choices
behind new constructions, including the erecting of monuments, as in the
case of the new building of the Medical School.
Improvements in the city port associated with an imposing marginal ave-
nue stretching along the river were an integral part of his vision, which aimed
at changing a “court city filled with rolling orgies, gasps of gas and festivities”33
into a monumental city able to smoothly integrate modernist trends along-
side traditional values. This was to be reflected not only in housing and build-
ings, which would come to define a Portuguese architectural style of housing,
but in bridges and tunnels, parks, green spaces, and horticultural sites as well.
These were the springboard behind the often-radical reconstruction of what
he dubbed as wealthy and poor Lisbons, that is the part of Lisbon where the
elites and bourgeoisie lived and the other part of the city populated by the
working class.
Like Matos, Almeida also envisioned the creation of a sister city, an “indus-
trial and commercial Lisbon” on the south side of the river Tagus. Prior to
its construction, it was necessary to overcome municipal and professional
30 Fialho de Almeida, Os Gatos (Lisboa: Livraria Clássica Editora, 1927, first published
1889–94).
31 Fialho de Almeida, “Lisboa Monumental. II.”
32 Fialho de Almeida, “Lisboa Monumental. I,” 199.
33 Fialho de Almeida, “Lisboa Monumental. II,” 498.
Figures 3.3a–b The two-platform bridge connecting the two Lisbons of the future and
working-class neighbourhood of the hygienic type
In Fialho de Almeida, “Monumental Lisbon,” 1906
conflicts, extend the southern network of the railway from Barreiro to Cacilhas
and Almada, and then build a fluvial terminal close to the customs’ buildings
(see chapter 6 in this volume), to the left of Terreiro do Paço.34 The monu-
mentality of the new “industrial city” was derived from its “furnaces and ham-
mers;” a cityscape of factories and chimneys emanating heavy smoke that took
London for its model. Routinely visited by a “labyrinth of steamers,”35 a monu-
mental bridge with a platform for people and another for trains connected the
two cities of Lisbon.36
Both in the new “industrial city” and in reconstructed “poor Lisbon,” espe-
cially where factories and industrial sites were located, proletarian neighbour-
hoods of the “modern hygienic type”37 were to be constructed with appropriate
materials, free from contagious diseases, including tuberculosis. In accordance
with modernity’s hygienic model, the neighbourhoods should have proper
ventilation, water and sewage infrastructures, and be surrounded by gardens
and green spaces where families and workers could spend their leisure times
(see chapters 2 and 10 in this volume). They embodied the “republican and
proletariat Lisbon.”38 Inspired by traditional rural one-floor houses of the
southern regions of Portugal, they were surrounded by a small garden and were
in rows in large and airy streets with sidewalks filled with trees. The rents
were cheap and included an annuity enabling tenants to become owners of
their houses after a certain number of years.39 Streets radiated from a common
large rotunda, which was the heart of the neighbourhood. Amply illuminated
and filled with trees, it could accommodate concerts and outdoor activities. It
included the public library, the church, a free bathhouse, facilities for children,
including a kindergarten and lactario, a conference hall, and finally the public
school, occupying the richest building of all, and materializing the importance
of moulding the new republican working-class citizen. On the opposing side of
the radiating streets a square boulevard delimited the neighbourhood’s bound-
ary. Filled with trees it included at its corners playgrounds for children and
fields for adults to practice physical exercise and to play collective games.40
For both Matos and Almeida, the rise of a “new poor Lisbon,” filled with
working-class neighbourhoods, should merge the advantages of city and
34 Fialho de Almeida, “Lisboa Monumental. I,” 497.

countryside to enforce hygienist policies as outlined by the framework of

republicanism and Saint-Simonian ideologies.41
3 When Reality Meets Fiction
3.1 Melo de Matos and Fialho de Almeida on Existing Working-Class

Housing and Neighbourhoods
Matos and Almeida addressed the living conditions for the working class in
different ways, because of the dissimilar time frames of both utopias. Almeida
discussed them extensively in “Monumental Lisbon.” Melo de Matos did
not, as he projected his utopia into the far future, but he tackled the topic in
multiple fora.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, an estimated c.200 working-
class neighbourhoods existed in various industrialized sections of Lisbon, with
even more to follow in decades to come.42 Almeida’s vision was antithetical
to the “so-called working-class neighbourhoods recently built.” For him, “they
are asphyxiating spots, without beauty or grace, often lugubrious courtyards,
implanted in second class terrains with bad access, poorly ventilated, badly
caulked, and infested by damp, whose poor hygienic conditions are a function
of the stupidity of builders, and the cruel avarice of landlords.”43 Moreover, he
did not hesitate to criticize the status quo behind their construction – rang-
ing from property owners, builders, engineers and municipalities – urging the
constitution of a council of independent experts. This independent council,
according to Almeida, would be capable of enforcing urban choices for houses,
streets, and neighbourhoods in Lisbon, and thereby securing a harmonious
urban development and urging Portuguese architects to work towards the
creation of a Portuguese style of housing (the so-called Portuguese house).44
These interventions, while scathing in its criticism, ultimately informed
“Monumental Lisbon’s” detailed proposal of working-class housing and neigh-
bourhoods anchored in the concept of a “modern and hygienic” industry.
Matos, by contrast, did not refer to working class housing and neighbour-
hoods in “Lisbon in the year 2000.” That said, in his expert practice Matos
showed a deep commitment to low-cost housing and working-class dwellings,
41 For more on the question of gardens and green spaces see Simões and Diogo, “Urban
utopias and the Anthropocene.”
42 Pereira, “Pátios e vilas de Lisboa;” Teixeira, “As estratégias de habitação.”
as well as the improvement of their living conditions. Thus, it is not a coin-

cidence that he was the editor of the journal Construção Moderna (Modern
Construction), founded in 1900 as the first Portuguese journal purposefully
addressed to construction works, and specifically to new modern family
houses.45
Despite the absence of the pointed rhetoric characteristic of Almeida,
Matos’ public interventions retained a style of their own. He voiced his ideas
in several forums, including articles in journals, newspapers, and talks deliv-
ered at numerous conferences and associations. As a committed engineer
he participated in various expert associations and publications, pushing for-
ward the professional status of civil engineering.46 His agenda for a scientifi-
cally based engineering and its role in moulding a techno-scientific nation
shaped the contents of Construção Moderna; particularly between 1903 and
1910. As an engineer with republican inclinations, and member of one of the
political parties (Centro Regenerador Liberal) he did not consider himself
a political man in the partisan sense, but one deeply involved in popularization
and educational activities able to build the new republican citizen, irrespec-
tive of class. He was especially concerned with the least privileged sections of
the population to such an extent that he considered one of the main dimen-
sions of engineering to be its interventionist social role. It is in this framework
that we should address his various reflections on low-cost housing.
Informed by international discussions and trends, including demonstra-
tions in International Exhibitions, both in Europe and the United States of
America, he summarised them in his talks and publications. Critical of the sta-
tus of low cost housing and neighbourhoods in various cities in Portugal, Matos
proposed several measures to align Portuguese cities with international urban
trends.47 Low cost housing was a social question, which emerged with the rise
of industrial cities and the concomitant migratory influxes of workers,48 and a
hot topic at the intersection of hygienist, industrialist, and capitalist concerns
45 Marieta Dá Mesquita, “Mello de Mattos e a Construcção Moderna” in Revistas de

Arquitectura: Arquivo(s) da Modernidade, ed. Marieta Dá Mesquita (Lisboa: Caleidoscópio,
2011) includes biographical details on Melo de Matos; Paulo Manuel Simões Nunes, A
Construção Moderna e a cultura arquitectónica no início de Novecentos em Portugal,
Mestrado em Teorias da Arte, FBAUL, 2000; Pereira, “Pátios e vilas de Lisboa.”
46 Mesquita, “Mello de Mattos;” Maria Paula Diogo; Diogo and Saraiva, Inventing a European
nation.
47 O Conimbricense, Jan to Feb 1904. He preferred the designation low-cost housing to work-
ing class/proletariat housing due to its broader scope, which encompassed not only fac-
tory workers but also other sorts of workers, including those in commerce.
48 See for example Clemens Zimmermann, ed., Industrial Cities. History and Futures
(Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2013).
that cannot be assessed from an exclusively philanthropist stance but from an

ethical and ideological perspective.
3.2 The Bairro Grandela: An Exceptional Case

In his 1910 lecture delivered at the Congresso Nacional da Mutualidade
(National Congress of Mutuality), Matos highlighted an exception to the
overall misery of working-classes dwellings: the Bairro Grandela (Grandela
neighbourhood).49 Located near a railway station in the outskirts of Lisbon
(São Domingos de Benfica), the Grandela neighbourhood epitomized
Saint-Simonian, republican, and freemason ideals. The Barrio Grandela exem-
plified the perfect environment for the “new man,” the cornerstone of republi-
can society and its virtues of equality and fraternity.
The Grandela neighbourhood was built by Francisco Grandela, a self-made
businessman and entrepreneur, republican, freemason, Saint-Simonian, and
a believer in industrial progress.50 The son of a country physician, Grandela
came to Lisbon in his teens to work as an employee in a fabric shop. When he
was 26 years old, he established his own shop, renowned in the capital because
of innovative marketing techniques that he later implemented in his Armazéns
do Grandela (Grandela general store), inspired by the French magasins.
The Grandela magasin was an architectural project by George Demay, a
French architect who specialized in the use of cast-iron, was and also involved
in the construction of low-income houses. In charge of its construction was
the Portuguese engineer Ângelo Sárrea de Sousa Prado, a deputy of the African
Commission of the Geographical Society of Lisbon, and responsible for survey-
ing and designing various railroad lines in Angola.51 Demay used two of the
major magasins in Paris – Printemps and Samaritaine – as inspiration for his
Art-Nouveau building with 11 floors replete with the most up-to-date technolo-
gies, where around 500 employees worked and sold a wide variety of products.
49 José Maria Melo de Matos, “Da ação da mutualidade contra as habitações insalubres.
Papel do cooperativismo na construção de casas higiénicas e baratas,” Conferência apre-
sentada no congresso nacional da mutualidade (Lisboa, 1910), 14.
50 João Mário Mascarenhas, ed. Grandella, o Grande Homem (Lisboa: Câmara Municipal
de Lisboa, 1994); A.H. de Oliveira Marques, Dicionário de Maçonaria Portuguesa (Lisboa:
Editorial Delta, 1986). Grandela also published a journal called A Cidade e os Campos (City
and Countryside), in which various activities in which he was involved were advertised,
including the store and the neighbourhood.
51 Luanda-Ambaca (1876) and Zaire River-Zambeje (1894). Prado was also a member of the
Sociedade dos Makavenkos (Makavenkos Society), founded by Grandela to host male par-
ties, but one of the sites where eventually the Republican revolution was prepared, as
many of its members were republicans and Freemasons.
Grandela’s marketing agenda included many novelties: the use of a door-

man dressed in red; large, attractive, and amusing advertisements in the main
newspapers; the concepts of product guarantee, refunding, home delivery and
fixed price; and sales by catalogue in Portugal, Spain, and the Portuguese colo-
nies. Catalogues were distributed free of charge on the Portuguese mainland,
on the islands of Azores and Madeira, West and East Africa, India, and Brazil,
and exceeded 2 million copies per year. Due to his entrepreneurial success,
Grandela decided to invest in the textile industry, building in S. Domingos de
Benfica a factory for knitwear, woolen cloths, cotton, gloves, and perfumes,
employing around 250 workers.
Paying tribute to his ideological commitments, Grandela implemented a set
of benefits for his employees, such as Sunday rest, free medical care, a week of
paid vacation and, finally, a neighbourhood. The Bairro Grandela was inaugu-
rated52 in 1904, and its architectural plan was authored by architect Rosendo
Carvalheira who, together with Matos, founded the journal Construção
Moderna.53 The neighbourhood included 86 houses hierarchically organized,
a large central avenue, shops, a school built in 1907 (and named after Afonso
Costa, one of the most renowned republican leaders and future prime min-
ister and close friend of Francisco Grandela), a kindergarten built in 1906,
and a place for workers to socialize called Academia de Instrução e Recreio
(Academy of Instruction and Leisure).
In contrast with the traditional neighbourhoods of old Lisbon, namely
Alfama, described as a filthy slum, the Grandela neighbourhood was presented
as clean, healthy, bright, and blessed by the country’s unpolluted air. Whereas
the houses were built according to the Portuguese style, the school and the
kindergarten presented classic facades with masonic symbols, which under-
lined their relevance for the community as temples of knowledge.54 Upon
52 Bairro Grandela is referred in the database of the Direção-Geral do Património Cultural

http://www.patrimoniocultural.gov.pt/pt/patrimonio/patrimonio-imovel/pesquisa-do
-patrimonio/classificado-ou-em-vias-de-classificacao/geral/view/74406/. Also see: http://
restosdecoleccao.blogspot.pt/2014/09/armazens-grandella.HTML. References to this
neighbourhood can also be found at: Luísa Teotónio Pereira, Uma perspectiva sobre a
questão das ‘Casas baratas e salubres’ (1881–1910), manuscript of work for the discipline
‘História Contemporânea de Portugal’ (1980).‬‬
53 Filipa Antunes, Habitação Operária – Pátios e vilas de Lisboa. Aexperiência da cidade
operária industrial. MSc Thesis, Faculdade de Arquitectura, Universidade Técnica de
Lisboa, 2002. Rosendo Carvalheira was also member of the municipality, member of
the Makavenkos Society, and worked on an unfinished plan of a sanatorium funded by
Grandela in the outskirts of Lisbon.
54 Francisco Grandela was a member of the Sociedade das Escolas Liberais, a society which
promoted the construction and financing of primary schools.
Figures 3.4a–b Working-class houses in Grandella neighbourhood. Joshua Benoliel,

c.1910 Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa, PT/AMLSB/CMLSBAH/PCSP/004/
ACU/001135; and School at the main central avenue, credit Who trips
completion, Demay, the architect of the Grandela magasin’s monumental

building, was invited to visit the neighbourhood. As an architect also engaged
in low-income housing, Demay did not hesitate to consider it as an example for
all European countries to follow in their industrialized cities.
To avoid the idea of charity behind existing working-class neighbourhoods,
workers paid a monthly rent for their houses and for the services of the kinder-
garten and of the school, defined according to their salaries; these contribu-
tions were sent to a common fund managed by the workers’ association, which
also received a contribution from the owner of the Grandela factory and store.
The Grandela neighbourhood mirrored both Matos’ and Almeida’s
visions concerning the modernizing and civilizing role of industry, within
Saint-Simonian and republican ideals. Progress, both material and spiritual,
depended on the power of science and technology to shape the new urban
landscapes; new urban landscapes to nurture a new and more just society.
3.3 Capital, Credit, and Low-Cost Housing

Most working-class dwellings, closer to slums than to decent accommodation,
were far from those imagined by Matos and Almeida, or from the Grandela
neighbourhood. Several reports by politically involved experts (engineers, phy-
sicians, and architects)55 considered it imperative to build appropriate neigh-
bourhoods for the working class, in a movement parallel to the one giving rise
to a new wealthy Lisbon funded by a handful of capitalist investors.
The first proposed law concerning the construction of low-cost hygienic
dwellings dated from 1884, and was presented by Augusto Fuschini, a politi-
cian and engineer of socialist and positivist leanings.56 Others followed,57
but no legislation was issued before 1918,58 during the ephemeral period of
the dictatorship of Sidónio Pais, which opposed the Republic. Mirroring what
was happening at the international level, persistent discussions on low-cost
housing by various actors ranged from house plans, number of divisions and
construction materials, mono- and/or multi-family houses, to working-class
55 Inquérito Industrial de 1881 (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1881); Inquérito aos Pátios exis-
tentes em Lisboa (1905); Inquérito de Salubridade das Povoações mais importantes de
Portugal. MOPCI, Conselho dos Melhoramentos Sanitários (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional,
1903). Physicians also published several works discussing the living conditions of the
working class and the propagation of contagious diseases such as tuberculosis in filthy
neighbourhoods.
56 Álvaro Ferreira da Silva, “Fuschini, Augusto Maria (1843–1911),” in Maria Filomena Mónica,
ed., Dicionário Biográfico Parlamentar, 1834–1910, vol. II (Lisboa, Coleção Parlamento,
2005), 262–268, 267.
57 A review of the various attempts can be found in Mata, Estudos Económicos.
58 Decreto nº4137, Diário do Governo, I Série – Número 87, 25 April 1918, 451–457.
neighbourhoods’ plans in the proximity of industrial facilities, as well as the

financial means for their construction and the question of ownership. Despite
their profusion and the commitment of its participants they were unable to
pass through the threshold of theory to practice, resulting in no immediate
practical action.
Grandela neighbourhood was built in accordance with Saint-Simonian
market-driven guidelines, by an entrepreneur to house his workers in an airy
location at the outskirts of Lisbon, and in a neighbourhood accessible by train.
Obviously, not all working-class housing arising from private initiatives, includ-
ing those by industrialists, factory owners, and capitalists, shared the philan-
thropic rules recommended by the New Christianity, with its ethics of devotion
to the common good and the improvement of the life of the masses.59 In fact,
the average rent of a working-class house amounted to around 3500 réis, or
10% of the salary of the best-paid workers.60 No wonder that future legislation
imposed a strict limit of c.300/400 réis on rents in order for buildings to fall
under the designation of low-cost housing. Therefore, for most private build-
ers what was at stake was a financial problem that proved difficult to resolve.
How to articulate low-cost housing and limited rents with capital investment
and profit?
The financial means for constructing low-cost housing and questions of
their ownership were tangentially addressed in the utopian models of Matos
and Almeida, respectively: Matos’s utopia proposed the localization of finan-
cial and credit institutions and various kinds of associations at the “brain and
heart” of the city, while Almeida’s utopia gave primacy to cooperativist and
collectivist associations in the new cosmopolitan and socialist Lisbon, which
included suggestions of cheap rents with an annuity enabling workers to even-
tually become homeowners.61
Utopias aside, national discourse on low-income housing continued to oscil-
late between a republican state, which did not yet consider its duties to secure
59 Saint-Simon, Nouveau Christianisme (1821). For the relation of Saint-Simonianism and the
proposal of a unifying framework substituting that provided by traditional religions see
Richard Wittman, “Space, Networks, and the Saint-Simonians,” Grey Room 40 (2010), 24–49.
For the relation with market-driven guidelines see Michel Bellet, “Saint-Simonism and
Utilitarianism: the history of a paradox. Bentham’s Defence of Usury under Saint-Amand
Bazard’s Interpretation,” Working paper GATE 2011–35. 2011. <halshs-00654847>, 2011.
60 The minimum 10% corresponded to salaries of the best-paid workers, that is those work-
ing at metallurgical industries. Due to such high rents, in practice just middle class fami-
lies, not the working class ones, could afford them. Inquirição às Associações de Classe,
Boletim do Trabalho, 49 (1910); A. Castro, A Revolução Industrial em Portugal no Século XIX
(Porto: Limiar, 1978 (4ªed.), 194–95.
public financing of housing for disfavoured citizens,62 and a capitalist class

mostly attracted to speculative investment in prospective neighbourhoods for
wealthy clients in the emerging capitalist Lisbon. It is no wonder that a third
way was explored, empowering worker self-organization into associations or
cooperatives with the ability to finance their own housing.63
By the first decade of the 20th century, only two successful construction
cooperatives of low-cost housing in Lisbon persisted, according again to Matos’
assessment: The Popular Cooperative of Building Construction (Cooperativa
Popular de Construção Predial) and the Portuguese Building Company
(Companhia Predial Portuguesa).64
The oldest building, the Popular Cooperative of Building Construction,65
was founded on 5 March 1893 by a butcher named Braz Fernandes.66 By 1911,
it had 2993 members, paying monthly different fixed fees.67 The price of the
square meter of purchased land varied from 200 to 4500 réis. If there were, at
times, cheaper than average prices, this was due to landowners’ philanthropic
inclinations, i.e., sympathy towards the association’s aims. The association had
constructed 11 houses, and in 1915, built an additional 14 with preparations
for additional future housing. Members were selected by lottery and were
obliged to pay back the amount invested in their house in several annuities
below 20.68
62 Miriam Alpern Pereira, “Centenário da República: Mutualismos, seguros sociais e a I

República,” Seara Nova 1713 (2010) (http://www.searanova.publ.pt/pt/1713/dossier/171/
Centen%C3%A1rio-da-Rep%C3%BAblica-Mutualismos-seguros-sociais-e-a-I-rep%
C3%BAblica.htm).
63 Among various projects we highlight the proposal for the creation of an association for
the construction of working-class neighbourhoods put forward by the famous architect
Adães Bermudes. See Adães Bermudes, Projecto para a Organização de uma Sociedade
Promotora de Habitações Económicas destinadas às Classes Laboriosas e Menos Abastadas
(Lisboa, 1897).
64 Melo de Matos, “Da ação da mutualidade.”
65 Estatutos da Cooperativa Popular de Construção Predial (Lisboa, Tipográfica Económica,
1895).
66 Daily newspaper O Século, “O problema da habitação – que tem feito a obra da Cooperativa
Popular de Construcção Predial,” 12 December 1915.
67 From the total number of members, 2672 paid a monthly fee of 100 réis, 206 a fee of 200
réis, and 115 a fee of 300 réis. For comparisons’ purposes, note that in 1910 the daily salary
of a mason (medium category – “official”) was 340 réis, while the salary of a textile worker
was 415 réis. However, from 1860 to 1910, there was a steady impoverishment of worker’s
lifestyle as food products increased by around 60% while salaries raised just 30%. Castro,
A Revolução Industrial, 186–89.
68 Melo de Matos, “Da ação da mutualidade,” 14–16; O Século, “O problema da habitação;”
Caeiro da Mata, Estudos Económicos, 136–137.
The Portuguese Building Company was founded in 24 January 1905,69 and

was directed by Frederico Bartolomeu and the engineer Justino Teixeira. It con-
structed 9 houses by 1911, and the selection mechanisms for house candidates
were like those used in the Popular Cooperative of Building Construction –
periodic fees, lottery, fixed annuities, and deadlines for investment refunds.
Other mechanisms were also put in place for non-winner lottery members to
be able to purchase their own houses.70 However, in order for the association to
be financially sustainable, these working mechanisms implied a membership
of around 10000 members, numbers far greater than the membership at that
time. In fact, by 31 December 1909, the association only had 734 members.71
To counter identical circumstances in other European countries, such as
Germany, the state was discussing financial mechanisms to support this kind
of association. Despite rising republicanism and increasing concerns for the
state duties towards the well-being of all citizens, irrespective of origin and
class, these discussions had no tangible outcome.
In this context, the talk referred to above and delivered at the 1910 National
Congress of Mutuality,72 Matos discussed several measures to secure the finan-
cial sustainability of private building cooperatives, including the articulation
of their action with loans’ agencies, mutual aid associations, insurance compa-
nies or other financial entities which could administer loans and mortgages,
enabling workers’ cooperatives under favourable enforced financial condi-
tions, including limited interest rates, to re-invest their capital in new low-
cost housing. These various solutions strongly reasoned with the financial and
moral roles allocated to banks, capital and credit by Saint-Simonians.73
4 Concluding Remarks
In this chapter we opted to look at a less visible face of the work of experts in
reshaping the urban landscape during a period in which engineers, physicians,
69 Estatutos da Cooperativa Predial Portuguesa aprovado em 1907 com a reforma de 1911

(Lisboa, Tipografia Universal, 1911).
70 Securities (títulos) defined members to be selected, bonds (obrigações) defined forms of
payment of capital invested, interests to be gained by and deadlines for reimbursement
to the association.
71 Melo de Matos, “Da ação da mutualidade,” 16; Caeiro da Mata, Estudos Económicos,
138–142.
72 Melo de Matos, “Da ação da mutualidade.”
73 Bellet, “Saint-Simonism and Utilitarianism.”
architects, and scientists were vying for the recognition of their professional sta-
tus and their role as urban experts. By taking working-class neighbourhoods as
urban objects of study, we challenge the exclusive association of experts to major
techno-scientific and medical institutions of education, training and research.
It is only by accounting for urban spaces as objects belonging to the history of
science and technology that we can understand how and why the problem
of housing for the working class became one of their central concerns.
Their socialist, republican, and Saint-Simonian inclinations enable to
understand how their commitment to techno-scientific visions of the meta-
morphosed capital and of the other Lisbon, which came to be materialized in
mid-twentieth century and cannot be disentangled from their commitment
to secure proper living conditions for incoming workers. For these experts,
affirming progress and modernity as primarily dependent on industrialization
and its attendant infrastructures of transports and communication implied
a concern for the potentially negative effects of migratory fluxes of workers
into urban settings. As such they took seriously the impact of migrations on
the living conditions for the working class and discussed the means for their
improvement by attending international conferences or by promoting parlia-
mentary debates on the topic. It is in this context that we assessed the socio-
technical imaginaries of Almeida and Melo, and the discussions in various fora
by Matos. At the same time, we looked at singular cases in which these imagi-
naries were materialized in the Grandela neighbourhood and the two building
cooperatives highlighted by Matos. While of limited impact and predating a
consistent discussion of the role of the welfare state they reveal how individu-
als or groups of individuals took the matter in hand.
At the macro-level, their utopian visions depended on steam, industry,
infrastructures of mobility and global scales. But at the scale of working-class
neighbourhoods extensively discussed there was an attempt to enforce hygien-
ist policies within the framework of republican and Saint-Simonian ideologies
concerning the well-being of the masses, and the role of financial institutions,
credit, and capital in the improvement of their living conditions.
Grounded on comparisons with other cities in Europe and the United States,
the sharp criticisms voiced by Almeida and Matos concerning recent devel-
opments in “poor Lisbon,” and the discussions for an imagined “poor Lisbon,”
ranging from housing conditions to organizational and financial means of
their construction, reveal how their Saint-Simonian visions to alter the periph-
eral status of Lisbon depended on techno-scientific expertise, hygienist poli-
cies and fluxes of capital.
Acknowledgements
Research for this chapter was supported by the Foundation for Science and
Technology, under projects PTDC/IVC-HFC/3122/2014, UID/HIS/UI0286/2013,
UID/HIS/UI0286/2019 and UIDB/00286/2020 UIDP/00286/2020.
Chapter 4
Crossing Urban and Transport Expertise to Pave

Lisbon’s Future Urban Sprawl (1930s–1940s)
M. Luísa Sousa
1 Introduction
This chapter builds on the historiography that asserts the necessity for treating
infrastructures such as roads as technological artefacts and cultural objects.
Therefore it interprets them as such.1 The example given by Langdon Winner
of New York’s parkways planned by Robert Moses, which supposedly excluded
by design “poor people and black [people]” from accessing the wealthier areas
of Long Island, although controversial, remains a classical text that defends
the view that “artefacts have politics” – i.e., that artefacts “can embody specific
forms of power and authority.”2 The case presented in this chapter focuses on
the construction of a tourist infrastructure – the Lisbon-Cascais coastal road –
and its connection to the changes in Lisbon’s urban planning in the 1930s and
1940s. It privileges the study of the relation between artefacts and politics,
namely the analysis of values inscribed in artefacts3 – their material charac-
teristics and limitations, regulation, and embedded envisioned uses – and the
relationship between technical and political actors, with an emphasis on the
relation between expertise and the regime’s political agenda.
The then recently institutionalised right-wing dictatorship of Portugal’s
Estado Novo (New State 1933–1974) aimed at bringing about the “regenera-
tion” of the nation by promoting a new social and political order – e.g. state
corporatism, single party, censorship and repression. This “regeneration” was
branded as a new form of nationalism that reinforced its imperial vocation
and aided in the construction of the “new man” based on the imagined virtues
1 Thomas Zeller, Driving Germany: The Landscape of the German Autobahn, 1930–1970 (New
York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007), 239, 240.
2 Langdon Winner, “Do artifacts have politics?,” Daedalus 109, 1 (1980): 121–136, quotations
from 121, 24. For a discussion on the controversy raised by this article see, for instance, Steve
Woolgar and Geoff Cooper, “Do Artefacts Have Ambivalence? Moses’ Bridges, Winner’s
Bridges and Other Urban Legends in S&TS,” Social Studies of Science 29, 3 (1999): 433–449.
3 Susan Leigh Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” American Behavioral Scientist 43, 3
(1999): 377–391, 388, 389.
© M. Luísa Sousa, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004513440_007

Crossing Urban and Transport Expertise 121
of the catholic rural family and country’s poor lifestyles.4 Alongside these
“moral” elements, this “regeneration” of the nation also possessed a material
and technological dimension (see also chapter 14 in this volume). In spite of
the regime’s strong rural-driven rhetoric against urbanization, mechanization
of agriculture, and industry in general, important investments in urban plan-
ning, public works, and industry featured among the policies developed dur-
ing the period of the New State’s consolidation of power in the 1930s.5 This
was epitomised in the Centennial Commemorations (1940), announced by
the president of the Council of Ministers, António de Oliveira Salazar, in 1938,
and aimed at showing the regime’s “work on moral and material renewal and
resurgence,” and sought “to make public and private services accelerate the
pace of their activity,” thereby affirming “the fulfilling capacity of Portugal.”6
To achieve this “fulfilling capacity,” events like exhibitions, conferences, and
processions were planned, as well as a program of public works that focused
mostly on the two main cities of mainland Portugal – Lisbon and Porto – and
their surrounding areas, and which included tourism roads, and other works
broadly framed in the new urban plans.7
These works were launched by the Ministry of Public Works and Commu
nications (created in 1932), headed by the minister, Duarte Pacheco, an electri-
cal engineer who supported the regime’s agenda. In a speech given at one of
the several Centennial Commemoration events in 1940, Pacheco emphasised
the “heroic efforts of our people through its eight centuries of history,” and the
“fulfilling capacity, patriotic and Christian spirit of the generation of the 1940s,”
which was a “symbol of historical continuity of [the] New State – underpinned
by Salazar’s knowledge and fervent patriotism.”8 Pacheco was adamant that
these nationalist commemorations held the unanimous and enthusiastic
applause of all Portuguese people, and that all who contributed to Portugal’s
imperial vocation – including artists, technicians, and workers – should be
glorified.
4 Fernando Rosas, “O salazarismo e o homem novo: ensaio sobre o New State e a questão do
totalitarismo,” Análise Social 35, 157 (2001): 1031–1054.
5 Fernando Rosas, O New State nos anos trinta: elementos para o estudo da natureza económica
e social do Salazarismo (1928–1938) (Lisboa: Editorial Estampa, 1986), 152–155.
6 “Oito Séculos de Nacionalidade. A Fundação de Portugal e a Restauração da Independência
serão comemoradas com o maior relevo em 1939 e 1940,” Diário de Lisboa, 27 March 1938.
7 Decreto-lei nº 28797, in Diário do Governo, Ministério das Obras Públicas e Comunicações
(MOPC) (1938): 1044, 1045.
8 Duarte Pacheco, “Sessão solene de encerramento da Exposição do Mundo Português,” Revista
dos Centenários 24(1940): 21.
122 Sousa
This chapter focuses on two groups of technicians who contributed to the

regime’s plans for the modernisation of Lisbon and its propaganda through
their technical expertise regarding roads and urban planning, and particularly
about the construction of the Lisbon-Cascais coastal road: road engineers
from the Junta Autónoma de Estradas (Autonomous Board of Roads, JAE) and
two architect-urbanists, from the Société Française des Urbanistes (French
Urbanists Society). The values inscribed in the design of this road, and its rela-
tion to the urban planning of Lisbon, reveal a set of political purposes that
equally served the regime and the technicians who oversaw its construction.
Furthermore, they created a road with improved technical characteristics and
scenic views, hitherto non-existent in the country, that served as the basis for
the promotion of elitist lifestyles, such as automobile tourism.9 The promo-
tion of urban sprawl by this type of planning paved the way to a future domi-
nated by the automobile at the expense of other forms of mobility, leading to
what Mimi Sheller called mobility injustices.10 Both the road engineers and
architect-urbanists embraced the car in their conception of mobility infra-
structures – including the “new city” to the west – as part of their normative
visions for Lisbon and its future development.11
Using archival material from the JAE and the Municipality of Lisbon, as well
as other coeval sources such as governmental and technical reports, legislation
and plans, and journals and newspapers’ articles, this chapter shows how road
engineers acted as urban planners while making the coastal road to the West
of Lisbon, and how architect-urbanists projected new forms of mobility onto
Lisbon and its surroundings. For it was these two types of expertise, which
crossed and converged to create a new Lisbon fit for Portugal’s New State.
9 On the exceptional characteristics of the investment and the construction process of this
road see Sousa, “Roads for the 1940 Portuguese Nationality Commemorations”; M. Luísa
Sousa, A mobilidade automóvel em Portugal, 1920–1950 (Lisboa: Chiado Editora, 2016).
10 In the 1980s the modal split for commuting travels between the area covered by the
coastal road and Lisbon was almost equally divided between private (automobiles) and
collective transport. In the 1990s, automobility became increasingly dominant. Margarida
Pereira, “O processo de decisão na política urbana: o exemplo da Costa do Sol” (Ph.D.
dissertation, Universidade Nova Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, 1994),
75, anexos AI-5, AI-6 and AI-7. On mobility justice see Mimi Sheller, Mobility Justice. The
Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes (London; Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2018).
11 Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering urbanism: networked infrastructures tech-
nological mobilities and the urban condition (London; New York: Routledge, 2001), 12.
2 Road Engineers as Urban Planners. Urbanization in the West of

Lisbon and the Construction of the Lisbon-Cascais Coastal Road
2.1 Engineers and the Autonomous Board of Roads

The implementation of the material improvements framed by the New State’s
“regeneration” program was intimately linked to the professional affirmation
of engineers, who sought to make their work relevant to the agenda of Salazar’s
dictatorship.12 With the State as their main employer, the engineers contrib-
uted to carrying out this agenda, in terms of both planning and execution,
thus proving themselves as decisive aids for the New State’s public works pro-
grams during the 1930s and 1940s, including the Centennial Commemorations
(1940).13 Moreover, it was during this period that engineers benefited from the
regime’s substantial investments in public works projects such as the construc-
tion of roads and harbour renovations. In turn, these projects contributed to the
regime’s appearance of legitimacy in its propagandistic self-presentation.14 Thus,
both the regime and the engineers benefited from one another as a resource.15
12 Tiago Saraiva, “Laboratories and Landscapes: the Fascist New State and the Colonization
of Portugal and Mozambique,” HoST – Journal of History of Science and Technology 3(2009):
35–61; Maria Paula Diogo and Ana Cardoso de Matos. “Going Public: The First Portuguese
National Engineering Meeting and the Popularization of the Image of the Engineer as
an Artisan of Progress (Portugal, 1931),” Engineering Studies 4, 3 (2012): 185–204. This
professional affirmation was present since the nineteenth century and continued in
the twentieth century. Maria Paula Pires dos Santos Diogo, “A construção de uma iden-
tidade profissional: a Associação dos Engenheiros Civis Portuguezes, 1869–1937” (Ph.D.
dissertation, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 1994),
278–94; Jorge Borges de Macedo, “A problemática tecnológica no processo da continui-
dade República-Ditadura Militar-New State,” Economia III, 3 (1979): 427–453, 451; Marta
Macedo, Projectar e Construir a Nação. Engenheiros, ciência e território em Portugal no
século XIX (Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2012); Maria de Lurdes Rodrigues, Os
Engenheiros em Portugal: Profissionalização e Protagonismo (Oeiras: Celta Editora, 1999),
92–95.
13 Nuno Luís Madureira, A Economia dos Interesses. Portugal entre as Guerras (Lisboa: Livros
Horizonte, 2002), 109–16; Diogo, “A construção de uma identidade profissional,” 149, 50,
63, 76–78, 218–21, 32, 68–70; Rodrigues, Os Engenheiros em Portugal, 96, 97.
14 João Fagundes, “Obras Públicas – a grande fachada do ‘New State’,” in História de Portugal –
dos tempos pré-históricos aos nossos dias. New State: o ditador e a ditadura, ed. João Medina
(Alfragide: Ediclube, 1998), 365–385, 365. Rosas, O New State, 202, 258. Cláudia Ninhos and
M. Luísa Sousa, “The nationalization of the Portuguese landscape: Landscape architec-
ture, road engineering and the making of the New State dictatorship,” in Closing the Door
on Globalization: Internationalism, Nationalism, Culture and Science in the Nineteenth
and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Cláudia Ninhos and Fernando Clara (Abingdon, New York:
Routledge, 2017), 107–143.
15 Mitchell Ash, “Science and politics as resources for one another: rethinking a relational
history” (paper presented at the ESHS in-between meeting. Rethinking the history of the
124 Sousa
The improvement of national roads was carried out by the JAE.16 Founded
in 1927 under the Military Dictatorship that preceded the New State, and origi-
nally created as a temporary body for the improvement of transport and auto-
motive infrastructure, the JAE became one of the most important organs of the
New State’s Ministry of Public Works that helped in the elaboration and execu-
tion of the regime’s infrastructure policy. In addition to this role as political
consultant, the JAE helped to improve the administration’s oversight and man-
agement of national territory via both building materialities and designs able
to represent order and hierarchy.17 In this way a discourse on material achieve-
ments, order, and “resurgence,” emerged with respect to the JAE, thus closely
mimicking the discourse of the regime and its support groups and institutions.
As with other technoscientific institutions created or consolidated by the New
State regime, the JAE and its engineers embodied an engineering practice at
the service of Salazar’s New State (see Introduction to this volume).
The construction of the coastal road between Lisbon and Cascais demon-
strates another set of characteristics particular to JAE’s road engineers: the
development of engineering knowledges and practices appropriated from
foreign countries – namely by testing new materials and construction tech-
niques, following, for instance, the experience in road construction in Nazi
Germany18 – and the expanded remit of their expertise regarding urbanism.
This road had multiple (political) purposes, all of which were carried out
by the JAE engineers, ranging from the technical to the propagandistic, and
including the promotion of automobile tourism and the outline for Lisbon’s
westward urban expansion.19
One of the authors of the preliminary project of the Lisbon-Cascais coastal
road, and who would later become its supervisor, JAE’s engineer Paulo Marques,
sciences in Europe, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, 2019). This idea

was already developed in M. Luísa Sousa, “Roads for the 1940 Portuguese Nationality
Commemorations: Modernising by excess in a context of scarcity,” The Journal of Transport
History 37, 2 (2016): 175–193. See also Tiago Saraiva, “The Fascistization of Science,” HoST –
Journal of History of Science and Technology 3 (2009): 9–13.
16 Sousa, A mobilidade. 272–96.
17 Sousa, A mobilidade, chapter 6; Sérgio Palma Brito, Notas sobre a evolução do viajar e
a formação do turismo, vol. I (Lisboa: Medialivros, 2003), 579; Amélia Aguiar Andrade,
“Sobre a construção da imagem contemporânea de estrada,” in Momentos de Inovação
e Engenharia em Portugal no Século XX. Grandes Temas, ed. Manuel Heitor, José Maria
Brandão de Brito, and Maria Fernanda Rollo (Alfragide: Dom Quixote, 2004), 409–423.
18 Ninhos and Sousa, “The nationalization.”
19 Sousa, “Roads for the 1940 Portuguese Nationality Commemorations.”
stated the symbolic importance of the coastal road in the Boletim da Ordem
dos Engenheiros (Bulletin of the Association of Engineers). For Marques, the
coastal road was to be an achievement of both the engineers and the regime,
following the tone of the discourse that emphasised the material “regenera-
tion” promoted by New State:
The superior tact of His Excellency the President, the wise, prudent and
persistent governance of His Excellency the President of the Council
[Salazar], the clear vision, interest and dynamism of the Minister of
Public Works and Communications [Pacheco], the organization and
activity of the Autonomous Board of Roads [JAE], the working qualities
and adaptation by all who took part in the study and execution of the
works, including engineers, architects, contractors and workers, were
the base elements on which it was possible to consolidate the work
described. Apart from its direct economic purpose, this work represents
a proof of how much it is worth the union, discipline, organization and
fulfilling capacities of the Portuguese. Their result enables one to trust in
the future of Portugal.20
The coastal road was at times portrayed in official reports and exhibitions as a
showcase of the joint work of the JAE and the regime. Such was the case during
the 1948 Public Works Exhibition celebrating the fifteen years anniversary of
the Ministry of Public Works and Communications. Hosted by one of Lisbon’s
most important engineering schools, Instituto Superior Técnico (Technical
Superior Institute), it lasted five months and was visited by around half a mil-
lion people. In this exhibition JAE’s work was presented as a material indicator
of the “national progress achieved during the period of the New State.”21
2.2 The Lisbon-Cascais Coastal Road as Tourist Road

From the very beginning, the Lisbon-Cascais coastal road was designed as a
tourist attraction while policies regarding tourism became instrumental to the
regime’s propaganda. In the words of António Ferro, director of the Secretariat
20 Paulo Marques, “A estrada marginal e a auto-estrada: elementos fundamentais da rede da

Costa do Sol,” Boletim da Ordem dos Engenheiros 48(1940): 507–542, 542.
21 Quinze anos de obras públicas: 1932–1947. Exposição e congressos de Engenharia e Arqui
tectura, vol. 2 (Lisboa: Comissão Executiva da Exposição de Obras Públicas, 1949). 52.
126 Sousa
of National Propaganda, tourism was part of the general idea of Portugal’s

“national renaissance,” and served as the “great façade of nationality.”22 Thus,
by the 1930s, tourism was considered as an important element for the eco-
nomic health of the country.23
Characterised by propagandistic imagery24 of rural, historic, and natu-
ral scenery, the New State’s tourism advertisements were part of its general
campaign for the “re-portuguesation of Portugal.” This was a campaign largely
inspired by the images of a mythical ruralism that rose to prominence with
the Centennial Commemorations in 1940, and began with the construction of
Pousadas – a chain of small hotels – alongside additional tourist routes part
of a Commemorations’ public works program.25 However, the Lisbon-Cascais
coastal road embodied a different facet of tourism, which was not linked to the
idea of a mythical ruralism, but instead to the idea of connecting the capital
to a well-known elitist villégiature area, accessible to well-off motorists. It was
to become the most “modern” road in Portugal, constructed with top technical
characteristics.
Since the beginning of the twentieth-century the construction of roads for
automobile tourism, in various countries incorporated the motorist’s point
of view and their expectations regarding the roads’ layout and regulation –
e.g. the “corniche de l’Esterel,” near Cannes, in France and promoted by the
French Touring Club, or the Redwood Highway in California.26 In Portugal, the
first use of the “tourism road” designation was for the “project of the tourism
road between Lisbon and Cascais,” as written by JAE engineers in 1931, and
followed by the 1934 preliminary project.27 In the First [Portuguese] National
Congress of Tourism held in Lisbon in 1936, it was also proposed that the
22 João Antunes Guimarães, Relatório do I Congresso Nacional de Turismo (Lisboa: Sociedade

Nacional de Tipografia, 1936), 11. On the “great façade of nationality” see Daniel Melo,
Salazarismo e Cultura Popular (1933–1958) (Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2001).
250; Raphael Costa, “The ‘great façade of nationality’: some considerations on Portuguese
tourism and the multiple meanings of New State Portugal in travel literature,” Journal of
Tourism History 5, 1 (2013): 50–72, 57.
23 Costa, “The ‘great façade’,” 61; Sousa, A mobilidade, 104.
24 Costa, “The ‘great façade’,” 56.
25 Melo, Salazarismo, 251–53; “Decreto-lei nº 29663,” in Diário do Governo, MOPC (1939): 573.
26 Catherine Bertho Lavenir, La Roue et le Stylo, Comme Nous Sommes Devenus Touristes
(Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1999), 207–215; Gabrielle Ruth Barnett, “Drive-By Viewing:
Visual Consciousness and Forest Preservation in the Automobile Age,” Technology and
Culture 45, 1 (2004): 30–54.
27 Conselho Superior de Obras Públicas, “Parecer nº 381,” (Infraestruturas de Portugal, Fundo
Documental da JAE, Arquivo da Direcção dos Serviços de Construção, 1934), 11, 52. Jorge
Moreira, Paulo Marques, and Fernando Santos Lobo, “Estradas. Bases para o projecto de
uma estrada de turismo entre Lisboa e Cascais,” ACP – Órgão Oficial do Automóvel Club de
Portugal 11(1931): 33–35, 38–40, 52–55.
national roads’ classification included “tourism roads” as a new category that

should be managed by a Department internal to the JAE that was yet to be
created. Additionally, and in more general terms, these “tourist” roads should
be planned as having better features than the average national road – e.g.
better pavements, better profile and plant layouts, better road surroundings
through afforestation and other measures such as road assistance for tour-
ists.28 Influenced by the Centennial Commemorations, these suggestions were
partly included in the planning of tourism roads, and specifically in the coastal
road in the Lisbon region.
The other purpose of the Lisbon-Cascais coastal road was to direct Lisbon’s
urban expansion westward, largely in response to the population growth in
the area.29 The Lisbon-Cascais coastal road would form a larger urbanisation
project alongside the planning of the so-called “Costa do Sol”30 or “Sun Coast” –
the western surroundings of Lisbon, connecting the city to the tourist places
of Estoril and Cascais – which came as a response to the need to “use the wide
area of land to be opened to urbanisation and tourist exploitation, including
the construction of the coastal road between Lisbon and Cascais.”31 In 1934,
the JAE undertook the topographical survey of the area preceding its urbanisa-
tion plan and the demarcation of its roads’ network.32 In 1935, the name “Sun
Coast” came to define the area geographically limited on the north by a pro-
jected motorway, and to the south by the river Tagus and the Atlantic ocean.
Afterwards the Gabinete do Plano de Urbanização da Costa do Sol (Office for
the Sun Coast Urban Plan) was created to supervise the urbanisation of this
area, with particular attention paid to issues of “beautification and aesthetic
enhancement,” as well as to issues concerning public health.33 Its president,
28 José Salgado, “Estradas de turismo” (paper presented at the I Congresso Nacional de

Turismo, Lisboa, 12–16 January 1936), 3, 4; Relatório do I Congresso Nacional de Turismo,
149–53.
29 In the first three decades of the twentieth century, the Lisbon’s population increased
68,5% and most of its surrounding localities, as Sintra, Loures and Vila Franca de Xira
did not increase as much. The municipalities of Cascais and Oeiras (municipal locali-
ties within the areas of the Sun Coast, following Lisbon), however, increased more than
the capital, registering increases of respectively 182% and 142%. Pereira, “O processo de
decisão na política urbana,” 70.
30 Portaria nº 8000, in Diário do Governo, MOPC (1935): 250, 251; Decreto nº 26762, in Diário
do Governo, MOPC (1936): 775–778.
31 Decreto nº 22444, in Diário do Governo, MOPC (1933): 625–626, 626; “Processo individual
de Paulo de Serpa Pinto Marques,” (Infraestruturas de Portugal/Fundo Documental da
JAE, Arquivo dos Recursos Humanos, 1929–45).
32 Decreto-lei nº 24453, in Diário do Governo, MOPC (1934): 1664; Decreto nº 25133, in Diário
do Governo, MOPC (1935): 382.
33 Decreto nº 26762, 777.
128 Sousa
chosen by Duarte Pacheco, was the brigadier and military engineer Manuel
da Silveira e Castro, who was also President of the JAE and Director of the
Tourism Section of the Centennial Commemorations Commission.34 In 1937,
the Municipalities of Lisbon, Oeiras, and Cascais, all of which included areas
belonging to the Sun Coast, were forbidden to approve any construction, or
substantial modification, in the area without prior approval from the Office
for the Sun Coast Urban Plan.35 As the plan for the Sun Coast would only
be approved over a decade later, in 1948, partial plans were approved in the
meantime, involving both the coastal road and the motorway linking Lisbon
to the National Stadium. In the end, both the coastal road and motorway
came to delimit respectively the southern and northern boundaries of the Sun
Coast area.36
The JAE engineers went well beyond their competences in the construction
of the coastal road, not limiting their work to technical issues regarding the
beautification of the “Sun Coast’s” network of roads; their construction proj-
ect included developments to the coastal road platform area, such as lanes,
sidewalks, road signs, the construction of embankments, afforestation, as
well as overpasses and underpasses for both vehicles and pedestrians. What is
more, the engineers included as part of their project car parks, gardens, pub-
lic lighting, sewage, water, gas, energy, telegraphs, and telephones networks.
Additionally, the JAE was responsible for managing the estate bordering the
road, proceeding with expropriations, while temporarily holding in its pos-
session various lands and buildings, and especially from 1944 onwards gradu-
ally handing these properties over to other entities, with the mediation of the
Ministry of Finance.37 In sum, the JAE was one of the main actors behind the
Sun Coast’s urbanization such that the coastal road became a “primary ele-
ment in the Sun Coast urbanization.”38
34 Decreto-lei nº 29087, in Diário do Governo, Presidência do Conselho (1938): 1439–1441;

Portaria [nomeação da Comissão Executiva das Comemorações do Duplo Centenário], in
Diário do Governo, Presidência do Conselho (1938).
35 Decreto nº 27601, in Diário do Governo, MOPC (1937): 285, 286.
36 Decreto-lei nº 37251, in Diário do Governo, Ministério das Obras Públicas (1948): 1715,
1716; Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional, Cadernos do Ressurgimento Nacional. Obras
Públicas (Lisboa: Edições S.P.N., 1940), 80.
37 For more see, Sousa, A mobilidade, 449–450.
38 Conselho Superior de Obras Públicas, Parecer nº 381, 5.
3 Architect-Urbanists as Mobility Planners. A New Lisbon for the

New State
3.1 Lisbon’s Riverside and the 1940 Centennial Commemorations

Until the first half of the nineteenth-century, Lisbon developed mainly along
the river, with water transportation remaining the fastest and cheapest way
to connect west and east Lisbon in the absence of reliable passageways over
land. In the last quarter of the nineteenth-century, however, Lisbon’s met-
ropolitan area expanded both to the interior and to the north. Chief among
these expansion projects was the construction of landfills along the river to
the south as a means of resolving the city’s sanitation problems, and thereby
making way for the riverside avenue, Avenida 24 de Julho, whose first stretch
opened in 1862.39 Equally important was the fact that this riverside avenue
improved vehicular traffic overland. As such, one of the promoters of this
project was the Companhia Carris (Rails Company); owner of horse-drawn
tramways, Americanos, named after their provenance; which inaugurated
its first line in this avenue in November 1873.40 The renewed Lisbon axis
along the Tagus river would become a techno-scientific and commercial
cluster at the turn of the century, dedicated to the enhancement of sanitary
control, and the circulation of merchandise and persons through Lisbon’s port
and rail station (see chapters 6 and 7 in this volume). Similarly, Lisbon’s neigh-
bourhood of Belém, would also become an important display for the New State
nationalistic values, in which science, technology and medicine were instru-
mental (see chapters 8, 9 and 14 in this volume).
Belém was a peripheral riverside area located in the western region of
Lisbon. In 1852, it ceased being a Lisbon’s parish and was eventually reincorpo-
rated as part of the city by the end of the century.41 Having been the point of
39 On the changes on urban planning in Lisbon in the late nineteenth-century and early
twentieth century, in which hygienic, mobility and embellishment inscriptions played
an important role see Álvaro Ferreira da Silva and M. Luísa Sousa, “The ‘Script’ of a New
Urban Layout: Mobility, Environment, and Embellishment in Lisbon’s Streets (1850–
1910),” Technology and Culture 60, 1 (2019): 65–97.
40 The horse-drawn tramways were called “Americanos,” which means Americans, because
the first 32 wagons were bought to a New-Yorker company. António Lopes Vieira, Os trans-
portes públicos de Lisboa entre 1830 e 1910 (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda,
1982), 111; Maria Helena Lisboa, Os engenheiros em Lisboa: urbanismo e arquitectura (1850–
1930) (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 2002), 124.
41 Lisbon’s official limits increased substantially during the second half of the nineteenth
century, namely with the creation of Estrada de Circunvalação (Circumvallation Road).
The area, in square kilometres, within the official limits of Lisbon changed in this period
in the following way: in the beginning of the nineteenth century, 9,47 km2; Decree of
11/9/1852, 12,1 km2; Lei of 18/7/1885, 64,9 km2; Decree of 22/7/1886, 97,2 km2; decree of
130 Sousa
departure for Portuguese overseas expansion during the fifteenth-century,

Belém retained a material and symbolic connection to Portuguese empire
building; a history that was reinforced with the Portuguese World Exhibition,
thereby presenting this neighbourhood as one of the most emblematic spaces
for the dictatorship during the Centennial Commemorations of 1940 (see
chapters 8, 9 and 14 in this volume).42 Works in the area also included the
alignment of the riverside avenue of Avenida da Índia (India Avenue, a name
with obvious imperial connotations) with the planned Lisbon-Cascais coastal
road, which was to depart from Belém.43 In other words, this tourism road
materially connected the celebration of the “memory” of “Patriotic History,”
and the “work of historical continuity of the New State” that the Centennial
Commemorations promoted, to “the capacity of achievement … of the genera-
tion of the 1940s.”44
3.2 French Architect-Urbanists and the New Lisbon

Lisbon was the region of the country where the public works promoted within
the Centennial Commemorations were more numerous, thus “fulfilling old
aspirations of the empire’s capital.”45 This was enhanced when the engineer
Duarte Pacheco became mayor of the Lisbon Municipality in 1938, following
his appointment as Minister of Public Works.46 During his mayorship, he rein-
forced the urban dimension of the legislation passed during his first mandate as
minister.47 To plan the urbanisation of the future “Sun Coast,” Pacheco invited
21/11/1903, 82,4 km2; see Augusto Vieira da Silva, “Os limites de Lisboa. Notícia histórica.
II – Do meiado do século XIX até à actualidade (1940),” Revista Municipal 6 (1940):
11–23. See also Raquel Henriques da Silva, “Lisboa romântica, urbanismo e arquitectura,
1777–1874” (Ph.D. dissertation, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 1997), 396–99. José-Augusto
França, “De Pombal ao Fontismo. O Urbanismo e a Sociedade,” in O livro de Lisboa, ed.
Irisalva Moita (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 1994), 363–388, 388.
42 Elsa Peralta, “A composição de um complexo de memória: o caso de Belém, Lisboa,” in
Cidade e império: dinâmicas coloniais e reconfigurações pós-coloniais, ed. Nuno Domingos
and Elsa Peralta (Lisboa: Edições 70, 2013), 361–413, 378–381.
43 Matos Sequeira, “A acção da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa na Exposição do Mundo
Português,” Revista Municipal 6 (1940): 24–26; “Projeto do prolongamento da avenida da
Índia entre o Bom Sucesso e as Portas de Algés e ruas adjacentes,” (Arquivo Municipal de
Lisboa, 1928–37); “Projeto de alteração dos traçados da avenida da Índia e do caminho de
ferro de Cascais” (Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa, 1935–39).
44 Quotations from a speech of minister Duarte Pacheco (already mentioned above):
Pacheco, “Sessão solene.”
45 Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional, Cadernos, 27.
46 Duarte Pacheco was Minister of Public Works from 1932 to 1936. He occupied again this
position in 1938 and until his death, in a car accident, in 1943. Sandra Almeida, “O país a
régua e esquadro: urbanismo, arquitectura e memória na obra pública de Duarte Pacheco”
(Ph.D. dissertation, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, 2009), 208–32.
47 Decreto-lei nº 24802, in Diário do Governo, MOPC (1934): 2137–2141.
foreign architect-urbanists, such as Alfred Agache, the then vice-president of

the French Urbanists Society. Agache would work on the project until 1936,
when the planning of the Sun Coast was passed on to another of his contem-
poraries, Étienne De Gröer.48
In 1933, Agache was hired by Pacheco to prepare an urban plan “from
Terreiro do Paço until Cascais,” along the riverside and connecting Lisbon’s
older city centre to its western region.49 For Agache, this western region was
to be the “new Lisbon”: “a new Lisbon, facing the river, in love with the sea, as
we all dreamt of and which Salazar will soon turn into a wonderful reality.”50 It
was Agache who suggested Étienne De Gröer’s participation in the Sun Coast
Urban Plan, given their former collaboration on the Rio de Janeiro Urban Plan
(1928–1930). At the time, De Gröer taught at the Institut d’Urbanisme (Institute
of Urbanism) at the University of Paris, in which some architect-urbanists who
later worked on Lisbon’s urban plans were also trained.51 His expertise as an
urban planner in Portugal was materialised in his authorship of the lengthy
article “Introdução ao urbanismo” (“Introduction to urbanism”), which was
published in the first issue of the official publication of the Direcção Geral dos
Serviços de Urbanismo (General Direction for Urbanism Services) – an institu-
tion founded in 1944 to coordinate urban plans in Portugal and consolidate the
preceding planning actions.52 Agache’s and De Gröer’s influence was felt until
48 Decreto nº 22444. On Alfred Agache and on Étienne De Gröer see, respectively Almeida,
“O país,” 274, 275 and 290. Agache was removed from this work in 1936, the year when
he delivered the study, following the dismissal of Duarte Pacheco from the Ministry of
Public Works and Communications (to which he returned in 1938). On the Sun Coast,
and Lisbon’s Urbanization Plans see, respectively, Pereira, “O processo,” (pp. 84, 85 for the
dismissal of Agache in 1936); Carlos Nunes Silva, “Planeamento municipal e a organização
do espaço em Lisboa: 1926–1974” (M.A. dissertation, Universidade de Lisboa. Faculdade
de Letras, 1986).
49 Quote from an interview to Duarte Pacheco in 1933, cited in Paula André, “As cidades da
cidade. Lisboa na primeira metade do século XX: nova Lisboa (1936) e Lisboa nova (1948),”
Urbana 7, 10 (2015): 89–111, 99.
50 Agache interview (1936) cited in André, “As cidades da cidade,” 100.
51 The first Portuguese architect to study at the Institute of Urbanism, setting a “a train-
ing pattern for Portuguese town planners at the Institute (..) until the 1970s” was João
Guilherme Faria da Costa, who became architect of Lisbon’s municipality and worked
with his teacher, De Gröer, in the 1948 Lisbon’s urban plan. Catarina Teles Ferreira
Camarinhas, “The Construction of Modern Scientific Urban Planning: Lisbon under
French Urbanisme Influence (1904–1967),” Planning Theory & Practice 12, 1 (2011): 11–31, 16.
52 Étienne De Groër, “Introdução ao urbanismo,” Boletim da Direcção-Geral dos Serviços de
Urbanização 1(1945–1946): 17–86; Decreto-lei nº 34337, in Diário do Governo, MOPC (1944):
1327, 1328. This General Direction was responsible for coordinating both urban plans and
“rural improvements,” which had been before 1945 under the JAE’s assignments. Sousa, A
mobilidade, 384–389.
132 Sousa
well into the second half of the twentieth century.53 Thus, in spite of the anti-
urbanisation rhetoric of the New State, planning the new Lisbon embodied
central aspects of the regime’s agenda: to limit high population density in the
city and to reconstruct the country’s image guided by its imperial dimension
(see chapters 8 and 9 in this volume).54
As for Agache and De Gröer, they would turn to the work of the English
urban planner, Ebenezer Howard, and particularly his concept of the garden
city, in order to solve the problem of population growth in urban centres due to
migration from the countryside. This was part of a wider set of social reforms
whose three main pillars were cooperative organisation, land reform, and self-
sufficiency. It limited city’s population to 32000 inhabitants, in such a way
that a network of garden cities interconnected through greenbelts was creat-
ed.55 In 1911, in a congress on “Social Hygiene,” Agache presented the English
garden-city model as a concrete answer to physical and social hygiene urban
problems, namely regarding the working-class housing56 (see chapter 3 in this
volume). Both Agache and De Gröer considered Howard garden cities’ concept
to be the basis of “modern urbanism,” whose purpose was to “reorganise the
citizens’ existence, giving them the best possible living conditions,” through
the planning of a “beautiful,” hygienic and decongested city, thereby imposing
“order” onto the city and its surroundings.57
Agache and De Gröer also defended the limitation of urban population den-
sity. For example, De Gröer advocated single-family housing neighbourhoods
53 Paula André, “Portugal de fora para dentro: Paul Descamps, Donat A. Agache, Étienne
de Groer,” in Arte & discursos, ed. Margarida Acciaiuoli and Maria João Castro (Lisboa:
Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas. Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2014), 255–268,
255; Vasco Brito and Catarina Teles Ferreira Camarinhas, “Elementos para o estudo do
Plano de Urbanização da cidade de Lisboa (1938),” Cadernos do Arquivo Municipal de
Lisboa (2007): 163–189, 183.
54 Camarinhas, “The Construction of Modern Scientific Urban Planning,” 12.
55 Michel Geertse, “Cross-Border Country Planning Dialogue in Interwar Europe,” SAGE
Open 5, 3 (2015): 1–12, 3–5.
56 It was the congress of the “Alliance d’hygiène sociale,” held in Roubaix (France). Catherine
Bruant, “Donat Alfred Agache (1875–1959) – L’architecte et le sociologue,” Les Études soci-
ales 122(1994): 23–65, 42. Agache was also interested in the concept of garden cities as
they considered planning cities from scratch, as he did in his project for Yass Canberra
(Australia).Vincent Berdoulay and Olivier Soubeyran, “Agache ou le milieu comme sup-
port écologique,” in L’écologie urbaine et l’urbanisme (Paris: La Découverte, 2002), 177–
200, 191. I thank Celia Miralles Buil for giving me the access to this article.
57 De Groër, “Introdução ao urbanismo,” 24 (first quote); 45 (second and third quotes). On
Agache see Bruant, “Donat Alfred Agache,” 54.
instead of housing in multi-storey buildings.58 It was proposals of this kind that

aligned Agache and De Gröer’s visions with Salazar’s celebration of catholic
family values. This, moreover, was not a coincidence: both Agache and Salazar
were acquainted with Fréderic Le Play’s work, whose notion of the family as
the foundation of society was translated into French urban reform, which in
turn influenced Pacheco’s 1930s urban policies.59 As the architect and urban
historian Paula André states:
Le Play’s influence on Salazar’s ideology and political thinking is revealed

in Salazar’s articulation between family, housing and private property.
The family was one of the pillars of the New State, and this was translated
into the regime’s housing policy, in which both housing typology and its
property regime were justified on ideological grounds.60
Moreover, Agache and De Gröer’s planning ideas were also linked to consid-
erations of spatial distribution – and particularly for Agache, who viewed the
garden city concept of “zoning” as a fundament of urbanism and saw urban-
ism itself as an applied science, or an “applied sociology.”61 It is in this way
that zoning came to be viewed as the method of planning Lisbon’s “positive”
evolution; a method that outlined a particular spatial distribution throughout
the territory alongside their corresponding and appropriate social activities.62
In promoting zoning, De Gröer closely followed the different classifications of
zones, and their corresponding activities, which were used in previous garden
city designs: industrial, commercial, civic, residential, free spaces, and rural.63
What is more, it was in the application of such principles that urban planners
58 He defended the limitation of population within a city, and the construction of horizon-
tal property (and not vertical) as a condition for the good health of the population, but
also as a preventive measure towards aerial bombing – the houses should be separated,
sprawled. De Groër, “Introdução ao urbanismo,” 28, 39, 40. Etienne De Groër, “Plano
Director de Lisboa. Modo actual de construir” (Gabinete de Estudos Olisiponenses, 1948),
IIª parte, Vol. 2, 2 – Densidades de população.
59 André, “Portugal de fora para dentro,” 255–60; Paula André, Teresa Marat-Mendes, and
Paulo Rodrigues, “Alfred-Donat Agache Urban Proposal for Costa do Sol. From the
Territory to the City” (paper presented at the 15th International Planning History Society
Conference, São Paulo, 2012), 3, 4; Bruant, “Donat Alfred Agache,” 25, 32; Berdoulay and
Soubeyran, “Agache ou le milieu,” 177. See also Frederico Ágoas, “Narrativas em Perspetiva
sobre a História da Sociologia em Portugal,” Análise Social 206, 68 (2013): 221–56.
60 André, “Portugal de fora para dentro,” 257.
61 Berdoulay and Soubeyran, “Agache ou le milieu,” 178.
62 Bruant, “Donat Alfred Agache,” 26, 52.
63 De Groër, “Introdução ao urbanismo,” 24, 25, 34.
134 Sousa
could turn the city’s inhabitants into “honest men and good Christians.”64
Thus, for De Gröer, zoning was the “basis of urbanism” and was fundamen-
tal to create quality, healthy working-class neighbourhoods, and to curb real
estate speculation.65 And to connect these zones through space, urban (and
regional) planning implied urban and suburban mobility, which was influ-
enced by another “actor” that was gaining prominence on the European scene:
the motor vehicle.
At the congresses of the International Federation for Housing and Town
Planning (IFHTP)66 held during the interwar period, various planning options
were under discussion: one option endorsed the concept of “pure” garden cit-
ies, promoted by the British, while another proposed its appropriation in con-
tinental Europe, accompanied by the growing concern for regional planning
and suburbanisation (caused partly by the growing use of motor vehicles).67
As urban planner and historian, Catarina Camarinhas, argues, it was via the
French School that these ideas reached Portugal, namely through De Gröer
and the concept of “garden-district,” which proposed “a compromise between
the initial ideal of the garden city and the reality of suburban expansion.”68
Planners wanted to tame the cities’ expansion into the countryside in an
orderly way via infrastructures and settlements.69 And yet, there remained an
inherent tension between infrastructures and spatial planning: if, in Howard’s
concept of the garden city, mobility was secured via trams and public tran-
sit, in the interwar period these means of transport were being replaced by
motorised vechicles (namely the private automobile). At the IFHTP interwar
congresses, this change was addressed either as a problem or as an oppor-
tunity, both to the planning of old urban city centres and to the process of
suburbanisation.70
Moreover, other expert fora addressed an ongoing discussion regard-
ing the type of roads that should be built for motor vehicles. The debate on
64 De Groër, “Introdução ao urbanismo,” 74.

65 De Groër, “Plano Director de Lisboa,” IIª parte, B- Zonamento, p. 7.
66 It was co-founded by Howard in 1913 as the International Garden Cities and Town
Planning Association, to promote the garden city concept.
67 Geertse, “Cross-Border Country Planning,” 3–5.
68 Camarinhas, “The Construction of Modern Scientific Urban Planning,” 22–24, 28.
69 Geertse, “Cross-Border Country Planning,” 7.
70 Ruth Oldenziel, M. Luísa Sousa, and Pieter van Wesemael, “Designing (Un)Sustainable
Urban Mobility from Transnational Settings, 1850 – Present,” in A U-Turn to the Future.
Sustainable Urban Mobility since 1850, ed. Martin Emanuel, Frank Schipper, and Ruth
Oldenziel (New York: Berghahn Books, 2020), 29–66; Geertse, “Cross-Border Country
Planning”; Renzo Riboldazzi, “Getting to the Root of the Crisis of Urbanity: The Debate
on Urban Open Spaces in the IFHTP Congresses between the two Wars,” Planum – The
Journal of Urbanism 24 (2012): 1–18, 6.
automobile-only roads – i.e. motorways – was coeval in Europe: the construc-

tion of the first national motorways took place in Fascist Italy in the 1920s, and
in Nazi Germany and the Netherlands in the 1930s.71 They were inspired by
American parkways in the style of Robert Moses, which provided “an endur-
ing model for the twentieth century highways.”72 Parkways were all the more
attractive given the fact that they supported other economic activities and
afforded greater possibilities for the inclusion of spaces for leisure within spa-
tial planning. For De Gröer, parkways were leisure places that also became
thoroughfares.
3.3 Intermingling Transport and Urban Expertise

It is worth noting here that viewing road networks as “a sort of … framework,
on which the rest of the area’s plan should be based on,” has been promoted by
architects since the beginning of the twentieth century.73 Agache was amongst
these promoters by considering roads’ planning as a fundamental part of the
urbanist’s work. For Agache and his contemporaries, the urbanist intervened
in the “organic” city as a therapist who “heals [the “sick” city],” thus upholding
the relation of analogy between cities and organic bodies.74 According to this
metaphor, which had been previously applied in urban planning, a sickness
occurred within a city whenever one of its vital functions was not working
properly: circulation (roads), digestion (networks), breathing (free spaces), and
physiognomy (layout of the buildings and the general composition).75 Thus,
Agache defended an image of the urbanist as the one responsible for think-
ing beyond his immediate problem, and who proceeds via general regional
71 See, for instance, Massimo Moraglio, “A rough modernization: landscapes and highways
in twentieth-century Italy,” in The world beyond the windshield: roads and landscapes
in the United States and Europe, ed. Christof Mauch and Thomas Zeller (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 2008), 108–124; Zeller, Driving Germany; Gijs Mom, “Roads without Rails.
European Highway-Network Building and the Desire for Long-Range Motorized Mobility,”
Technology and Culture 46, 4 (2005): 745–772.
72 Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: American Cities and the Coming of the Automobile
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 223.
73 As was the case of the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen in The Munkkiniemi and Haaga plan
(1915), in the Greater Helsinki. Emilia Karppinen, “Collective Expertise behind the Urban
Planning of Munkkiniemi and Haaga, Helsinki (c. 1915),” in Urban Histories of Science.
Making Knowledge in the City, 1820–1940, eds. Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan
(New York, London: Routledge, 2018), 164–185, here 174, 175.
74 Bruant, “Donat Alfred Agache,” 26, 49, 51; Berdoulay and Soubeyran, “Agache ou le milieu,”
184.
75 Bruant, “Donat Alfred Agache,” 51, 55; Berdoulay and Soubeyran, “Agache ou le milieu,”
184, 185, 195.
136 Sousa
planning drafts that include the axis of communication between municipali-

ties.76 In this sense, Agache adhered to the discipline of urban planning in the
early twentieth-century, which held the view that a metropolis should develop
“together with its surrounding areas.”77 What is more, it was an idea that was
also applied to Lisbon.
When hired in 1933, the decree issued by Pacheco’s Ministry of Public Works
and Communications defined Agache’s intervention as follows:
The expansion of our urban centres has taken place almost always with-
out the prior establishment of a superior criterion guiding it, subordinat-
ing itself only to the needs of opportunity, with obvious disadvantage for
the collective interest, which is poorly served in aesthetics, hygiene and
economy.
… the Government considers that the plan for the use of the large land
area that will be open to urbanisation and tourist exploitation by the
construction of the coastal road between Lisbon and Cascais should be
established from the outset, because field studies for this road are under-
way. It is time that the experienced hand of an already renowned urban-
ist in this difficult kind of works draws (…) the outline of all the elements
of utilization and valorisation of this magnificent coastal strip that will
be served by our first tourist road, so that one can get the most out of its
exceptional conditions.
… the Government is authorised by the Ministry of Public Works and
Communications to assign to (…) the French architect urbanist Alfredo
[sic] Agache, vice-president of the French Urbanists Society, to carry
out the preliminary study of the urbanisation of the area from Lisbon to
Estoril and Cascais.78
And in 1936, Agache commented on the agreement by the minister Pacheco on

the assumption of a regional planning perspective:
In fact, the first intention of the government was to improve the few
beaches on what is called the “Costa do Sol” (the Sun Coast), by develop-
ing the old coastal road, but the minister followed us very well and even
76 Donat Alfred Agache, “L’aménagement de la Costa do Sol (Portugal),” Urbanisme : revue

mensuelle de l’urbanisme français 43(1936): 146–150, 146; Bruant, “Donat Alfred Agache,”
59, 60; Berdoulay and Soubeyran, “Agache ou le milieu,” 190.
77 Karppinen, “Collective Expertise,” 168.
78 Decreto nº 22444.
encouraged us when, following an introductory report, we demonstrated

to him how important it was for the future of the country to examine the
problem from a broader angle.79
In this broader context, Agache deeply emphasised the need to rigorously

think through traffic and routes; not only concerning the region to the west
of Lisbon, which he considered to be the most important “extension” of the
city, but in other directions of urban expansion as well. As Agache puts it, this
should be done by: 1) “determin[ing] the character of the functional centres of
Lisbon and direct their traffic to the main exits;” 2) “connect[ing] the capital
with the hinterland and overseas;” and 3) making a road plan, which he con-
sidered a “key element:”
Regarding the western region of Lisbon, establish a framework of routes

allowing rapid traffic between the capital and the various satellite agglom-
erations (Queluz, Sintra, etc., and in particular the existing beaches or
those under formation).80
In addition, Agache argued for the need to construct a motorway that would
connect the centre of Lisbon to Estoril (it would become the marker for the
northern frontier of the Sun Coast area; only the 8 km stretch from Lisbon to
the National Stadium was built in the 1940s), and the construction of a sports
park, which became the National Stadium and the site where the motorway
met the coastal road.
However, it was De Gröer who went on to make Agache’s vision a reality.81
Moreover, De Gröer defended the importance of integrating planning at differ-
ent geographical scales – urban, regional, and national – in an epoch that he
called the era of the “command economy:” an allusion, common to architect-
urbanists in interwar Europe, of experts working on behalf of a dictatorship
that was itself abided by the coeval technocratic internationalism that consid-
ered science and technology to be apolitical.82 For De Gröer, planning a city
79 Agache, “L’aménagement,” 147. See also André, Marat-Mendes, and Rodrigues, “Alfred-
Donat Agache Urban Proposal for Costa do Sol. From the Territory to the City,” 4.
80 Agache, “L’aménagement,” 148.
81 André, “Portugal de fora para dentro,” 267.
82 De Groër, “Introdução ao urbanismo,” 27. On technocratic internationalism see Johan
Schot and Vincent Lagendijk, “Technocratic Internationalism in the Interwar Years:
Building Europe on Motorways and Electricity Networks,” Journal of Modern European
History 6, 2 (2008): 196–217; Martin Kohlrausch and Helmuth Trischler, Building Europe
on Expertise: Innovators, Organizers, Networkers (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
138 Sousa
Figure 4.1 Road plan for the Sun Coast according to Agache (1936)
Source: Donat Alfred Agache, “L’aménagement de la Costa do Sol (Portugal),”
Urbanisme : revue mensuelle de l’urbanisme français 43 (Mars–Avril 1936):
146–150, here p. 148
should work in tandem with the planning of its expansion; or as De Gröer

himself put it, to plan a city meant “to prepare enough extensions that will
allow it [the city] to develop in harmony.”83 Thus, the residential areas in the
extensions of a city were divided in three types, according to the social class
of their dwellers: namely working class, middle class, and the wealthy class,
each of which involved different population densities. Therefore for example,
population density in areas for the wealthier classes should be more than one
third lower than those for the working class.84 It was in this way that De Gröer
applied the urbanist concept of “zoning” within urban space, via a division
of urban space along class lines and accompanied by a hierarchy of architec-
tural quality and typologies proper to each.85 All of this ultimately led to the
planning of the Sun Coast in such a way that reinforced its elitist pedigree,
thereby aligning principles of urban planning with political principles of the
New State.
Urban sprawl was a consequence of the type of planning promoted by De
Gröer. He was against the compact city, and in favour of a decongested city,
with a limited population density.86 This paralleled the relevance he gave, as
Agache, to mobility routes and future means of transports. In the future, De

84 De Groër, “Introdução ao urbanismo,”, 40, 54.
85 Fagundes, “Obras Públicas,” 372, 77. As shown in the chapter 9 in this volume, the hous-
ing types were designed according to social class, and, moreover, those for the wealthier
integrated nationalistic symbols of the imperial Portugal, as the armillary sphere.
86 De Groër, “Plano Director de Lisboa,” IIª parte, Vol. 2, 2 – Densidades de população.
Gröer imagined that transports would be so easy and direct, that they would
make cities obsolete:
If we admit, for example, that, in the future, transports will become

much faster and cheaper than today, one could think that in general cit-
ies will not be necessary. The concentration of all urban activities and
habitations in the same place would become useless, and one could live
sprawled throughout the countryside and quickly move to other people’s
place, or from home to office, or to the factory.87
However, insofar as cities remained a part of modern life, De Gröer advo-

cated for forms of transportation that increased mobility within the city while
improving its links to the city’s recently developed extensions, and in rela-
tion to population density. Thus, De Gröer promoted the construction of ring
roads surrounding urban centres for crosstown motorised traffic, together with
four-lane expensive exit routes between 11 to 12 meters in width.88 Moreover,
De Gröer’s expanded four-lane throughway was designed with motor vehicles
in mind, with the construction of the 3 meter lanes, which were designated
for high-speed traffic, in accordance with international standards. Thus, the
Lisbon-Cascais coastal road, alongside the stretch of motorway connecting the
centre of Lisbon to the National Stadium, would mark the first time that these
international traffic standards were used in Portugal. Furthermore, De Gröer
considered motorbuses to be a more “advantageous” form of transportation
than trams, and thus should be used in their place. The first six motorbuses
in Portugal were introduced at the Portuguese World Exhibition in Lisbon
(1940).89 High traffic routes, however, were only built once each zone was
assigned a particular social activity; a process that would eventually determine
significant points of interest, such as buildings for public administration and
public services, as well as commercial areas and parks.90
Some of these thoroughfares could be framed as “parkways” – a term bor-
rowed from the North-Americans – with green areas framing the traffic lanes,
allowing for the circulation between free and open spaces throughout the

88 De Groër, “Introdução ao urbanismo,” 49, 55, 66.
89 De Groër, “Introdução ao urbanismo,” 66. Lisbon introduced motorbuses as a form of
urban collective transport later than other European countries. For a periodisation pro-
posal see Colin Divall and Barbara Schmucki, “Introduction: Technology, (Sub)urban
Development and the Social Construction of Urban Transport,” in Suburbanizing the
masses: public transport and urban development in historical perspective, ed. Colin Divall
and Winstan Bond (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 1–19.
90 De Groër, “Introdução ao urbanismo,” 55, 61.
140 Sousa
city.91 However, for De Gröer, parkways could themselves be considered as

open spaces.92 By having the possibility of being framed both as thorough-
fares or open spaces, parkways, in De Gröer’s formulation, carried the tensions
and contradictions inherent to this urban vision, as it pertains to the wellbe-
ing of dwellers and city planning. On the one hand, he deemed essential the
existence of free/open/green spaces, which were considered the “lungs of the
city.”93 These included not only public parks and gardens, but sports facili-
ties, and the green belt, or rural area, around the city where construction was
absent, in order to define city limits.94 For De Gröer, these green spaces were
considered to be an “absolute need”:
The air! The sun! These are the two elements of God that should not be
lacking to anyone and from which our artificial civilisation deprived the
inhabitants of the cities. They will have them again thanks to us. Our cit-
ies will now be clear and cheerful.95
On the other hand, De Gröer also considered the construction of high traffic
routes for motor vehicles as essential and viewed as the best means of trans-
portation between Lisbon and its developed, satellite, regions.96 These thor-
oughfares, however, were not considered to be open spaces by De Gröer, due to
the “constant circulation of cars and the smell of gasoline,” which did not allow
its neighbouring inhabitants to rest.97
From 1938 to 1948, De Gröer also applied these principles to the planning of
Lisbon.98 Using survey data collected by the engineer António Emídio Abrantes
in 1938,99 De Gröer prepared the Lisbon Urban Plan (concluded in 1948), in
which he criticised what he considered as the “denial of urbanism.”100 Thus,
De Gröer proposed zoning as the tool for giving urban “order” to Lisbon and
a new sprawling structure, in which the planning of road mobility was funda-
mental, and included the use of ring roads and exit thoroughfares, such as the

92 De Groër, “Plano Director de Lisboa,” IIª parte, Vol. 2, F – Distribuição dos espaços livres,
p. 86.
93 De Groër, “Introdução ao urbanismo,” 42, 69.
96 De Groër, “Plano Director de Lisboa,” IIª parte, Vol. 2, 2 – Densidades de população, p. 3.
97 De Groër, “Plano Director de Lisboa,” Iª parte, B- Espaços livres, p. 72.
98 De Groër, “Plano Director de Lisboa.”
99 António Emídio Abrantes and Carlos Martins Jorge, “Elementos para o estudo do plano de
urbanização da cidade de Lisboa [Exemplar das peças escritas corrigidas por E. de Groër]”
(Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa, 1938).
100 Brito and Camarinhas, “Elementos.”
Figure 4.2 Main communication axes of the Lisbon 1948 urban plan
Source: “Plano Director de Urbanização de Lisboa,” 1948
one used to connect the riverside avenue in Belém (Avenida da Índia) and the
Lisbon-Cascais coastal road. The Lisbon Urban Plan, completed by De Gröer
and approved by Lisbon’s Municipality in 1948 (although not approved by the
government), built on his first studies from the late 1930s and gave primacy to
main communication axes. Most notable among these was a network of radial
and peripheral roads that included the Lisbon-National Stadium motorway
and the coastal road.101
The 1948 Lisbon Urban Plan changed the late nineteenth century pattern
of urban expansion to the north to a radial-centric expansion, thereby encom-
passing the city’s western regions, including Belém.102 The 1948 Plan was based
on the prediction that Lisbon’s population should not overcome 10 percent of
the country’s population, which was estimated to reach upwards of 10 million
people in the next 20 years.103
101 Almeida, “O país,” 293; Fagundes, “Obras Públicas,” 374, 75.

102 Brito and Camarinhas, “Elementos,” 185.
103 De Groër, “Plano Director de Lisboa,” Iª parte, C- Lisboa e a sua região, p. 81, 82, IIª parte,
Vol. 1, A – Limitação do desenvolvimento urbano e estabelecimento duma cintura rural
de protecção, p. 2.
142 Sousa
Figure 4.3 Lisbon’s imagined population growth in 20 years and its extensions (1948)
Source: “Plano Director de Lisboa. Modo actual de construir,”
(Gabinete de Estudos Olisiponenses, 1948), Iª parte, C-Lisboa e a sua
região, pp. 81, 82
Based on their rationale regarding regional planning, both Agache and De

Gröer gave primacy to the planning of roads in Lisbon and its suburbs, thus act-
ing as mobility planning experts. That said, Agache and De Gröer’s approach
remained normative. For Agache, the city was fundamentally economic in
nature, thus leading, in spite of his intention to include the social dimension,
to a situation wherein the social was subordinated to the economic function
of urban life.104 Similarly, De Gröer’s approach, treated economic inequality
as a natural given and something to which the urbanist principle of “zon-
ing” must accommodate. What is more, De Gröer straightforwardly assumed
that the automobile would not only be the dominant form of transportation
104 Berdoulay and Soubeyran, “Agache ou le milieu,” 194.

in the future, but the most desirable means of transit as well.105 In the 1948
Lisbon Urban Plan’s zoning code, De Gröer’s list of each zone’s area in hectares
excluded the area occupied by roadway infrastructure – except for the motor-
way – which itself occupied considerable space. This omission on De Gröer’s
part indicates the way in which road infrastructure itself comes to be reified
in practice.106
The construction of the Lisbon-Cascais coastal road, and the subsequent plan-
ning of the Sun Coast and of Lisbon’s expansion shows how urban planning
at differing scales was simultaneously addressed by a select group of experts.
Moreover, it shows the fundamentally political function of coordinating each
of these works, as it was motivated by, and carried out in accordance with, the
vision of Minister of Public Works, Duarte Pacheco. Additionally, both road
engineers and architect-urbanists mutually benefited from their respective
expertise on urban and mobility planning: while the JAE began their prelimi-
nary project for the coastal road between Lisbon and Cascais in 1931, followed
by an extended topographical survey (1934) of the area between Algés and
Cascais, they would go on to play an important role in the implementation of
the Sun Coast Urban Plan and in the urbanisation of the area surrounding the
coastal road.
In 1933, the decision to open the first touristic road in Portugal – the
Lisbon-Cascais coastal road – led Pacheco to invite the architect-urbanist
Agache to draw up plans for the urbanisation of the area stretching from Lisbon
to Cascais, which was later expanded into what came to be referred to as the
Sun Coast. By following Agache’s suggestion to study the problem regionally,
Pacheco framed the Sun Coast area as one of the extensions of the new urban
plan for Lisbon, which was to be studied by one of Agache’s colleagues, De
Gröer. Both Agache and De Gröer considered road planning – particularly high
traffic routes conceived as thoroughfares for (future) motor vehicles – to be
a key feature of their urban design for Lisbon and its satellite developments.
For whom were the coastal road and the new Lisbon built? The construction
of the coastal road, together with the motorway from Lisbon to the National
Stadium, meant an exceptional investment in the period of the World War II,
105 See, for instance, De Groër, “Plano Director de Lisboa,” IIª parte, Vol. 3, 1 – Memórias
Explicativas que acompanharam Desenhos de Detalhe.
106 De Groër, “Plano Director de Lisboa,” IIª parte, Vol. 2, G – Distribuição da área geral abran-
gida pelo plano director.
144 Sousa
whether considered in technical, financial, or legislative terms, and in terms of

material resources. This investment was concentrated in an already privileged
area of Lisbon surroundings, creating regional asymmetries, and helping to
build an elitist culture of automobile tourism, while paving the way to future
automobilities. As to urban planning, both architect-urbanists prescribed
“cures” for the sicknesses of the city, while also dictating its future uses. This
is seen in Agache and De Gröer’s respective visions for the spatial distribution
and axes of mobility throughout Lisbon proper. Thus, it was the normative pre-
scription of Agache and De Gröer that came to encompass the possible future
social uses embedded within the layout of a modernised Lisbon. Private auto-
mobility was already inscribed in the plan, privileging at the time an elite (low
motorisation rates), and later contributing to other forms of mobility injustice
regarding an accessible and clean city (with no air or noise pollution), which
they intended to foster and preserve. This approach to urbanism reflects a
“strong utopian tradition among planning theorists” in which, inspired by the
garden city concept, Agache’s and De Gröer’s visions for the future of the city
and its mobility’s infrastructures is included.107 Mobility’s infrastructures, as
artifacts, do have politics.
Acknowledgments
A previous version of this article was presented at the Sixth National

Meeting for the History of Science and Technology, held in FCT/UNL, Monte
de Caparica (Portugal) in July 2018, as part of the panel “New State, Cidade
Nova? Ciência, cidade e fascismo em Lisboa, 1933–1945,” organised by Jaume
Valentines-Álvarez and Jaume Sastre-Juan. I thank the comments of the mod-
erator Marta Macedo, the organisers, the other participants, Carlos Godinho
and Cláudia Castelo, and the audience. This work has also been presented at
the research project VISLIS’s workshops, and I thank the invited commenta-
tors and participants for their comments and suggestions. This work has also
benefited from the careful editing and comments of this volume’s editors,
Ana Simões and Maria Paula Diogo, for which I am grateful. I also thank Celia
Miralles Buil for her comments to a previous version of this article. Part of
the research for this chapter was funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a
Tecnologia (Foundation for Science and Technology, Portugal) with the post-
doctoral fellowship awarded to M. Luísa Sousa (SFRH/BPD/93517/2013) (until
December 2018), and through UID/HIS/00286/2019 and UIDB/00286/2020
UIDP/00286/2020.
107 Edward W. Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2010). 29.
Part 2
Port City and Imperial Metropolis
∵
What does it mean to be a port city of an imperial metropolis? In this part of

the book we explore the techno-scientific grammar of the empire as displayed
in the urban fabric, both concerning the circulation of people and goods and
the construction of the visible face of the imperial discourse.
Portugal was an extended and long-lasting colonial power (the independence
of the last colonies was declared in 1975, following the Carnation Revolution).
During the nineteenth century and a significant part of the twentieth century,
it still held many colonies in Africa and Asia, despite Brazil gaining its indepen-
dence in 1822. The Portuguese capital city held a privileged geographical posi-
tion, roughly located at mid-length of the extended Portuguese Atlantic coast.
Bathed by the river Tagus, which offered advantageous circulation conditions,
Lisbon was simultaneously the empire’s political centre and a capital city of
the western European periphery. It was precisely this specific peripheral geo-
graphical situation in what relates to Europe, but its centrality between Europe
and other continents, most especially North and South America, and Africa,
which turned Lisbon into a particular node of a European network for the cir-
culation of commerce and capital, and the exchange of knowledge and people.
Lisbon was often dubbed as the main gateway to Europe. But at the end of the
nineteenth century, it aimed at becoming the gateway to the old continent.
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century health and sanitary issues were
considered an integral part of modernization projects aimed at improving
Lisbon’s urban landscape. Indeed, the prevention of diseases and their control
are crucial elements for understanding the impact of human migrations and
circulation of people, non-human animals, plants and goods on urban devel-
opment, and especially with respect to the planning of architectural and pub-
lic works projects.
In Port city and imperial metropolis, we deal with the economic, sanitary and
ideological control of the city via the intervention of experts. Although physi-
cally distinct, the city of Lisbon and the river Tagus form a unique entity that
explain most of Lisbon’s identity, from its characteristic luminosity (resulting
from the construction materials used in Lisbon, including its mostly white
mosaic pavements, but mostly from the reflection of the light in the water
of the large estuary of the river) to its economic activities and to its role as
the capital of an extended empire. Lisbon and the Tagus form a gateway to the
Atlantic and to Europe, a wide common space of circulation of people and

goods, but also of the exercise of control, concerning both commercial activi-
ties and sanitary conditions. Over the course of five chapters, we explore the
entangled histories of experts, commerce, and health in close connection with
the port and the imperial axis of Lisbon.
In chapter 5 “Hybrid features of the new Lisbon lazaretto (1860–1908),” José
Carlos Avelãs Nunes focuses on the various dimensions – architectural, medi-
cal, techno-scientific, socio-economic and political – of the new lazaretto. This
sanitary compound closely dialogued with the port of Lisbon and encapsu-
lated the tensions between political power and private economic interests and
between public responsibility and individual welfare.
In chapter 6, “The customs laboratory of Lisbon from the 1880s to the 1930s:
Chemistry, economy and scientific spaces”, Ignacio Suay-Matallana analyses
the means of controlling and regulating the merchandise and commerce at
the port of Lisbon. Working at the intersection of chemistry and economy, the
customs laboratory protected the national economy (and more specifically
the commerce of wine) and secured the development of the necessary exper-
tise to fulfil its duties.
In chapter 7, “Lisbon after quarantines. An urban protection against inter-
national diseases,” Celia Miralles-Buil places the port itself at the centre of her
analysis. She summons different geographical scales of urban connections
(from local to national and international) to analyse the strategies and ten-
sions of Portuguese’s physicians and public health authorities to implement a
strong health control for every ship to fight against epidemics coming from the
sea while reconciling these procedures with commercial interests.
While in chapters 5, 6 and 7, the imperial dimension is implicit in the threat
of tropical diseases and commodities arriving at the city port, chapters eight
and nine explore the imperial character of Lisbon’s riverbank and surrounding
areas which were appropriated as additional leverage for political propaganda.
In “The Colonial Garden and the Colonial Agricultural Museum. Education,
research and ‘tropical illusion’ in the imperial metropolis,” Cláudia Castelo
analyses how these two institutions inscribed colonial landscapes, commodi-
ties, and imperial history in the Belém’s neighbourhood, part of the so-called
“memory complex” of the Portuguese Empire.
The garden and the museum were the setting for the colonial section of the
Portuguese World Exhibition in 1940, an event that is examined by Antonio
Sanchez and Carlos Godinho in “Urbanizing the history of ‘discoveries.’ The
1940 Portuguese World Exhibition and the making of a new imperial capital.”
The authors follow the use of the armillary sphere, one of the main scientific
icons of the so-called Age of Discoveries, in the reconstruction and moderniza-
tion of Lisbon. The “urbanization of the sphere” was an important aspect of the
metamorphosis of Lisbon into an imperial capital by the New State, infusing

feelings of pride, veneration, and greatness, and promoting a daily proximity
with the regime’s colonial agenda.
Again, the three axes mentioned in the introduction are summoned
through the five chapters. As a port city, marked by its intimate knowledge that
death and diseases often arrived by boat, Lisbon developed and relied upon a
strong network of urban infrastructures, both physical and of knowledge, in
order to oppose the ever-eminent danger of contamination. Thus, the sani-
tary and health infrastructures doubled in their significance, not only as pre-
ventive health measures but also as symbols of modernity and the progress of
Portuguese society, driven by techno-scientific advances.
That said, Lisbon’s condition as an imperial metropolis assumed the func-
tion of maintaining colonial rule in Africa from afar. However, until the
Portugal’s Colonial War (1961–74), for Lisboners the African colonies were often
felt rather as historical and distant entities than actual territories. This was
even the case during the 1890 British Ultimatum crisis when they were used
as “weapons” in domestic politics. To counteract the empire’s invisibility its
symbols were inscribed in the urban fabric of the city, either by colonial-based
institutions that displayed the people, the fauna, and the flora from the distant
lands of Guinea, Cape Vert, S. Tomé and Príncipe, Angola and Mozambique,
or by the extended use – particularly after the Portuguese World Exhibition –
of the armillary sphere as a long-lasting heraldic feature associated with the
Portuguese Age of Exploration.
Chapter 5
Hybrid Features at Lisbon’s New Lazaretto

(1860–1908)
1 Introduction
The privileged geographical situation of Lisbon, the westernmost capital in

continental Europe, situated at the crossroads of Europe, the American conti-
nent, and Africa, justifies that the history of Lisbon’s fight against deadly con-
tagions was connected to the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea by the
Tagus River, with its inverted “Y” shape-like large estuary.
By the mid-nineteenth century, Lisbon and its river became known as a
“natural doorway” or “gateway” to Europe.1 French and English companies,
alongside many others, launched successful commercial maritime lines con-
necting Lisbon to England, France, Africa and Brazil, a former Portuguese
colony, with stopovers in Africa, where various Portuguese colonies stood.2
Thousands of ships crowded with people and goods crossed the Atlantic and
the Mediterranean.
As the capital of Portugal and a port city, Lisbon responded to the demand-
ing challenges of increased traffic in its port.3 By the turn of the century, in
approximately a decade, traffic grew from 13,274 ships in 1889 to 21,334 in 1901
and was accompanied by a twofold increase in cargo capacity.4 The capital
port city had to accommodate several changes and infrastructural improve-
ments to compete with rival European port cities and ensure the needs for the
new routes of foreign commercial companies, thereby securing its centrality
with respect to the global trade routes established since the period of colonial
1 I. de Vilhena Barbosa, “O Novo Lazareto de Lisboa.” Archivo Pittoresco, 27 (1864): 209–210; Ana
Barata, Lisboa ‘caes da Europa’ (Lisboa: Colibri, 2010), 70.
2 In 1888, advertisements to vessels leaving Lisbon for Brazil (11 to 15 days trip), Buenos Aires
or other Pacific ports (such as the Pacific Steam Navigation Company or the French Steam
Navigation Company) announced the services of a medical doctor on board, free of charge.
3 Carola Hein, ed., Port Cities: dynamic landscapes and global networks (London: Routledge,
2011); Patrick O’Flanagan, Port Cities of Atlantic Iberia. c. 1500–1900 (London: Routledge, 2016).
4 Adolfo Loureiro, Os portos marítimos de Portugal e ilhas adjacentes, Vol. I (Lisboa: Imprensa
Nacional, 1904), 43.
© José Carlos Avelãs Nunes, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004513440_009

Hybrid Features at Lisbon ’ s New Lazaretto ( 1860–1908 ) 151
expansion. Simultaneously, Portuguese trade increased from 61,534 to 117,054

contos de réis5 while 40 to 50 percent of all imported and exported cargo passed
through the port of Lisbon. Thus, it follows that Lisbon’s increasing importance
for maritime and economic movement was accompanied by rising economic
flows and the growth of customs income,6 such that approximately one-third
of the total number of passengers came from Africa and Brazil.
As in all port cities throughout history, Portugal’s political and economic
status confronted the problem of how to strike a politically advantageous bal-
ance between the rewards of trade and the costs of contagion. Securing the
safety of a port city was a sort of military fight against deadly contagious dis-
eases, especially since the port’s permeability could jeopardize the health of an
entire population, disrupt main trading routes, and lead to the collapse of one
of the main entrances into the European continent.7
Maritime ships served as the primary vector of transmitting contagious
diseases such as cholera and yellow fever. In 1855, Lisbon was the site of a
severe outbreak of cholera, which arrived via English trading ships.8 However,
due to England’s unique historical and political relationship with Portugal,
authorities bypassed a mandatory quarantine, which gave rise to devastat-
ing consequences. Most of these ships’ passengers contracted cholera and air
fumigations in the port and surrounding neighbourhoods were not sufficient
to avoid the propagation of epidemics. In 1857, yellow fever, or the so-called
black vomit, decimated part of Lisbon’s population and was described as hav-
ing left “a theatre of death, tears and pain” in its wake.9 Yellow fever arrived in a
vessel coming from Brazil. Retaining the bodies of the ship’s deceased without
disinfection at customs together with the inadequate disinfection of luggage,
ultimately caused a significant number of deaths among customs’ workers.
It would only be years later, in 1864, that the Royal Academy of Sciences of
5 Portuguese coin: 1 conto de réis is equivalent to 1000 réis. Ana Prata, Políticas portuárias na I
República (1880–1929) (Casal de Cambra, Caleidoscópio, 2011), 29. For comparative purposes
see note 30.
6 Prata, Políticas portuárias, 29.
7 In the second half of the nineteenth-century, there were still animal corpses dumped in
the sidewalks, human wastes thrown through the windows to the streets and an installed
deep state of poverty. While its gardens and magnificent buildings supported the “romantic
Lisbon,” the imagined “capital city” was open to new infections and not ready to face their
consequences. José-Augusto França, Lisboa: História Física e Social (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte,
2008).
8 Maria Antónia Pires de Almeida. Saúde Pública e Higiene na Imprensa Diária em Anos de
Epidemia, 1854–1918 (Lisboa: Edições Colibri, 2013).
9 Barbosa, “O Novo Lazareto de Lisboa,” 209–210.
152 Avelãs Nunes
Lisbon would officially recognise that “the outburst of yellow fever fostered at
last public hygiene studies, which were due for long.”10
If Portuguese authorities failed to implement a strategy of quarantining and
confinement of cholera and yellow fever patients, it was due to the medical
and scientific uncertainties regarding their origins and causes of transmission.
Some experts, proponents of what was known as “germ theory,” defended the
view that contagion was not necessarily mediated by human contact but by
a vector, or contagious agent, whose microscopic origin was soon to be clari-
fied by the inroads of scientific experimental medicine.11 By contrast, other
experts advocated for a miasma theory approach centred on propagation
through miasmas, or vapour emanations due to harmful air properties. While
both views emphasized the importance of improving sanitary conditions in
increasingly overcrowded urban spaces and working-class neighbourhoods
(see chapter 3 in this volume), germ theory advocates elected confinement as
the crucial measure against epidemics while miasma theorists gave primacy to
securing proper sanitary conditions and did not insist on physical restraint. In
Portugal as well as abroad, experts were divided between both camps.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the controversy over the diseases’ causes
and the proper means of treatment and eradication were debated at annual
international sanitary conferences. What emerged from each successive con-
ference were the opposing national strategies which often mirrored cultural
differences among experts of different nationalities working under different
geographical conditions. Thus, it was the representatives from England who
defended a system of prevention based on anti-contagiousness claims and
advocated for the suppression of quarantines, while southern European coun-
tries, which were geographical more vulnerable, continued to support strate-
gies of confinement.12 Alternative forms of confinement and prevention held
significant scientific, economic, social, and political dimensions, which had to
be balanced against each other.
10 Barbosa, “O Novo Lazareto de Lisboa,” 209–210.

11 Roy Porter. Blood and Guts: a short history of medicine. London: Norton & Company, 2004,
p. 70; Jacques Le Goff, Jean Charles Sournia, Les Maladies ont une histoire. Paris: Seuil;
1985; Frank M. Snowden, Epidemics and Society. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020;
Alchon Susan Austin. A Pest in the Land: New World Epidemics in a Global Perspective.
Albuquerque (USA): University of New Mexico Press, 2003; Almeida, Domingos José
Bernardino de. Quarentenas perante a Ciência ou a critica cientifica do Regulamento geral
de sanidade marítima. Lisboa: Livraria Ferin, 1891.
12 Peter Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005); John Chircop, and Francisco Javier Martínez eds. Mediterranean
quarantines, 1750–1914. Space, Identity and Power. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2018.
Figure 5.1 Location of Lisbon and of the Lazaretto. A – Atlantic Ocean; B – Tagus River; C –
Lisbon; D – Lazaretto (Porto Brandão)
©Google Earth
This chapter analyses the construction of the New Lazaretto13 (circa 1860)
against the backdrop of a Lisbon in transition away from older forms of confine-
ment and to newer forms of prevention. Located on the south side of the river
Tagus at Porto Brandão, the new lazaretto was separated from Lisbon by the
river’s large estuary, which shielded the capital city from incoming epidemics.
The new lazaretto was not one but several buildings whose function was the
administration of medical evaluations for both cargo and persons and to quar-
antine objects and passengers at the very site of Portugal’s main port of entry. If
cleared, then both commodities and persons were allowed to proceed to Lisbon
proper via the port located on the rivers northern bank. However, if cargo or
passengers failed their medical evaluation, they were forced to quarantine on
site. Alongside questions concerning the expansion of the port’s capacity to
13 The designation lazaretto comes from the old leper colonies administered by Christian
religious orders for centuries. They were often called lazar houses, a name honoring
Lazarus, the character in the parable of the rich man and the beggar, Lazarus, who suf-
fered from leprosy.
154 Avelãs Nunes
meet the demands of an increasingly expanding international market,14 the

construction of the new lazaretto became a site of intense debate between sci-
entific, commercial, and political authorities, particularly given their respec-
tive approaches toward public health and medicine.
This chapter analyses the various dimensions – architectural, medical,
techno-scientific, socio-economic, and political – of the new lazaretto, from
its creation in the 1860s until its demise in 1908, at a turning point con-
cerning conflicting medical practices. Taken together they account for the
new lazaretto’s temporal specificity – a very late bloomer in the long history
of the lazarettos – and its location on the other side of the Tagus River. Both
temporal and spatial characteristics account for the hybridity of the lazaretto’s
characteristics. They resulted from the difficult balance between changing
medical prevention practices and commercial requirements, between political
power and private interests, and between public responsibility and individual
welfare. Additionally, they show how the emergence and demise of the new
lazaretto cannot be disentangled from the remodelling of the port of Lisbon to
such an extent that despite located outside the city the lazaretto was always an
integral part of the urban question. Finally, they illustrate the changing posi-
tion of Lisbon as a port city, at the juncture of Europe and other continents,
from its centrality to the maritime protection of the country, to one of many
nodes in a polycentric sanitary structure, including various prevention facili-
ties in the port and across the city, better adapted to the increasingly dynamic
and global world at the turn to the twentieth century (see chapter 7 in this
volume).
2 The New Lazaretto. Robust Scientific Options of a Late Bloomer
From the late sixteenth-century to mid-nineteenth century, the maritime

protection of Lisbon was secured through confinement in a lazaretto located
within the repurposed medieval fortress of Fortaleza de Torre Velha (Fortress
of the Old Tower). With the absence of a connecting bridge between the two
margins of the river, its extended estuary provided the most effective barrier
against epidemics. The protection of the city was most efficient if situated in
the river’s southern margin. Travellers who were forced to quarantine, however,
14 Miguel Paes, Melhoramentos De Lisboa E Seu Porto (Lisboa: Typ. Universal, 1884); Emílio
Brògueira Dias and Jorge Fernandes Alves, “Ports, policies and interventions in ports in
Portugal – 20th Century”, Cahiers de la Méditerranée, 80 (2010): 41–64.
were confronted with a filthy, dark, damaged, and unhealthy building offering
terrible accommodations and equally terrible food.15
Under mounting pressure, the Portuguese government constructed an
entirely new lazaretto close to the decaying fortress, which housed the old
lazaretto. In 1860, a special royal commission comprised of political repre-
sentatives, physicians, and engineers,16 was appointed to assess the situation
of the old lazaretto. In the end, the royal commission’s findings validated the
political decision to construct a new lazaretto in place of simply remodelling
the old fortress. Such a conclusion was reached given the experiences of phy-
sicians such as Macedo Pinto, member of the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon
and the Medical Society of Lisbon, and who oversaw the treatment of chol-
era patients at the time. Such experiences shaped Pinto’s view that lazarettos
should be “places destined to cure the sick and confine suspects during the
incubation period of the contagious principle,”17 and as such should be erected
in elevated places with exposure to the north, ventilated and distant from vil-
lages. Moreover, for Pinto confinement and prophylaxis are public health mea-
sures that should abide by recent medical breakthroughs, thereby ensuring the
efficacy of new means of mitigating the worst effects of epidemics, such as
cholera.
Even though the first plans for the new lazaretto were drafted in 1858, con-
struction of this newer complex of buildings would take over a decade with
its completion in 1869, a time when Lisbon was still the hegemonic centre of
Portugal’s maritime traffic.
Planning was guided by scientific, technological, and medical input as evi-
denced by the specific areas for disinfection of luggage and people and the
instruments acquired. This desire for scientifically grounded infrastructure is
also reflected in the lazaretto’s construction process, wherein engineers and
physicians worked side-by-side and selected specific architectural features that
allowed for this new lazaretto to serve as a multi-functional space adequate for
the surveillance of the circulation of commodities, persons, and infectious dis-
ease in and out of Lisbon’s port. In addition, such cooperation between scien-
tific and technical knowledge was materialized in the disposition of buildings,
15 Conselho Extraordinário de Saúde Pública do Reino (CESPR), Relatorio da epidemia de

febre amarella em Lisboa no anno de 1857. (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1859); Barbosa, “O
Novo Lazareto de Lisboa.”
16 The medical doctor Guilherme da Silva Abranches, President of the Kingdom’s public
health board, and the engineers José Diogo Mascarenhas Mousinho de Albuquerque and
José Anselmo Gromicho Couceiro were appointed to examine the project.
17 Macedo Pinto, Medicina Administrativa E Legislativa, Obra Destinada Para Servir De Texto
No Ensino D’esta Sciencia, Vol. II (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade, 1863), 592.
156 Avelãs Nunes
Figure 5.2 General view of the old and new lazarettos. A: Fort of S. Sebastião or Old
Lazaretto; B: The New Lazaretto of Lisbon: Quarantines; C: Entrance and main
gates; D: Tagus River; E: Direction of the Lisbon South Margin (city) c.1910
Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa, Ref. PT/AMLSB/NEG/000755
the arrangement of surrounding spaces, and the integration of buildings and

surroundings in a tightly networked system, such that the architectural features
of buildings reflected their different functions. What is more, the main build-
ing, which housed the lazaretto’s quarantined persons, drew inspiration from
Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, which diagrammed a spatial arrangement of
prisons that reinforced the disciplining of individuals subject to confinement.18
18 The agenda of the social reforms of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was part of his emerging
theory of utilitarianism that championed the concepts of happiness and wellbeing at the
core of society. His penal reform included a new type of prison – the panopticon – more
efficient both from the economic and the punishment perspectives. It enabled to see but
not to be seen, due to a circular building that dominated a larger compound allowing a
small number of guards to oversee a large number of prisoners. The cells were located in
the circle, and the guard in a higher position in its centre. The fact that it was not possible
to see the guard created an additional mechanism of self-censorship among prisoners,
leaving in fact the burden of watching to those who were watched. In this sense the pan-
opticon was a response to a new disciplinary paradigm.
Still, it was simultaneously the siege of various architectural innovations,

including modern facilities, materials, and apparatuses. Its organization and
commodities reproduced the hierarchy of the different classes of transatlantic
passengers. Finally, the significant public expenses involved when quarantines
were mandatory, at a time of stringent financial conditions for the country and
the city, accounted for the concession of the main quarantine building to a
private company, which administered it in a hostel-like fashion.
2.1 The Building Complex

Between 1858 and 1860, the engineer, António Joaquim Pereira, drafted what
would become the official blueprints for the new lazaretto, with construction
beginning in 1861 until its completion in 1869.19 Working alongside Pereira
were a team of engineers that included individuals such as Cândido de Moraes
and Francisco Liberato Telles, who was hired at the civil engineering depart-
ment of the Portuguese Ministry of Public Works and published four books
dealing with his research into techniques of construction in general, with an
emphasis on pavement work in particular. Given this body of work, Telles was
made responsible for any necessary improvements at the lazaretto between
1880 and 1900. Such improvements included a new cemetery and chapel
(1886),20 a bridge, and a water supply system built in 1893/1894, among others.
The coloured pathway leading to the chapel, whose process of fabrication was
described for the first time in Portugal by Telles21 as its leading producer, were
made of cement tiles.22
The initial project of the lazaretto had a total budget of 500,000,000 réis
(or 500 contos de réis) to be used for “quarantine buildings, foundations and
19 The account book of the new lazaretto building begins on 5 July 1861. From the opening
until March 1864 there are listed the following categories: quarantine building, hostel,
dock and landing, foundations and earthworks, accessories, luggage barracks and ware-
houses. A unique entrance of “Quarantine Building” is recorded in the 5th book, starting
in September 1865, ending March 1866. ANTT, ref. PT/TT/JSP/D/01.
20 ANTT, ref. PT/TT/MOPCS/PR/190.
21 Ine Wouters, Stephanie Van de Voorde, Inge Bertels, Bernard Espion, Krista de Jonge, and
Denis Zastavni. Wounters, Voorde, Bertels, Building knowledge, constructing histories: pro-
ceedings of the Sixth International Congress on Construction History (London: CRC Press,
Taylor & Francis, 2018). Telles owned a company called Trituração de Pedras Liberato
Telles & Companhia, which was the first to use steam machines on the south bank of the
river and was working in 1885. Joana Pereira, A produção social da solidariedade operária:
o caso de estudo da Península de Setúbal (1890–1930). Lisbon: PhD Thesis, 2013, 103.
22 António Frazão, “Lazareto de Lisboa”. Branco e Negro, 60, 23.05.1897, 115, also reproduced
in “O Lazareto,” Brasil-Portugal, 162: 288.
158 Avelãs Nunes
earthworks, docks and landfills, accessories, hostel and barracks, paths, ware-
houses and luggage, laundry, hospital, cemetery and repairs.”23 In total, the con-
struction of these facilities for the new lazaretto amounted to approximately
568,300,000 réis (or 568 contos de réis), thus exceeding the initial budget by
less than 15 percent.24 Given Portugal’s financial crisis in the final decades of
the nineteenth century, which culminated in the nation-state declaring bank-
ruptcy in 1892, the investment in the new lazaretto clearly demonstrates the
importance of territorial control in the eyes of the Portuguese government.
Thus, in response to the strain that was placed on the Portuguese economy by
this economic crisis, the government sought out a truly cooperative model of
the division of labour between politicians, scientists, and engineers that can
be seen in their will to construct and furnish the buildings following modern
architectural trends, and make use of up-to-date industrial materials and sci-
entific instruments.
Despite the completed lazaretto’s two-fold function of managing the flow
of persons, commodities, and preventing the possibility of the spread of infec-
tious disease, the narrow entrance of the lazaretto did not, itself, reflect the
massive scale required for overseeing the circulation of persons and things.
While iron gates served as a means of materializing the division of labour
proper to this new lazaretto – spaces for loading activities (central), for incom-
ing visitors (westwards), and for quarantined people (eastwards)25 – surveil-
lance teams oversaw daily operations from the perimeter. And on days with
particularly large numbers of commodities and persons, surveillance teams
were assisted by military personnel stationed in a one-story building on the
lazaretto’s western border, previously used as an office building for archives
and secretariat.
23 Rui Manuel Mesquita Mendes, “Obras públicas nos concelhos de Almada e Seixal (1640–
1910). Um síntese histórica, artística e documental preliminar,” in Actas do 2.º Encontro
sobre o Património de Almada e Seixal (Almada: Centro de Arqueologia de Almada, 2014),
92–93.
24 For comparative purposes, in 1881 a worker employed in the metallurgy industry earned
an average salary of 800 réis per day, which amounts to 24,000 réis per month and 288,000
réis per year (Maria Filomena Mónica, “Indústria e democracia: os operários metalúrgicos
de Lisboa (1880–1934),” Análise Social, Vol. XVIII (72-72-74), 1982 (3, 4, 5): 1231–1277. This
means that the cost of the lazaretto amounted to 2000 the annual salary of a metallurgi-
cal worker. In 1849, the pavement of the Rossio Plaza (see chapter 1 in this volume) cost
300,000 réis, which is more than 1500 times less.
25 In the 1880s, the same three entrances served for quarantines, another for visitors and
another for employees of the lazaretto. Loureiro, Os portos marítimos de Portugal e ilhas
adjacentes, Vol. III–II, (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1907), 420.
Figure 5.3 Plan of the new Lazaretto

1. Old cemetery; 2. Chapel/Church of Porto Brandão; 3. Kitchen and parlor; 4–10. Quarantines
No. 1 to no. 7; 11. Mine water deposit; 12. Well water tank; 13. Hospital; 14. Fort of S. Sebastião
or Old Lazareto; 15. Dock; 16. Well with water for cleaning; 17. Dispatch room/for mechanical
ventilation; 18. Mechanical ventilation disinfection tank; 19–20. Verification; 21. mechanical
ventilation disinfection; 22–25. Sulfur disinfection; 26. greenhouse; 27. Sulfuric acid
disinfection; 28. Fans; 29. sulfur disinfection; 30. Secretariat and residence of customs
employees; 31. Barracks of guards and rowers; 32–33. Mechanical ventilation disinfection;
34. deposits; 35. Deposit for disinfecting leather by sulfurization; 46. Deposits; 37. Deposit for
sulfur disinfection; 38. deposits; 39. Officers’ barracks, with kitchen and barracks; 40. Covered
space for ventilation; 41. House of the health guards; 42. Laundry facilities; 43. House of the
inspector; 44. Stable for infected horses
Adaptation from Loureiro, Adolfo – Os portos marítimos de Portugal e
ilhas adjacentes, Vol. III, 1904, with SIPA: DES.00048211; DES.00048213 @The
autor
The pathway leading from the dockyard to the lazaretto was lined by several
buildings wherein cargo, goods, and clothes were verified and, if necessary,
treated. Alongside these spaces for processing cargo was the customs’ delega-
tion, the dispatch house, and three verification buildings; all of which were
organized in the style of assembly-lines26 common to the spatial organization
of factories during the period of industrialization: first, were the ventilation
treatment facilities where clothes and luggage were exposed to the continu-
ous circulation of fresh air, followed by acid treatment facilities, heat treating
facilities that housed kilns that sanitized imported products, and lastly, four
26 “O Lazareto de Lisboa,” Brasil-Portugal, 23: 8.

160 Avelãs Nunes
buildings designated for the ventilation of the luggage of the ships’ passengers.
Between the ventilation and acid treatment stations, and the heat and luggage
treatment sites, stood a surveillance building, from where the health guards
could follow every movement on the pier or the embankment, and the resi-
dence of customs employees.
Technological infrastructures were behind the disinfection of cargo in
the customs’ buildings and included modern kiln equipment made by the
Geneste, Herscher and Company House, a Parisian based company owned
by the engineers Charles Geneste and Eugène Herscher. Given the Company
House’s presence at several international exhibitions from 1883 to 1887, its kilns
gained international recognition27 from both hygienists and engineers. This
agreement between the technical and scientific communities was reflected in
the pairing of kilns that used boiled water to elevate the temperature of goods
to 130ºC28 with fans for “mechanical” sterilization and supplemental chemical
treatment. To cope with possible machinery fire hazards, there was a small fire
station, near the cemetery.29 The increasing number of passengers and goods
justified the acquisition of this high-tech infrastructure at the end of the 1890s.
Still critics remained unconvinced given that they considered this “new” laza-
retto remained ill-equipped for preventing and regulating the possibility of
contamination between persons and things.
Significant improvements in the dispatch area accounted for its ability to
handle the luggage of more than three hundred passengers in a short time
span of around six hours. Luggage was unloaded from the vessels, opened, dis-
infected, and verified, and then returned to their owners who continued their
journey to Lisbon in the very same day, avoiding in this way extra expenses and
negative commercial implications.30
Beyond its warehouses a long staircase connected the officers’ headquarters –
with capacity for more than 100 officers – to the hospital, which featured a
special infirmary dedicated for the treatment of suspicious illnesses. For
additional security, both the officer headquarters and the hospital were sur-
rounded by walls and required credentials for their access.31 That said, the
27 Charles Herscher; Eugène Geneste, Applications du génie sanitaires: ventilation,

chauffage, assainissement, désinfection, matériel d’assainissement (…) (Paris: Herscher
et Cie., 1889).
28 Laurent Escande, Avec les pèlerins de La Mecque. Dossiers numériques (S/l, Presses univer-
sitaires de Provence, 2013).
29 “O Lazareto de Lisboa,” 8.
30 “Lazareto,” Diário Ilustrado, 1955, 1878.
31 Macedo Pinto, Medicina administrativa.
architects and designers of the new lazaretto did not forego the opportunity
for its beautification.
The access to the main building of the lazaretto was done through a long
and narrow winding pathway, illuminated at night.32 The lazaretto’s main
building had three floors, designed according to a “fan-like” layout, and fea-
tured seven wings that were connected through a central area housing the liv-
ing room, chapel, and a modernised kitchen. Included in each wing – aside
from bedrooms, dormitories, and dining room33 – was a series of ample, clean,
airy, and well-equipped wards that served as isolated and autonomous, hostel-
like, quarantine units, with the typical guest staying for an average of seven to
twelve days.34
The main building also featured, as António Frazão put it “the most innova-
tive” kitchen in the Iberian Peninsula,35 given its industrial stove and capacity
for serving upwards of 1000 people. And to distribute food throughout each of
the buildings seven wings, the kitchen implemented the use of a rotating sys-
tem (called “rodas).”36 Moreover, a semi-circular “parlatório,” or visiting room,
was housed on the floor above the kitchen and featured twenty-one “large
windows, which faced a similar number of windows from where quarantined
people chatted with their visitors.”37 A health guard supervised this room.38 At
the centre there was a chapel where Catholic mass was celebrated on Sundays
and holy days of obligation.39
Gardened courtyards, with views to the river and Lisbon could be seen by
those in quarantine. Constructed behind the main building was a eucalyptus
tree-lined path, whose panoramic views stood in stark contrast with its rela-
tively mundane setting save the chapel, and which connected the lazaretto’s
main building to its cemetery. In the chapel one could appreciate a patterned
and coloured pathway leading to its entrance, decorated with several large,
semi-elliptical, windows replete with a ventilation system unique to the space.
By the beginning of the 1890s, and under the direction of the inspector
and physician António Homem de Vasconcelos, foreign experts considered
32 Frazão, “Lazareto de Lisboa”, 115. Condições para a adjudicação da Empreza da Hospedaria

do Lazareto de Lisboa (Lisboa, Imp, Nacional, 1885) and Condições para a adjudicação da
Empreza da Hospedaria do Lazareto de Lisboa (Lisboa, Imp, Nacional, 1891).
33 Frazão, “Lazareto de Lisboa,” 115.
35 Almost all the kitchen’s cooks were from Spain. Frazão, “Lazareto de Lisboa,” 115.
39 In the attics were located the rooms for servants, sailors and lower-class passengers. The
top slab was used to air out the garments. Frazão, “Lazareto de Lisboa,” 115.
162 Avelãs Nunes
the new lazaretto to be “a model establishment and one of the best in Europe
and America;”40 a group that included the prestigious French physician
Robert Proust, who served as the chief physician of Hôtel-Dieu in Paris, and
was a Professor of Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, the General
Inspector of the International Health Service, and the author of a number of
seminal public health treatises.
2.2 The Main Building: Between Panopticon-like and

Pavilion-style Prison
As the main, historical, actors in the fight against epidemic diseases, lazarettos
were not hospitals but satisfied a similar social function, just as they were not
prisons, but wielded the institutional power of holding people in confinement.
As such, the Portuguese press considered the new lazaretto to be a hybrid
between a fort, a hospital, and a prison.41 In other words, what these analogies
reveal is the fact that both health surveillance and control were the lazaretto’s
main social functions.
Given its three-storey main building the lazaretto could accommodate
more than 800 people in each of its seven, distinctive, wings by transposing
the categories of first-, second-, and third-class common to transatlantic ves-
sels into the blueprints for this new lazaretto – so much so that “passengers”
of the same class were organized according to the duration of their isolation.
At the lazaretto, it was the job of the inspector to oversee, and more impor-
tantly authorize, the visitors and family of quarantined individuals, with dedi-
cated spaces in its many living rooms. Visitation hours, however, were entirely
dependent upon the absence of quarantined individuals who were currently
residing in the wing of interest to the visitor.42
It is due to its techniques of surveillance and control, and an architec-
tural style entirely unique to itself, that the new lazaretto was considered a
panopticon-pavilion; a hybrid structure made more singular because there is
no other comparable lazaretto in Europe, whether in terms of architectural
style and space configuration.43 Its seven wings, all organized in a centripetal
star-like shape, immediately call to mind Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon

41 “O Lazareto de Lisboa,” Brasil-Portugal, 23: 8.
42 Portugal, Regulamento geral de sanidade maritima, approvado por decreto de 4 de outubro
de 1889 (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1889): art. 129, pr. 3.
43 All extant designs of lazaretto buildings were studied and subject to proper comparison.
models, which were still being implemented during the nineteenth century in
various countries, as in the case of the San Michele lazaretto in Italy.44
Aside from Bentham’s panopticon, it is equally likely that the designs of
the new lazaretto drew much of its inspiration from the French Mazas Prison
from the mid-nineteenth century, which the Portuguese royal attorney general
Manuel Thomaz de Sousa Azevedo visited in 1857. Two years after Azevedo’s
visit, he would mention his experience of Mazas Prison in an official report
delivered to the Ministry of Justice (1859).45 Not only does the lazaretto
share the same construction dates as its French counterpart, but the latter’s
design of a star-shaped layout, with patios and gardens, was also used in the
designing of Lisbon’s central prison. It would be thirty years after the lazaret-
to’s construction that the Portuguese physician, Agostinho Lucio e Silva, would
realise the added health benefits of the prison’s architecture for the contain-
ment of cholera and yellow fever among its prisoners.46
In 1888, Silva published his study on the tuberculosis outbreak at the
Penitenciária Central de Lisboa (Central Prison Establishment); the findings of
which seem to support the view of the new lazaretto as a medical rather than
political institution, an institution whose function is securing public health
rather than the maintenance and governance of a social order.47 While the
architectural configuration of the lazaretto is similar to a panopticon, there
was no form of centralized surveillance. Its centripetal star-like shape was
mainly chosen for medical reasons, due to the natural ventilation provided by
the spaces between wings, uniquely suited to house people who could propa-
gate contagious diseases. This was the main reason behind the pavilion system
model for lazarettos,48 as was the pathway encircling the main building, which
conducted people to quarantine, controlled by several guards, in a form of sur-
veillance typical of the pavilion system model, as it was aptly argued by the
44 Quim Bonastra, “Recintos sanitarios y espacios de control. Un estudio morfológico de la

arquitectura cuarentenaria,” Dynamis, 30: 38–39. In Portugal, the lazaretto is the first cen-
tripetal star-like shape building, followed twenty years later, in 1886, by the security build-
ing of the Miguel Bombarda’s hospital for alienated people, and in 1918 by the Sanatorium
Albergaria in Cabeço de Montachique, around 30 km away from Lisbon.
45 Manuel Thomás de Sousa Azevedo, Relatorio apresentado ao Ministerio da Justiça em 20
de Outubro de 1858 pelo Juiz de Direito ajudante do Procurador Regio da Relação de Lisboa
Manuel Thomaz de Sousa Azevedo (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1859).
46 Agostinho Lucio e Silva, A Tuberculose na Penitenciaria Central de Lisboa (Lisboa:
Imprensa Nacional, 1888), 19–20.
47 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books,
1995), 200–209, 217, 249.
48 Pedro Fraile, and Quim Bonastra, “Sharing architectural models: morphologies and sur-
veillance from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries”. Asclepio, 69 (2017), 1–22.
164 Avelãs Nunes
Figures 5.4–b Comparison between the New Lazaretto and the French Mazas
Prison. Top: interior and exterior plan of the new Lisbon
lazaretto; Bottom: Mazas Prison interior and exterior plan
SIPA, DES.00230391 + © WikiCommons
historian Quim Bonastra.49 Additionally to adequate ventilation, the central

part of the main building secured not centralized surveillance, but a central-
ization of services and efficiency of communication. It further allowed for
the creation of in-between front gardens, which could also be used for health
purposes.50
2.3 The Lazaretto’s Hostel: Private Concessions in Public Institutions

From 1879 to 1891, the physician and inspector, Homem de Vasconcellos,
managed the lazaretto’s hostel, such that medical experts eventually viewed
both the lazaretto and its hostel as model establishments. What is more,
Vasconcellos played a key role in the agreement process leading to the hos-
tel’s dual-function of quarantine facility and as a source of state funding via
the taxation of its use by private investors.51 That said, and while the lazaretto
remained first and foremost a government institution, there were extended
periods of time when its hostel was privately run with supplementary support
from the state – mainly in order to avoid the worst effects of the then-existing
financial situation of the Portuguese economy.
The hybrid facets of the lazaretto extended from the novel architectural
features of its main building, bringing together portions of panopticon and
pavilion designs, to its relationship within the links between public and private
institutions. With respect to the archival materials currently available, how-
ever, historical records are unable to clarify several details of the connection
between public and private institutions, such as the specificity of their terms
of agreement or their duration. For example, while it was the case that pas-
sengers were required to issue payment in accordance with a “fixed fee per
class”52 upon arrival, at the lazaretto – contrary to international practice53 –
what remains unclear is to whom this payment was addressed: the state or a
private company? At the very least, and with respect to the public and private
interest, and use, of the hostel, this much is clear: in 1873, the entrepreneur
Thomaz Elias dos Santos assumed the responsibility of steward of the lazaret-
tos hostel; a title he was relieved of, in 1878, by Homem de Vasconcellos, who
replaced him as hostel manager.
49 Bonastra, “Recintos sanitários,” 38–39.

50 José Carlos Avelãs Nunes, “Beyond White Architecture: Therapeutic gardens for patients
with tuberculosis in the sanatoria of the Greater Lisbon area (1870–1970)”. Gardens and
Landscapes of Portugal, 5(1): 39–55.
52 Loureiro, Os portos marítimos, III–II, 419.
53 John Howard, Ferreira da Silva (trans.), História dos principais lazaretos da Europa (Lisboa:
Typographia Chalcographica, e Litteraria do Arco Cego, 1800), 9.
166 Avelãs Nunes
In January 1873, Elias dos Santos won the concession of the supply and ser-
vice of the Lisbon port,54 with the express contractual obligation “to receive
560 quarantines in the lazaretto.”55 While it was indeed a risky venture given
the substantial investment required on his part, Elias dos Santos had the
backing of a powerful investor, Salon (or Shalom) Ben-Saúd, a wealthy Jewish
merchant.
According to the Portuguese government’s concession contract, the type of
management involved was classified as the management of an enterprise – the
Hospedaria do Lazareto de Lisboa (Hostel Company of Lisbon’s Lazaretto) –
and, therefore, all its equipment could only be acquired with the approval of
the Guard of the Estação de Saúde de Belém (Health Station at Belém). Thus,
the lazaretto’s entrepreneur was accountable to the regulation agent at the
Health Station at Belém; that is, accountable to a public institution that went
so far as to maintain records of the taxes placed on the equipment and goods
used by the hostel.56 Now, given the class structure organizing the passenger
ships arriving at the lazaretto, the price of entry upon arrival corresponded to
their particular class to which they belonged while in transit, as well as deter-
mining the quality of their accommodation. Additional charges could also
be issued in the event of a passenger’s hospitalisation, and its services, such
as, baths and medication.57 In the case of indigents, travellers who could not
afford to pay the hostel stay, third class service was provided and funded by the
Portuguese state to the concessionary, at a 30 percent discount rate.
And while bed mattresses and linens, as well as meals’ menus, varied in
price, every passenger was provided, by right, with accommodation, face and
foot basins, a watering can, a clothes’ hanger and bucket, and a buzzer but-
ton. Included as part of its concession contract was a list of food served at
the hostel, with menus and ingredients subjected to the daily approval by the
inspector, while a health guard supervised their preparation; measures, all of
which aimed at guaranteeing the foods preparation in accordance with health
standards as well as its overall quality for consumption.58
54 Public notice from 11.01.1873, contract from 27.01.1873.

55 Reflexões do empresário do fornecimento e serviço do lazareto do Porto de Lisboa sobre a
verdadeira inteligência de alguns artigos do regulamento geral de sanidade marítima de 12
de Novembro de 1874 (Lisboa: Typ. Universal, 1875): 7.
56 [António Rodrigues?] Sampaio, “Resoluções inéditas tomadas pelo ministro do reino,
11.09.1873” in O direito – revista de Jurisprudência e legislação (Lisboa, Typ. Lallement
Frères, 1875).
57 Reflexões do empresário, 7.
58 Portugal, Regulamento geral de sanidade maritima, approvado por decreto de 12 de
Novembro de 1874 (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1874), 9.
A comparison of the hostel’s records, which include guest fees, with its issued
receipts reveals the hostel’s relatively expensive price-point. Second-class
guests were charged approximately 2,800 réis for an eight day stay, that is 350
réis per day, roughly the same price as a single day pay of a factory worker.59
From 1886 until 1905, and despite the less than affordable prices, more than
77,417 quarantined people were listed as having checked into the lazaretto’s
hostel, with a peak attendance of 13,278 guests in 1900 and a record low of 30
guests by 1905.60 That said, and despite the relative success, the hostel, and
eventually the lazaretto itself, was not without problems.
On 14 March 1875, in a letter to the Portuguese King, Elias dos Santos threat-
ened to terminate his contract with the hostel. The reason being: the govern-
ment’s failure in declaring a mandatory quarantine for all passengers arriving
via the English vessel, Douro, whose port of origin was known to have been
dealing with an outbreak of yellow fever. Santos was concerned that such neg-
ligence posed a threat to the city’s safety, endanger his own business, and even-
tually put at risk the lazaretto. Elias dos Santos went further and threatened to
terminate the contract. But it is unlikely that he proceeded with this resolu-
tion, as there is no information related to another private concessionary in the
following years.
While extant records are unable to clarify the exact terms of the private-
public enterprise, both in terms of the legal duration of the business venture,
the number of private actors and the kind of contract that each investor indi-
vidually held with the state, what is certain is the above-average occupancy
rate at the hostel and equally above-average price of accommodation. Such
public-private concessions proved beneficial for private investors rather than
the Portuguese state.61
59 According to the regulations of the lazaretto, the daily payment for first, second and
third class people was respectively 600, 400 and 150 réis. Regulamento geral de sanidade
marítima, 1874, 1889. However the invoices of the lazaretto refer to 350 réis, not to 400 réis,
for second class people. ANTT, ref. PT/TT/JSP/D/01.
60 There are no data between 1892 and 1898. The highest numbers correspond to years 1889,
1890 and 1900 (c.12.000), and from 1902 onwards, there is a decrease from 309 to 30.
61 Two records of the terms of the hostel’s public concession exist for 1885 and 1891, and
there is also indication that a private concession was in operation in 1906, in ANTT, ref.
PT/TT/MR/CRC/104. In 1894, applications for a concession of a railway line between the
lazaretto and Cacilhas (where a boat connection to Lisbon existed), using a Decauville
system, announced as a very profitable investment in “Linhas Portuguezas,” Gazeta dos
Caminhos de Ferro, 16.08.1894, give indirect evidence of the intensive use of the lazaretto
and its economic advantages. However, it is not clear if legal concessions were continu-
ously in operation from the 1890s until the 1910s. While government accountability indi-
cates that there was “taxation” of the lazaretto, there are no revenues registered in some
168 Avelãs Nunes
Figures 5.5a–b 1st, 2nd and 3rd classes of the lazaretto bedrooms – “three different
classes, one real one;” (below) The businessman, before and after being in
charge of the lazaretto
In Bordallo Pinheiro, No lazaretto de Lisboa: 33, 49
These conclusions, which are evidenced by the historical record of the terms
and conditions of such contracts and those pertaining to state budgets and
their accountability reports, also find their corroboration in the memoirs of
one lazaretto employee,62 and the well-known artist, illustrator, journalist,
socio-political and satirical cartoonist sympathetic to Republicanism, Raphael
Bordalo Pinheiro (see chapters 1 and 12 in this volume).63 Bordalo Pinheiro’s
years. In 1900, the Hospedaria do Lazareto was explicitly indicated in the state’s budget
and considered as entailing “substancial expenses”. DSC, 70. In 1897, in an entry “income
from the lazaretto” a total of 4.000 contos de réis is listed in the state’s accountability. DSC,
17. In the following year the amount listed is 5.900 contos de réis in the next year DSC, 2.
But these amounts are low when compared with the profit of 8.000 contos de réis from
the Health Station at Belém.
62 Frazão, “Lazareto de Lisboa.”
63 Rafael Bordallo Pinheiro, No Lazaretto de Lisboa (Lisboa: Empreza Litteraria.
Luso-Brasileira, 1881). In 1875, he not only left for Brazil, but he also created the famous
cartoon character known as Zé Povinho who portrays the Portuguese people, a common
and simple man, often deceived by politicians, but still sharp in his criticism against injus-
tice and tyranny.
170 Avelãs Nunes
memoir is especially rich with detailed illustrations and first-hand accounts of

his quarantine at the lazaretto’s hostel.
In 1878, Bordalo Pinheiro boarded a passenger ship traveling from Rio de
Janeiro – where he worked as a journalist and writer for various newspapers –
to Lisbon. Forced to quarantine upon arrival, due to Rio de Janeiro’s declara-
tion of an outbreak of yellow fever, Bordalo Pinheiro became a fierce critic of
the state of the new lazaretto’s facilities. As he describes in his memoir, the
disinfection of luggage and clothes took place for the sole “benefit” of customs’
authorities rather than for sanitary purposes.64 For Bordalo Pinheiro, this was a
style of confinement that seemed closer to its use within prisons than its medi-
cal use as a public health measure.65 Quarantined people were cut out from
the outside world, accommodated in first-, second- and third-class bedrooms
with no substantial differences – “three different classes, one real one”66 – all
behind gridded windows, as if behind steel-bars in a prison.67
Bordalo Pinheiro’s resentment towards the lazaretto’s conditions of con-
finement was only furthered with his total cost of quarantine coming out to
60,000 réis. This included accommodation as well as payment for inspectors,
customs, chaplains, boatmen, and alms for beggars.68 In a sarcasm typical of
his style Bordalo Pinheiro noted that, for the hostel’s private investor, all was
well as long as “providence remembered to invent yellow fever.”69 That is, for
Bordalo Pinheiro, the lazaretto’s private business partner managed the main
64 Bordallo Pinheiro, No Lazareto de Lisboa, 32.

65 Bordallo Pinheiro, No Lazareto de Lisboa, 38, 46. Almost 30 years after Bordallo’s depiction
of the gridded lazaretto’s windows, a photograph by the renowned photographer Joshua
Benoliel, reproduced in the magazine Illustração Portuguesa, depicted the same room
with the gridded window. See “A febre amarella, os doentes do ‘Lanfranc’ no lazareto,”
Illustração Portuguesa, 172: 726, original images available at Arquivo Histórico de Lisboa,
ref. PT/AMLSB/CMLSBAH/PCSP/004/. In Howard, História dos principais lazaretos, 11,
the same gridded windows are referred in the Lazaretto of Marseilles, especially in the
“parlatório.”
66 Bordallo Pinheiro, No lazareto, 33.
67 Bordallo Pinheiro, No lazareto, 38, 46. Almost 30 years after Bordallo’s depiction of the
gridded lazaretto’s windows, a photograph by the renowned photographer Joshua
Benoliel, reproduced in the magazine Illustração Portuguesa, depicted the same room
with the gridded window. See “A febre amarella, os doentes do ‘Lanfranc’ no lazareto,”
Illustração Portuguesa, 172: 726, original images available at Arquivo Histórico de Lisboa,
ref. PT/AMLSB/CMLSBAH/PCSP/004/. In Howard, História dos principais lazaretos, 11,
the same gridded windows are referred in the Lazaretto of Marseilles, especially in the
“parlatório.”
68 Bordallo Pinheiro, No Lazareto de Lisboa, 47–48.
Figures 5.6a–b Inside the Lazaretto quarantine rooms, showing gridded windows
In Bordallo Pinheiro, No lazaretto de Lisboa: 46; Passengers
of the Lanfranc ship, c.1910, Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa, Ref. PT/
AMLSB/NEG/000755
172 Avelãs Nunes
building for the purposes of private profit in such a way that benefitted neither
those under quarantine nor its public partner, i.e. the state.
But Bordalo Pinheiro recognised, in a post scriptum to the memoir, that since
his stay, the lazaretto “washed its face, put on a clean shirt, and did not attack
any more passengers upon their arrival,” acknowledging his “new inspector,
pleasant, dynamic and intelligent.”70 He was referring to the distinguished
physician Homem de Vasconcellos, confirming that in the period he directed
the lazaretto no private enterprise ran the hostel, with possible profits for the
Portuguese state.
3 Lazaretto as Sanitary Station of the Port of Lisbon.

Entangled Histories
The hybrid design of the lazaretto’s main building reflected the competing
medical views regarding the origin, nature, and treatment of diseases, such
as cholera and yellow fever. The short life of this late bloomer in the history of
lazarettos cannot be disentangled from its rapidly evolving medical context,
which was mirrored nationally by successive legislative measures impacting
on the lazaretto itself, which came to play an increasingly minor role until its
functional, if not architectural, final demise. They also impacted on the urban
scale of the capital city; they reshaped the face of the port of Lisbon and mate-
rialized a new prevention system, centralized inside the port city, but expand-
ing into various units along with the city (see chapter 7 in this volume).
Analysing maritime sanitary regime regulations (also called general mari-
time health regulations) alongside reports from various commissions issued
from 1837 to 1891, enable one to understand the way in which the Portuguese
state sought to manage and regulate those placed under quarantine.71 Included
in these reports are detailed descriptions of the connection between the laza-
retto and the Health Station at Belém and the role of the lazaretto’s staff, with
particular attention given to health inspection protocols for incoming vessels
after passing through police and customs checkpoints. Health visits noted the
vessels’ ports of origin, the duration of travel, disease involved, issued detailed

71 Examples are “Medidas sanitárias propostas pelo conselho de saúde pública do reino,
convocado extraordinariamente pelo Deer. de 29 de setembro de 1857,” in Macedo Pinto,
Medicina administrativa e legislativa, obra destinada para servir de texto no ensino d’esta
sciencia, Vol II (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade, 1863); and Domingos José Bernardino
de Almeida, As quarentenas perante a ciência ou a critica cientifica do regulamento geral de
sanidade marítima (Lisboa: Typ. do Commercio de Portugal, 1891).
questionnaires completed by the captain, identified sick passengers, deter-

mined the specific amount of time individuals were required to quarantine as
well as any subsequent need for additional isolation.
By the 1890s, the lazaretto’s stringent quarantine restrictions came under
heavy criticism due to changing medical views as well as the negative impact
of confinement on international trade. What is more, and despite the lazaret-
to’s strict rules regarding confinement, passengers were known to have avoided
their period of state mandated quarantine, thus putting the population at risk
of infection. This problem was systematically voiced in parliamentary debates.
Aware of recent scientific discussions,72 they discussed the medical need for
the lazaretto and the rules followed by customs’ services (see chapter 6 in this
volume).73
The long-time harmful implications of the lazaretto for commerce and the
awareness of its damaging consequences for rising touristic activities con-
vinced the Minister of the Navy, Ressano Garcia, to include economic consid-
erations in the next legislation on a sanitary cord.74 Comparisons with other
national health defence systems, with particular emphasis on England (anti-
contagion views) and France (contagion views),75 were assessed. The English
were accused of placing the benefit of commerce ahead of people’s health, a
position Portugal should not adopt.76
Several specific events reinforced the necessity to change the rules of the
game. One such example was provided by the mandatory quarantine imposed
on passengers travelling from Brazil in 1899, in a ship declared suspicious.
Although there were no sick people on board, all passengers were forced to
quarantine for eight days in the lazaretto.77
Criticisms were also behind the awareness that similar procedures were not
applied to the same departing conditions. Passengers travelling from the same
port of origin were treated differently if they travelled directly to Lisbon, or
if they headed instead to the port of the Spanish city of Vigo, and then reach
Lisbon by land.78 Those coming from Vigo were not subjected to the same sani-
tary measures, and were allowed to enter the city, contrary to “their other fellow
72 DSC, 71, 1890-07-12; DSC, 72, 1890-07-14.

73 DSC, 34, 1889-04-24; DSC, 71, 1890-07-12; DSC, 71, 1890-07-12.
74 DSC, 91, 1889-07-03.
75 DSC, 91, 1889-07-03. Quim Bonastra, “Quarantine and territory in Spain during the sec-
ond half of the 19th century”, in Chircop and Martinez, eds. Mediterranean quarantines
1750–1914 (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2018): 19–21.
76 DSC, 91, 1889-07-03.
77 DSC, 2091, 1989-06-05.
78 Bonastra, “Quarantine and territory,” 24–31.
174 Avelãs Nunes
travellers who are still imprisoned in the lazaretto.”79 Spanish regulations were
criticized by their ineffectiveness and disrespect for international rules.80
Other reports indicated that various ports, such as the port of Bordeaux, in
France, used the same stratagem to enable passengers to circumvent the
Lisbon’s lazaretto, especially if their port of origin was in America.81
Another example was given by an Italian vessel coming from the port of
New Orleans which, after a 55-days travel on the Atlantic Ocean, entered the
Tagus. The regulations did not impose a stop at the lazaretto. However, seven
days later, one of its sailors was taken to the Hospital of St. José, in Lisbon, and
died. Doctors suspected that he contracted yellow fever, but the diagnosis was
not confirmed by the autopsy. Only then, security measures were activated by
the hospital, and the vessel, with crew and passengers, was sent to the lazaretto
and placed in total isolation.82
Certainly, the most devastating example behind the reform of the national
system of health was the appearance of plague in Porto in the summer of 1899.
Coming from India by sea and propagated by a Spanish port worker, it found a
favourable ground in the unhygienic city, leading to its isolation by a sanitary
cord. Ravaging famine, riots, and mounting criticisms in newspapers against
the discretionary decision of the central health authorities followed. Ricardo
Jorge, the leading physician on the fight against the plague, was professor at
the Medico-Chirurgical School (Escola Médico-Cirúrgica) and director of the
Hygiene Municipal Service (Serviço Municipal de Higiene). Working in his
bacteriological laboratory he identified the plague bacillus, discovered four
years earlier by Alexander Yersin, as the cause of the epidemics. His results
were confirmed by the physician and bacteriologist Câmara Pestana, the direc-
tor of Bacteriological Institute of Lisbon (Instituto de Bacteriologia de Lisboa).
Three hundred twenty cases were identified, and there were 132 victims, among
which stood Câmara Pestana.83
Thus followed a series of reforms, beginning with the health services in
1899, followed by the inauguration of a new set of regulations for health ser-
vices in 1901, authored by Ricardo Jorge. Notable among his included regula-
tions was the improvement to Portuguese maritime border security with a
series of new institutions – such that the Instituto Central de Higiene (The
79 DSC, 209, 1889-06-05.

80 DSC, 32, 1890-07-02.
81 DSC, 91, 1889-07-03; DSC, 29, 1893-06-23.
82 DSC, 7, 1891-03-18.
83 David Pontes. O cerco da peste no Porto: Cidade, imprensa e saúde pública na crise sanitária
de 1899. MSc thesis. Oporto: University of Oporto, 2012) and Rui Costa, Ricardo Jorge: ciên-
cia, humanismo e modernidade (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2018).
Portuguese Central Institute of Hygiene), and the Direcção-Geral de Saúde e

Beneficência Pública (General Directorate of Health and Public Welfare) was
created under the auspices of the Secretaria de Estado dos Negócios Interiores
do Reino (Kingdom’s Secretariat of Interior Affairs). The Central Institute of
Hygiene was tasked with managing relations between the lazaretto and the
Health Station at Belém, with both institutions required to actively study “the
defence of maritime ports against the invasion of exotic diseases.”84
Moreover, the Central Institute of Hygiene, which began offering a gradua-
tion in sanitary engineering studies, trained physicians in the most up to date
medical practices, including Ricardo Jorge. The reason being that the Institute
of Hygiene’s alumni were expected to assume positions of authority through-
out Portugal’s newly reformed health service, with notable attendees includ-
ing: Guilherme José Ennes, physician and director of the Lisbon Disinfection
Station, and who was in charge of isolation matters and public disinfec-
tion; José Vitorino de Freitas, official physician of the lazaretto, in charge of
issues concerning maritime health, naval hygiene, quarantine measures and
managing threats of the plague, cholera and yellow fever; Miguel Bombarda,
well-respected physician in charge of sanatoriums and hospitals. Lastly, the
lazaretto and the Health Station at Belém were now made available to produce
studies related to the control of epidemics.85
The years between 1889 and 1905 saw a steady decline in the number of per-
sons subject to quarantine and the dramatic increase in the amount of health
tests administered by the lazaretto, with a total of 237 infected persons, 1,361
administered tests, and 26,547 persons placed under quarantines. Moreover,
while the lazaretto recorded 76 infected persons, 4,413 in quarantine, and 129
administered tests in 1889, 1905 registered only one infected person, 30 in quar-
antine, and 1,361 administered tests.86 In order to supplement these reforms,
and as per the 1903 International Sanitary Conference’s approval, the lazaretto
would now serve as a “sanitary station”87 in Portugal’s policy regulating sani-
tary, maritime, and quarantine related issues.88
This change of name, however, also spelled its change of fate: at the beginning
of the twentieth century, the Portuguese press publicly declared the lazaretto
84 Boletim do Instituto Superior de Higiene Doutor Ricardo Jorge (Lisboa: Casa Portuguesa,
1946): 51.
85 Boletim do Instituto, 59.
86 Loureiro, Os portos marítimos, III–II, 129.
87 DSC, 30, 1893-06-26.
88 Francisco Javier Martinez. “Cholera and Spanish-Moroccan regeneration”, in John Chircop
and Francisco Javier Martinez eds. Mediterranean quarantines 1750–1914 (Manchester:
Manchester Univ. Press, 2018): 85.
176 Avelãs Nunes
dead. Dramatic declarations were voiced in one of the most widely circulated
newspapers, Diário de Notícias,89 as well as the magazine Brasil-Portugal,90 and
the illustrated magazine, Illustração Portuguesa.91 For the latter of the three,
it was the creation of the new disinfection station at Alcântara (Occidental
Lisbon) in 1906,92 that was to blame for the death of the lazaretto. In 1908,
the director of the Lisbon Disinfection Station, Guilherme Ennes, officially
reclassified the lazaretto as a modern disinfection facility, where the preven-
tive observation and hospitalization of patients took place; supervised by a
director who viewed the lazaretto as having “died of natural causes.”93
Due to its privileged geographical location at the intersection of continents

from both east and west, and despite its relatively small size when compared
to other European capitals, Lisbon became a privileged gateway to Europe dur-
ing the second half of the nineteenth-century. Considering the threat posed by
the outbreak of epidemics via maritime trade, a new lazaretto was established
as a protective, public health, measure considering the increasing number of
ships, people, and cargo arriving at the port of Lisbon. Local, regional, national,
European, and global features explain its late construction following modern
techno-scientific standards, while at the same time justify its demise: it would
only take fifty years from its founding for the new lazaretto to be declared
obsolete.
89 The declaration was corroborated by the recent case of an army soldier who was diag-
nosed with plague in Lisbon in 1899, was quarantined with his colleagues, but duly treated
with the serum from the Pasteur Institute. He was visited by Ricardo Jorge himself. Diário
de Notícias, 17/11/1899: 1.
90 The function of the lazaretto was reduced to that of “a holy collection of prophylactic
friars … cleaning passengers’ souls.” It was suggested that “souls should be disinfected
instead with Geneste & Herscher equipment.” “O Lazareto de Lisboa”, Brasil-Portugal, 24:
9. Five years later, the same magazine dubbed the lazaretto as the “gloomy face of the
dead.” “O Lazareto”, Brasil-Portugal, 162: 288.
91 “Um desembarque de um paquete da América,” Illustração Portuguesa, 9, 26.04.1906:
278–282.
92 The disinfection station at Alcântara (Occidental Lisbon) was planned in 1904 and inau-
gurated in 1906. “It was time to end the difficulties raised at every step by public health
precautions at the lazaretto and aimed at the yellow fever bogeyman. (…) With the disin-
fection station, ended the quarantines and the hotel’s bills, crossings in transport cages,
and luggage tips.” “Posto de desinfecção,” Brasil-Portugal, 162: 285.
93 Guilherme José Ennes. “Profilaxia em Portugal das doenças infecto-contagiosas” in Notas
sobre Portugal – Exposição Nacional do Rio de Janeiro de 1908 (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional,
1908), 666, 668.
Figure 5.7 Aerial view of the Lazaretto in 2020

©Google Earth, 2020
In this chapter, by looking at the various dimensions of the lazaretto – architec-

tural, medical, techno-scientific, socio-economic and political –, the hybridity
of its characteristics was discussed: from the architectural viewpoint its main
building intermingled features of Bentham’s panopticon-like and pavilion sys-
tem models; from the medical perspective it moved from strict containment to
a sanitary station in charge of health tests; from the techno-scientific point of
view its networked spatial organization, modern equipment and instrumen-
tation mirrored the various dimensions of bio-political power and coexisted
178 Avelãs Nunes
with an increasingly outmoded sanitary confinement practice; from the socio-

economic perspective it revealed the difficulties in articulating commercial
profit and the population health safety irrespective of social standing; and
finally from the political vantage point, it exemplified the challenges of articu-
lating public and private interests in a period afflicted by deep financial crisis.
All these apparently conflicting identity characteristics point to the necessity
of rethinking the complexity of this artefact of control.
The location of the lazaretto away from Lisbon on the other side of the river
Tagus does not place it out of the urban question. It is in this sense that the laz-
aretto can be located “inside” the city, in so far as it remained an integral part of
the discussions on the reform of the health system to be implemented, and
of the network of institutions associated with the improvement of the city’s
port. It would be no exaggeration to say that the new lazaretto was both out-
side and inside the city.
The new lazaretto was a late bloomer in the long history of quarantines as
prevention mechanisms against the incoming threat of diseases. Its existence
might seem paradox at first sight, but the paradox vanishes at a second look. Its
existence stems from the accommodation to rapidly changing medical views,
evolving from rigorous isolation measures to alternative sorts of prevention,
following the medical identification of the agents behind epidemics, at a time
of increasing and speedier communications between different continents,
which placed Lisbon in a privileged but particularly vulnerable situation vis-à-
vis other European port cities.
Acknowledgements
Research for this chapter began in the context of the project VISLIS.
Visions of Lisbon (PTDC/IVC-HFC/3122/2014) and continued with a post-
doctoral grant at CIUHCT (UID/HIS/00286/2019 and UIDB/00286/2020 and
UIDP/00286/2020), both supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science
and Technology (FCT, IP). As the first research topic following my about sana-
toria in Portugal, exploring specifically the intersection of history of architec-
ture and history of science, I especially thank my post-doctoral supervisor, Ana
Simões, whose research guidance, many discussions and active participation
were fundamental to the final outlook of this chapter.
Chapter 6
The Customs Laboratory of Lisbon from the 1880s

to the 1930s: Chemistry, Trade and Scientific Spaces
1 Introduction
It is common among urban historians to point out the fact that while “port
cities are cosmopolitan … the scholarship about them is often parochial.”1 This
chapter aims to address and partially overcome this problem by discussing one
of Lisbon’s most important sites from differing perspectives: the customs labo-
ratory. This scientific site – working at the border of chemistry and economy –
was the first and only of its kind in Portugal since its creation in 1887. This
work explores the reasons behind its creation in the late-nineteenth century,
its main activities and the kind of experts working in the laboratory, as well as
its collection of scientific instruments. Finally, the chapter analyses the con-
nections between this site of chemistry and the city of Lisbon, specifically the
port area.
In the mid-nineteenth century, trade was seen as a crucial element for the
modernisation and renovation of both Portugal and Lisbon. The Ministério
das Obras Públicas, Comércio e Indústria (Ministry of Public Works), created
in 1852, highlighted how international commerce was flourishing and trans-
forming the city of Lisbon, with new “public and private buildings, beauti-
ful streets, and promenades. The streets are clean, and with gas lighting. The
police service is effective, and security is perfectly assured.”2 Despite this
optimistic assessment, that period was internationally known as the “age of
the adulteration” due to the numerous cases of fraud, intoxication, and poi-
soning.3 On the one hand, new transport systems increased the circulation of
new kinds of merchandise from foreign regions, in some cases, even replac-
ing traditional products known by locals. On the other hand, chemistry was
1 Josef Konvitz. “Port cities and urban history,” Journal of Urban History, 19, nº. 3: 115–20.
2 Estado Industrial de Lisboa. Direção Geral de Agricultura. Ministério das Obras Públicas, mç.
950, nº 63. Ref: PT/TT/MOPCI-DGA/A-A-6-35/3. Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo, Lisbon,
Portugal.
3 Alessandro Stanziani, “Negotiating Innovation in a Market Economy: Foodstuffs and
Beverages Adulteration in Nineteenth-Century France,” Enterprise and Society, 8: 375–412.
© Ignacio Suay-Matallana, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004513440_010

180 Suay-Matallana
employed to adulterate different products. Many countries reacted against

such problems creating specialised spaces, such as municipal laboratories that
mainly focused on food control and public health issues. Customs’ laboratories
were also created for conducting chemical analyses and carrying out inspec-
tions to improve tax revenue collection. In the modern period, nation-states
building resulted in the expansion of taxes and an increase in the number
of government tax collectors. Over time, the new customs laboratories were
part of the internal mechanisms of various nation-states, which were now
capable of using science for controlling the circulation of commodities.4
The history of science’s lack of attention to these sites of chemistry may be
explained, not only by their small size or peculiar bureaucratic status, but
because the connections between money and science have often been consid-
ered as an “old story” – a story whose wealth of data and statistics continues to
pay little attention to the history of its social connections.5
The nineteenth-century is characterised by a rapid increase in the number
of reforms that took place in Portugal. The customs administration evolved
from the ancient Erário Régio (Exchequer) to the modern Fazenda Pública
(Treasure Office), and transformed, not only into a site that controlled the
circulation and taxation of merchandise, but into a space for the regulation
of trade, the shaping of industrial policy, and the overall promotion of the
Portuguese economy.6 The seven customs houses of the ancien regime (spe-
cialised in specific products like meat, fish, fruit or wheat) were now unified
in a single customs building. Moreover, in the 1880s, a new customs tariff was
approved, and new guidelines and inspection protocols were created for the
further control of merchandise.7 Different customs employees – e.g. verifica-
dores (surveyors) – were in charge of customs inspections, and were respon-
sible for overseeing the import/export of goods and the excise duty to be paid
by traders. Over time, new customs tariffs included even more accurate inspec-
tions to fight against fraud, but the limited tacit knowledge of these officials –
mainly based in organoleptic tests – was not enough to recognize products,
and thus required further technical assistance.
The standard practice of customs officials, unsure of a given commod-
ity’s validity, was the sending of samples of the merchandise in question
4 Ashworth, William J. Customs and Excise: Trade, Production, and Consumption in England
1640–1845 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 11.
5 David Edgerton, “Time, Money, and History,” Isis, 103, nº. 2: 316–27. For other fresh historio-
graphical works see the volume “Science and capitalism” published by Osiris in 2018.
6 Jorge Fernandes Alves, Metamorfoses de um lugar. De Alfândega Nova a Museu dos Transportes
e Comunicações (Porto: Museu dos Transportes e Comunicações, 2006).
7 António Napoleão Vieira Sousa, O serviço aduaneiro metropolitano (Luanda: Imprensa
Nacional, 1956), 137–39.
The Customs Laboratory of Lisbon from the 1880s to the 1930s 181
to academic institutions. Such was the case with a sample of sugar sent in
1874 from the customs house of Porto to the Academia Politécnica do Porto
(Polytechnic School of Porto).8 In 1876, the Port of Lisbon received a cargo of
margarine – a synthetic fat recently discovered – and customs officials decided
to request advice from the Instituto Industrial de Lisboa (Industrial Institute of
Lisbon). The government was very much interested in the chemical analysis
of this new product, not just for its health effects but also for its “future impact
on commerce and revenue,” especially given that oils and fats provided a signif-
icant portion of customs taxes. The customs authorities of Lisbon stated that
they were “against prohibitionism” but acknowledged that some economic
“valuable interests should be also respected.”9 Eventually, the importation of
margarine was approved based on a significantly higher import-tax to protect
local farmers and industries.
In the following years, the Portuguese government felt a greater need to
employ specialised experts for customs. This need was made more urgent
due to the so-called “question of alcohols,” which posed a serious economic
challenge for wine-producing countries such as Portugal, Spain, and Italy. In
addition, the late 1870s saw the spread of the phylloxera pest (a tiny insect
harming grapes), which caused a general decline in the price of wine, affecting
its international trade. Problems only continued into the 1880s, when new dis-
tillation technologies started to be employed in Central Europe for the indus-
trial production of alcohol, which not only included wine, but alcohols derived
from potatoes, grains, and other vegetables. In some cases, wine-producing
countries later imported this kind of alcohols and mixed them with their local
wines, further lowering the price of wine and reducing its quality.
In 1885, and in response to this situation, the Portuguese government cre-
ated a new set of instructions and procedures for the testing of wine within
its customs checkpoints. As recognised by the Ministério dos Negócios da
Fazenda (Ministry of Finances): “frauds and adulterations were affecting the
credit of Portuguese wine” that was considered “the most important and valu-
able element of … Portuguese agriculture.”10 When surveyors, or customs offi-
cials, were unable to determine the quality of wine, samples were sent from
their customs house to municipal or government laboratories for further purity
analyses. These measures, however, were not any more effective due to the
8 Antonio Corrêa Heredia, Relatório do Projecto de Regulamento Geral das Alfândegas.

(Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1876), 44–5.
9 Relatório dos Trabalhos Desempenhados nos anos de 1876 e 1877 (Lisboa: Imprensa
Nacional, 1879), 7–8.
10 “Portaria mandando proceder nas alfândegas à verificação dos vinhos nacionais, destina-
dos ao consumo interno do paiz, ou ao commercio de exportação,” Diário do Governo, 292,
26 December 1885.
182 Suay-Matallana
complexity and costliness of the process of sending an increasing number of

samples to various institutions. Thus, in 1887, the Portuguese customs service
was restructured, and a customs laboratory was created (figure 6.1). The main
goal of the lab – dependent from the Conselho Superior das Alfândegas (Board
of Customs) – was to conduct on-site chemical analyses required by public
health legislation and provide scientific advice to customs authorities. In addi-
tion, a customs museum was created to collect and store samples of different
products and merchandise and facilitate the identification of such products.11
The new laboratory improved the exchange of samples and information
between officials and chemists working on-site at customs checkpoints, thus
securing the chain of collected samples and reducing the number of potential
conflicts between government and traders. Due to the extra taxes collected
via this new customs procedure, and advice on industrial policy for the coun-
try, the laboratory contributed to the growth of the Portuguese economy. In
the 1880s, customs duties constituted approximately fifty percent of Portugal’s
revenue which was a rate like that of the United States (approximately fifty-
six percent), and higher than in Spain, France, Italy, or the United Kingdom
(approximately fifteen percent).12 At the time, many countries had not yet
developed a strong system of direct and indirect, or income, taxation, and gave
them far less importance than presently.
In addition to issues of taxation and national revenue, the creation of
the Portuguese customs laboratory was founded, in part, as a response to the
implementation of new customs controls and labs in other European coun-
tries. While this new set of customs procedures was motivated by Portugal’s
need for the increased control over wine imports, the objective for other
countries was regulating tobacco or tea trade as in the case with the United
Kingdom, which founded the first laboratory of this kind in 1842.13 Other, simi-
lar, laboratories would quickly follow: Austria (1848), France (1875), Italy (1886),
and Spain (reorganised in 1888).14 In the decades following its creation, new
experts arrived at the laboratory with a newly expanded set of responsibilities
and functions, and where a greater variety of analyses were conducted.
11 “Decreto aprovando a organização das alfândegas, e do serviço marítimo da esquadrilha

fiscal,” Diário do Governo, 14, 18 January 1887.
12 Manuel de J. Rodrigues Pereira, Archivo Aduaneiro. Legislação e Pautas das Alfândegas.
Elementos para a consultação das leis e desempenho dos serviços aduaneiros (Lisboa:
Minerva Lusitana, 1901), xi.
13 William J. Ashworth, Customs and Excise: Trade, Production, and Consumption in England
1640–1845 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 314.
14 Ignacio Suay-Matallana, “Customs Laboratories, chemistry and excise: an historical intro-
duction,” World Customs Organization News, 77: 34–7.
Figure 6.1 Old grain warehouse at Terreiro do Trigo, venue of the customs laboratory
of Lisbon
Photograph by Ignacio Suay-Matallana
2 Experts, Inspections, and Scientific Instruments: The Main

Features of the Customs Laboratory
Customs laboratories were not only specialised in exported local products, but
also conducted chemical analyses of many different substances arriving at cus-
toms. As stated in 1898 by a Portuguese customs official, “trade speculation,
doubt and fraud has replaced cautiousness” and very often customs declara-
tions stated:
benzene instead of alcohol, machinery instead of machine’s pieces, tal-

low instead of butter, wood vinegar instead of genuine vinegar, wood
instead of sticks, samples without value instead of saccharine, salicylic
acid instead of cinchona salts, etc.15
15 Pereira, Archivo Aduaneiro, xiii.

184 Suay-Matallana
As a result, customs laboratories were designed with the aim of accommo-

dating a large variety of import and export products, thus necessitating the
laboratories expansion of operations. No longer simply responsible for
the analysis of the most common export/import products, laboratories now
included the relevant expertise for the handling and processing of a greater
number of chemicals, medicines, and industrial products.
Thus, the increasing need of chemical analysis and scientific inspections
motivated the arrival of new experts to the customs laboratory of Lisbon.
As stated in the budget of the Ministry of Finances in 1889, the laboratory
and the museum were directed by one Inspector-geral do serviço técnico
(general inspector) and included one fiscal (surveyor) and three serventes
(technicians).16 In 1911, and following the advent of the Republic, the labora-
tory was reorganised according to a less hierarchical structure. The position
of general inspector was abolished, and the person in charge of the laboratory
was one analista do laboratório (chemist) with at least five years of experience,
and two ajudantes do analista (assistant chemists) recruited among customs
officials and candidates with a degree related to applied chemistry.17
The person responsible for the laboratory had a very specialised profile:
besides an expert on scientific issues, and chemical analyses, he had to be com-
petent in administrative and customs bureaucracy, as well as familiarised with
political and economic questions. In fact, many of the decisions and reports
prepared at the customs laboratory affected the export and import of a sig-
nificant number of commodities, altering business interests of traders and/or
affecting the revenue collected by the government. Considering this fluctua-
tion of individual profits and governmental revenue, customs chemists – in
Portugal as well as in other countries – combined their scientific knowledge
with political contacts and worked in tandem with governments. For example,
the chemist Thomas Edward Thorpe was the director of London’s customs lab-
oratory for many years, as well as president of the British Science Association
and the Society of Chemical Industry. In Italy, the first director of Rome’s
customs laboratory was Stanislao Cannizzaro, a well-known chemist, as well
as senator. The first directors of Madrid’s customs laboratory were Gabriel
de la Puerta and José Casares Gil, who were full professors at the Faculty of
Pharmacy, and members of the Spanish Senate.18 In line with its European
16 “Orçamento da despeza do Ministerio dos Negocio da Fazenda no exercício de 1889–

1890,” last updated 20 January 2020, http://purl.sgmf.pt/OE-1890/1/OE-1890_master/OE
-1890_PDF/OE-1890_0000_0096-0159_t01-B-R0300.pdf.
17 “Decreto reorganizando os serviços das alfândegas,” Diário da República, 124, 29 April 1911.
18 Suay-Matallana, Customs Laboratories.
counterparts, the first experts in charge of Lisbon’s customs laboratory also

combined scientific and institutional expertise.
Fernando Mattoso Santos was in charge of the customs laboratory of Lisbon
from its creation until the last years of the 1910s. Originally trained as physi-
cian, Mattoso Santos was Chair of Zoology at the Escola Politécnica de Lisboa
(Polytechnic School of Lisbon), and Chair of Merceology (chemical recognition
of commodities) at the Instituto Industrial e Comercial de Lisboa (Commercial
and Industrial Institute of Lisbon).19 Mattoso Santos enjoyed many political
positions, and would hold several offices over the course of his life: including
the Minister of Finances, President of the Câmara dos Pares (Senate), Minister
of Negócios Estrangeiros (Foreign Affairs), President of the Mercado Central
de Produtos Agrícolas (Agriculture Stock Market), and was a board member of
several other institutions.20 Mattoso Santos’ strong political influence proved
to be crucial for consolidating the activity of the customs laboratory in the few
decades of its existence.
Mattoso Santos was followed by Carlos (also mentioned as Carl and Karl) von
Bonhorst, a German chemist who was trained as assistant of the famous ana-
lytical chemist Carl Remigius Fresenius. Bonhorst also combined his work at the
customs laboratory with other institutional positions: these include the posi-
tion of professor, which he would occupy at the Industrial Institute, then at the
Escola Industrial de Caldas da Rainha (Industrial School of Caldas da Rainha),
and finally at the Escola Industrial do Marquês de Pombal (Marquês de Pombal
Industrial School) of Lisbon. Bonhorst was also a member of the Sociedade
Portuguesa de Química (Portuguese Society of Chemistry), the Sociedade Far
macêutica Lusitana (Lusitanian Society of Pharmacy), a regular contributor to
the chemistry journal Revista de Chimica Pura e Applicada (Journal of Pure and
Applied Chemistry), and was the founder of both the scientific publication Jornal
de Farmácia e Química (Journal of Pharmacy and Chemistry), and the leisure
association Ginásio-Club Português (Portuguese gymnasium-club).21
The third person in charge of the laboratory was Guilherme Wilfried Bastos.
In 1902, and after obtaining a commerce degree (Curso Superior de Comércio)
at the Industrial Institute of Lisbon, Bastos began working in the customs ser-
vice at the Jardim do Tabaco (Tobacco Warehouse) and would later succeeded
19 The term merceology very unusual in English is referred to a discipline in which chemical
analyses and chemical tests are employed to determine the composition of commodities
for levying customs taxes.
20 Registo Geral de Mercês de D. Luís I, liv. 48, f. 281. Ref: PT/TT/RGM/J/282724. Arquivo
Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon, Portugal.
21 Emilio Dias, “Índigo ou anil, a sua extracção em terrenos d’África, Antônio Augusto de
Aguiar, Alexandre Bayer e Carlos von Bonhorst, no ensino da química prática,” Revista de
Chimica Pura e Applicada, 19: 45–79.
186 Suay-Matallana
von Bonhorst as customs inspector from 1919 to 1942.22 Like his predecessors,
Bastos was also a professor at the Marquês de Pombal Industrial School, the
director of the laboratory of the Instituto Superior do Comércio (Commercial
Institute of Lisbon), and a member of many other scientific boards dur-
ing the first years of Salazar’s regime.23 Apart from Mattoso, Bonhorst, and
Bastos, other chemists working at the laboratory during the first third of the
twentieth century have also been identified (table 1).24
Table 6.1 List of the technical staff of the customs laboratory of Lisbon (1900s–1930s)
1901–1906 & Fernando Mattoso Santos, Inspector-geral do Serviço Técnico das

1909–1910 Alfândegas (customs inspector)
1895–1919 Carlos von Bonhorst, analista (chemist)
1901–1906 José Luiz Quintella Emauz Gonçalves, vogal do Tribunal Superior do
Contencioso Técnico (member of the Customs Court)
1901–1906 José Paulino da Sá Carneiro, reverificador (customs official)
1901–1906 Antonio Telles Machado Júnior, ajudante de analista (assistant chemist)
1913–1918 Marco Túlio de Carvalho, ajudante de analista (assistant chemist)
1913–1920 Diogo de Oliveira Jardim, ajudante de analista (assistant chemist)
1919–1942 Guilherme Wilfried Bastos, analista e inspector do quadro interno
aduaneiro (chemist and customs inspector)
1920 João Augusto Ferreira da Costa Júnior, ajudante de analista e oficial do
quadro aduaneiro (assistant chemist and customs official)
1922–1923 Alfredo Augusto Filipe, ajudante de analista e oficial do quadro adua-
neiro (assistant chemist and customs official)
1923–1930 Daniel Harrington Wagner, ajudante de analista e aspirante oficial do
quadro aduaneiro (assistant chemist and customs official candidate)
1925–1927 António Óscar Trindade, ajudante de analista e oficial do quadro
aduaneiro (assistant chemist and customs official)
1928 Mário Vaz Nápoles dos Reis, ajudante de analista e oficial do quadro
aduaneiro (assistant chemist and customs official)
1929–1930 Dinis Augusto Curson, ajudante de analista e sub-inspector do quadro
interno aduaneiro (assistant chemist and customs deputy inspector)
22 Aureliano Capelo Veloso, “O Laboratório da Direcção Geral das Alfândegas,” Revista

Aduaneira, 2: 23–4.
23 Expediente Guilherme Wilfried Bastos. Arquivo Contemporaneo do Ministerio das
Financas, Lisbon, Portugal.
24 Most of the information has been obtained from the Lista dos funcionários dependentes da
Direcção Geral das Alfândegas (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional) published by the Portuguese
government in that period.
The activities of the customs laboratory were not only mediated by chemists,
and other technical staff, but also by a diversity of employees from the Ministry
of Finances, including customs officials, surveyors, and port inspectors. These
employees worked at the Portuguese borders and ports and were the first to
receive and inspect imported and exported merchandise. They often applied
their tacit knowledge (e.g. visual inspections) to recognize products, but they
also relied on some simple scientific instruments like a Delaunay’s alcohol-
meter, or a Salleron’s ebulliometer for rapidly testing the quantity of alcohol
contained in a given wine sample. Experts at the customs laboratory prepared
guidelines and instructions to standardise sample collections, trained both col-
lectors and observers working at customs, and ensured the effective use of its
instruments. These publications were very useful to create “networks of trust”
between the laboratory and other customs units, and ultimately helped stan-
dardise operations, increase efficiency, save time, and avoid possible disputes
or controversies.25 They contributed to reducing the problems related to the
introduction of scientific instruments in the collection of taxes, and facilitated
discussion regarding standards of “objectivity” among traders, consumers, and
inspectors at different customs offices.26
The political and administrative reforms of 1911 further increased the
responsibilities of the customs laboratory regarding the standardisation of
their methods and operations. The laboratory took on the new task of supply-
ing, calibrating, and measuring scientific instruments and apparatuses used by
other customs officials across the country. As stated by law, the laboratory was
responsible for “verifying the accuracy” of different objects such as alcohol-
meters, thermometers, densitometers, and ebulliometers.27 Another strategy
followed to facilitate and standardize the work done in the customs facilities
across the whole of Portugal gave way to the publication of official instructions
by Mattoso Santos. For instance, in 1888 the Ministry of Finance allowed for
the use of capillary vinometers for the measurement of the alcohol content of
imported and exported wine. This was the same year that Mattoso Santos pub-
lished his report entitled Instruções para o emprego fiscal do vinómetro capilar
de tubo inclinado de Delaunay (Instructions for the use of the Delaunay’s alco-
holmeter at customs), which explained the vinometers proper use.28 Later, in
1892, Mattoso Santos published a report entitled Relatorio do Inspecção-geral
25 David N. Livingstone, Putting science in its place. Geographies of Scientific Knowledge

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 16.
26 William J. Ashworth “‘Between the Trader and the Public’: British Alcohol Standards and
the Proof of Good,” Technology and Culture, 42, nº. 1: 27–50.
27 “Decreto reorganizando os serviços das alfândegas,” Diário da República, 124, 29 April 1911.
28 “Portaria determinando quaes os instrumentos e apparelhos que devem ser usados no
serviço das verificações aduaneiras,” Diário do Governo, 236, 15 October 1888.
188 Suay-Matallana
do Serviço Técnico (Report of the General Inspection of the Technical Services),

which explained the technical decisions taken by the customs laboratory on
the inspections of different products, and provided more accurate instructions
regarding the inspection of alcohol, sugar, weaves, and fabrics.
Other members of the laboratory were integrated in an official commission
to standardise chemical analysis and published many scientific articles in jour-
nals such as Revista de Chimica Pura e Applicada, the most relevant Portuguese
chemistry journal with a wide readership across the country. The standardiza-
tion of scientific operations at customs checkpoints was also done by experts
of the customs laboratory in a less formal way: the publication of articles in
different non-scientific journals addressed to customs employees, traders, and
factory owners, and operators.
Between the 1870s and the 1930s many journals concerning customs proce-
dures were published in Lisbon and other Portuguese cities. For instance, in
June 1873, the first issue of Archivo Aduaneiro (Customs Archive) was published
with the goal of providing “useful commercial news” for surveyors, customs
employees, traders, and shipping companies of different cities, and to contrib-
ute to the avoidance of customs controversies. It also created a section on tech-
nology and its “characteristics, properties, classification, transformation, trade
changes, technical progresses, historical news, and taxes determination.”29
Subsequent issues included articles on analysis of alum (salts of sulphate),
cotton inspection, or techniques to differentiate strands of silk, wool, and other
vegetable fibres. Another journal addressed to the same public was the Revista
das Alfândegas (Journal of Customs), founded in 1893 and featured some of the
customs laboratory members as regular contributing authors. For instance,
Mattoso Santos published papers on saccharine inspections, von Bonhorst on
analysis of fat by refraction, fibres research, and artificial fertilizers, and the
customs chemist Telles Machado wrote an article on chemical synthesis.
The products selected by these chemists matched the most relevant imports
for the period 1880–1889, for instance fertilisers were essential in a country
with an economy mostly centred on agriculture, and intermediate chemical
goods as well as cotton and wool products were imported for domestic con-
sumption.30 Other articles on chemistry and customs were published in similar
journals, such as Revista Aduaneira (Customs Journal, Lisbon, 1898), Jornal das
Alfândegas (Journal of Customs, Porto, 1898), Almanach Aduaneiro (Almanac
of Customs, Lisbon, 1907), O Despacho (The Clearence, Lisbon, 1906), Revista
das Alfândegas Portuguesas (Journal of Portuguese Customs, Lisbon, 1909) and
29 “Programma,” Archivo Aduaneiro 1: 1.

30 Pedro Lains, A economia portuguesa no século XIX. Crescimento económico e comércio
externo 1851–1913 (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional Cas da Moeda, 1995), 136.
the Revista Aduaneira (Customs Journal, Luanda, 1923). This dearth of articles
and news reports published by chemists at Lisbon’s customs laboratory was
extremely important, not only for facilitating laboratorial work, reducing sci-
entific controversies, and creating technical guidelines employed at customs,
but also for the increase in their scientific authority as experts by revealing their
knowledge of chemistry in non-academic contexts and ultimately reinforcing
the prestige of the customs laboratory itself. As shown in the following sec-
tion, the chief consequence of this wealth of literature was the creation of new
links between the customs administration and other institutions of the city.
The activities of the laboratory can be studied not only from official publi-
cations, articles in scientific journals, and texts in customs journals, but also
via considerations of its collection of scientific instruments. Initially founded
as the Laboratório da Inspecção-geral do Serviço Técnico das Alfândegas
(Laboratory of the General Inspection of the Customs Technical Service) in
1892, it changed its name to Laboratório do Tribunal do Contencioso Técnico
da Direcção-Geral das Alfândegas e Contribuições Indirectas (Laboratory
of the Customs Court of the General Directorate of Customs and Indirect
Taxes). With the Republican regime, it became Laboratório da 3ª Repartição
da Direcção-geral das Alfândegas (Laboratory of the Third Office of the
General Directorate of Customs), then the Laboratório da Direcção-Geral
das Alfândegas e dos Impostos Especiais sobre o Consumo (Laboratory of the
General Directorate of Customs and Excise Duties).31 Changes of name not-
withstanding, the laboratory enjoyed great institutional stability, its directors
served long terms, and its location remained the same.
The laboratory’s stability, together with the actions of successive customs
chemists, account for the preservation of a large collection of scientific instru-
ments. The historical collection of scientific instruments of the customs labo-
ratory of Lisbon was recently studied, and a catalogue (with photographs, sizes,
registration numbers, etc.) was prepared.32 The collection includes 217 objects
from the 1880s to the 1950s, and it is unique in its field in Europe.33 The collec-
tion offers an excellent opportunity to study, not just the main official
31 Manuela Costa, “O Laboratório aduaneiro. O ‘braço científico’ das Alfândegas,” Alfândega

Revista Aduaneira, 67: 07–13.
32 Ignacio Suay-Matallana, “A cultural material do laboratório da Alfândega de Lisboa,”
Conservar Património, 30: 131–39.
33 Few historical instruments employed for customs inspections were displayed at the
Science Museum of London. Peter Morris, “The image of chemistry presented by the
Science Museum, London in the twentieth century: an international perspective,”
HYLE – International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry, 12, nº. 2: 215–39. See also: Marta
Lourenço, and José Pedro Sousa Dias, José Pedro, “‘Time Capsules’ of Science: Museums,
Collections, and Scientific Heritage in Portugal,” Isis, 108, nº. 2: 390–8. Other isolated
examples are dispersed in some regional laboratories of Spain, and Italy. See: “La storia dei
190 Suay-Matallana
experiments and tests done at the customs laboratory, but also other kinds
of private analyses conducted at the laboratory as customs chemists were
allowed to do chemical analyses required by local importers, traders, commer-
cial agents, sellers of the Agriculture Stock Market, and other individuals, fol-
lowing the payment of a fee approved by the government.34
The customs collection consists of five large groups of instruments. The
largest group includes a wide variety of hydrometers employed to determine
the density of different liquids – generally wine, alcohol and spirits, as well as
oil, milk or vinegar. The second largest group of instruments consists of dif-
ferent kinds of weighing scales and mass balances (Mohr-Westphal, Roberval,
analytical, etc.). The third group includes very specialised instruments, like
Engler’s and Redwood’s viscometers (for accurate analyses of oil and petrol),
Malligand’s ebullioscopes (for determining alcohol content), a Pensky-Martens’
apparatus (for testing the flash point of flammable liquids like oils) or a Wood’s
lamp (to inspect products like petrol using luminescence). There are also dif-
ferent glass objects, and a last group of diverse objects including a centrifuge,
a water distiller, a locker for expensive reagents and narcotics, and the official
seal stamp of the laboratory. All these products were employed for the analysis
of the most relevant products of the national economy of Portugal. Chemical
products and fabrics were among the most frequently imported products,
while wine and oil were Portugal’s main exports.
Instrument makers, and country of manufacture of these instruments shed
light on the collection’s evolution, which saw many French instruments
employed during the first decades of operation of the laboratory. The second
largest group of instruments were brought to Portugal from Germany during
the laboratory’s renovation from 1911 to the 1920s.35 Currently, the collection
is well preserved and in good condition, located in some rooms of the cus-
toms laboratory, and in a large showcase placed at its entrance. Further stud-
ies, exhibitions, and activities on the customs collection will promote a better
understanding of work done at the laboratory and contribute to the creation
of new bridges between the public sphere and the history of chemistry, the
history of customs, and the material culture of science.36
laboratori chimici,” Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli, last updated January 20, 2020,
https://www.agenziadoganemonopoli.gov.it/portale/-/la-storia-dei-laboratori-chimici.
34 “Portaria aprovando a tabela de preços de análises no laboratório do museu aduaneiro,”
Diário do Governo, 42, 24 February 1891.
35 Suay-Matallana, Conservar Património, 134.
36 Ana Simões, Maria Paula Diogo and Ana Carneiro. “The Physical Tourist Physical Sciences
in Lisbon,” Physics in Perspective, 12: 335–67.
Figure 6.2 The collection of scientific instruments at the customs laboratory in 2018
Photograph by Ignacio Suay-Matallana
3 The Customs Laboratory of Lisbon and the City
As many historians pointed out, the “spatial turn” shows how geographies and
spaces need to be considered in order to analyse the circulation of science; the
construction of scientific authority; the exchange of scientific ideas, objects
and practices; and the emergence and consolidation of disciplines or the con-
struction of regional and national identities.37 Scientific activity, therefore, is
connected and influenced by its local context, including physical places and
sites.38 As we have seen, the chemists of the customs laboratory were involved
in many activities, addressed different audiences, and were part of numerous
institutions of Lisbon (and other Portuguese cities). These experts participated
37 Diarmid A. Finnegan, “The Spatial Turn: Geographical Approaches in the History of

Science,” Journal of the History of Biology, 41: 369–88.
38 Antonio García-Belmar, “Introduction. Sites of Chemistry in the Nineteenth Century,”
Ambix, 61, nº. 2: 109–14.
192 Suay-Matallana
in the local public sphere to legitimate their work, reinforce their institutional
prestige, and created links with political and economic power to achieve their
goals. As such the history of science and urban history intersect, as cities and
science are simultaneously co-constructed.39
Going a step further, recent social and cultural studies have proposed the
idea of “urban assemblages” to show how cities are made of a large network
of spaces and practices in which scientific agendas mingle with issues con-
cerning consumers, the economy, transportation, political power, and urban
spaces of leisure.40 In this sense, then, cities are systems in permanent change
affected by, and affecting, a large variety of factors, and thereby pose novel
challenges for historical and geographical studies: the urban changes under-
gone by Lisbon after the educational reforms of the late-nineteenth-century,
and, even more after the Republic illustrate these trends. New academic
institutions were created around two scientific clusters. The first – the Hill
of Sciences – was located close to the Jardim do Príncipe Real (Royal prince
garden) at Bairro Alto and included the Academia das Ciências (Academy
of Sciences), the old Faculdade de Ciências (Faculty of Science), and the
Faculdade de Letras (Faculty of Humanities). Another cluster – the Hill
of Medicine, specialised in health – was settled in the Campo de Santana’s
area, which included the Faculdade de Medicina (Faculty of Medicine), the
Faculdade de Farmácia (Faculty of Pharmacy), the Instituto de Medicina Legal
(Legal Medicine Institute), the Instituto Bacteriológico de Câmara Pestana
(Câmara Pestana Bacteriology Institute), and some new hospitals, as well as
the Faculdade de Direito (Faculty of Law), and the Escola de Guerra (War
College) (see chapter 13 in this volume).41
While Lisbon status as the “scientific capital of the country” was built on
the new faculties and the University of Lisbon and the rise of new profes-
sional groups,42 other projects such as the port asserted Lisbon as “the biggest
39 Sven Dierig, Jens Lachmund; J. Andrew Mendelsohn, “Toward an Urban History of

Science,” Osiris, 18 (2003): 01–19.
40 Ignacio Farías, Thomas Bender, Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes
Urban Studies (London: Routledge, 2010).
41 Other recent works study with more detailed the campus bio-médico-sanitário (bio-
medical-sanitarian campus). See: Tiago Saraiva and Marta. Capital científica: práticas da
ciência em Lisboa e a história contemporânea (Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2019).
42 Ana Simões, “From Capital City to Scientific Capital. Science, Technology, and Medicine
in Lisbon as Seen through the Press, 1900–1910,” in Urban Histories of Science, ed. Agustí
Nieto-Galan; Oliver Hochadel (London: Routledge, 2019), 141–63; Carneiro, Ana, Amaral,
Isabel. “Propaganda and Philanthropy: The Institute Bento da Rocha Cabral, the Lisbon
Site of Biochemistry (1925–1953),” Ambix, 62, nº. 2: 138–66.
commercial entrepôt of Europe”, and expanded the city along the Tagus’s mar-
gins.43 The study of the customs laboratory considered in this chapter has made
visible a new techno-scientific cluster in the city of Lisbon, which was situated in
the port and linked to the inspection and regulation of many products, as well as
to trade, commerce, imports and exports (figure 6.3). Located in the lower side
of the Alfama’s neighbourhood, in the port zone, and close to the customs
house, the customs laboratory was also connected along the Tagus River
axis, which included the industrial area of Alcântara, the Escola de Medicina
Tropical (Tropical Medicine School), the Hospital Colonial (Colonial Hospital),
and the Industrial Institute.
In contrast to the other two areas associated with medical and theore
tical knowledge, or the training of new university professionals, the port area
was dedicated to the control and circulation of merchandise. This popular
district housed many companies, factories, and warehouses that prepared,
stored, and distributed the variety of merchandise circulating through Lisbon’s
port and rail station. The port area was also located nearby Lisbon’s downtown,
and the Praça do Comércio (Commerce Square) where a number of govern-
ment offices, e.g. the Ministry of Finances, were, and not far from Portugal’s
first rail station, Santa Apolónia, constructed in 1865.
In contrast to other capitals – like Washington, Paris, Berlin, or Madrid –
Lisbon possessed a double character: it was the capital of Portugal and an
important port city. As some historians have pointed out, this coincidence
of capital and port city often generated additional expansion and growth –
Lisbon was the most populated city of Portugal and became a sort of cultural
and trade hub of the country.44 Being at the heart of commercial and financial
Lisbon and summoning the scientific and institutional authority of its direc-
tors, the customs laboratory was a unique site in Portugal. Among Lisbon’s
industrial hubs the Santa Apolónia/Xabregas neighbourhood was the closest
to the customs laboratory, thus making it a useful space for the circulation of
imported and exported industrial products.45
Since the 1920s, other European countries – France, Italy, the United
Kingdom or Spain – maintained a network of regional customs laboratories.
In Portugal, however, a similar structure was never created, and other strate-
gies were put in its place. Porto, Portugal’s second largest city, combined the
43 Simões, “From Capital City to Scientific Capital,” 145–146.

44 Carola Hein, “Port cities: a networked analysis of the built environment,” in Port Cities:
Dynamic Landscapes and Global Networks, ed. Carola Hein (London: Routledge, 2011), 28.
45 Jorge Custódio, “Reflexos da industrialização na fisionomia e vida da cidade: o mundo
Industrial na Lisboa Oitocentista,” in O Livro de Lisboa, ed. Irisalva Moita, (Lisboa: Livros
Horizonte, 1994), 470.
194 Suay-Matallana
production of the much-appreciated Porto wine with an intensive industrial

and port activity; this would ultimately lead to calls for the creation of a cus-
toms laboratory “like the one in Lisbon.”46 Instead, the Porto customs house
sent its samples to the city’s municipal laboratory, which was established by
Antonio Ferreira da Silva in 1884. Between 1884 and 1896, Porto’s municipal
laboratory received 159 samples of different products from the customs house
to be analysed, mainly alcohol, sodium carbonate, oils and fats.47
In other Portuguese cities a limited number of samples were sent to
Laboratórios das Estações Químico-Agrícolas (agriculture laboratories) cre-
ated in the 1880s and distributed throughout the country. As stated by law,
agricultural laboratories collaborated with different customs houses in analys-
ing imported copper sulphate – a pesticide employed to protect vineyards –
the most important Portuguese crop at that time.48 Copper sulphate samples
were then sent from customs houses to agriculture laboratories to confirm
their purity, a process that created conflicts between institutions as it implied
extra amount of work, as well as budget problems because analyses were done
for free.49 An attempt to create a customs laboratory in Lourenço Marques
(Maputo), in the African colony of Mozambique took place in 1899. It was to be
specialised in wine and oil analyses to serve “the interests of the State, the trad-
ers, and the winemakers,”50 but was never materialized and colonial samples
continued to be sent to scientific or academic units that assisted the customs
house – mainly to the bromatology and toxicology laboratory of Lourenço
Marques, created in 1914.51
The combination of merchandise exchanges with political power impacted
urban landscapes, resulting in the creation of public and private buildings,
as well as facilities linked to monopolies and other institutions of strategic
interest.52 This happened in Lisbon’s port cluster, with the official Jardim do
Tabaco (Tobacco Warehouse), and the Contrastaria de Lisboa (Lisbon’s Assay
46 Alvaro Silva, “Laboratórios nas Alfândegas,” Revista Aduaneira, 1: 3–4.

47 António J. Da Silva,. Relatórios do Laboratório Municipal de Química do Porto no período de
1884 a 1896 (Porto: Tip. A. da Fonseca Vasconcellos, 1897), 119–24.
48 “Decreto relativa aos preparados cúpricos destinados ao tratamento das vinhas”, Diário do
Governo, 222, 11 October 1893.
49 Direcção Geral de Agricultura. Ministério das Obras Públicas, mç. 932, nº. 119. Ref: PT/TT/
MOPCI-DGA/A-A-6-35/5. Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon, Portugal.
50 “Decreto creando em Lourenço Marques um laboratório chimico destinado á analyse
dos vinhos, seus derivados e azeites, importados ou expostos á venda na província, de
Moçambique,” Diário do Governo, 293, 27 December 1899.
51 Antonio Gomes de Almeida, Laboratório Químico de Lourenço Marques: relatório dos tra-
balhos efectuados de 1929 a 1932 (Lourenço Marques: Imprensa Nacional, 1934), 3.
52 Hein, Port cities, 28.
Office), both linked to the Ministry of Finances: the first was a specialised cus-
toms house for the tobacco monopoly since the eighteenth-century, while the
assay office was created in 1882 by the national mint, and served, since 1916, as
the mint’s laboratory for testing gold, silver and other metals.53 Another gov-
ernment office related to trade and industry was the Repartição da Propriedade
Industrial (Industrial Property Office) beginning around the 1880s, and close to
the customs laboratory. Finally, an institution included in the port area focused
on food inspections was the Laboratório Municipal de Higiene (Municipal
Laboratory), which opened in 1882, eventually being transferred to the central
government in 1890, and finally changing its name to the Instituto Central de
Higiene (Central Hygiene Institute) in 1899.54
The customs laboratory of Lisbon offers a revealing example of governmen-
tal buildings and institutions created for the management of metropolitan
commerce. It was located in a building called Terreiro do Trigo (Wheat Market)
designed during the Pombal period (1765) by the same architect who designed
the Praça do Comércio only 700 meters away,55 and which came to accom-
modate the customs of Lisbon, as well as many government offices, combining
bureaucratic with scientific activities.56 This was the case of some units of the
Ministry of Finances, and the Ministry of Public Works, which also ran a labo-
ratory of veterinary pathology and bacteriology managed by two veterinary
surgeons and the analytical chemist, Hugo Mastbaum.57
The customs laboratory benefited from a great physical and institutional
stability as it operated without interruption or relocation. Indeed, its location
inside the customs house of Lisbon was extremely useful to fulfil its goal of
providing scientific advice to other customs officials. The arrival of samples to
the laboratory was facilitated by the proximity of the port, while also receiv-
ing samples from the customs deposits, and warehouses of the area. Moreover,
after testing samples the results could easily reach both the government and
traders, which was especially convenient for stakeholders.
53 Documentos diversos relativos, entre outros assuntos, à solicitação de instalações para o

laboratório de biologia florestal. Ref: Arquivo das Secretarias de Estado, cx. 222 proc. T3.
Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon, Portugal.
54 Fernando da Silva Correia, “O cinquentenário do Instituto de Higiene,” Boletim do Instituto
Superior de Higiene Doutor Ricardo Jorge, 7: 161–81.
55 João Pedro Pereira Cruz, A cidade e o rio: origem e evolução da frente ribeirinha de lisboa até
ao século XVIII (Évora: Universidade de Évora, 2016), 51.
56 Miguel Fevereiro, “Virologia,” Laboratório Nacional de Investigação Veterinária, 7: 04–21.
57 The laboratory was placed in the Terreiro do Trigo between 1913 and 1918, and conducted
5000 analyses. Later, it was transferred to the Baldaia palace at Benfica.
196 Suay-Matallana
On the other hand, the location of the laboratory facilitated its coopera-
tion with other institutions created for food and merchandise inspections. In
1888, the Agriculture Stock Market was created by the government inside the
Terreiro do Trigo building to facilitate the control, storage and sale of products,
like wine, oil, or butter, before being sold in Lisbon or distributed by train.58
Initially, the agriculture market held its own laboratory linked to the indirect
taxation department and was divided in three sections: cereal and beans, wine
and vinegar, and olive and oils. Apart from assuring the quality of the products
to protect public health, the laboratory contributed to the collection of excise
duties. After five years of operation, the Ministry of Finances decided that hav-
ing two laboratories in the same space – one focused on taxes of imports and
exports, another on internal taxes – was expensive and impractical.59 Thus,
in 1892, the agriculture market’s laboratory was closed and some of its instru-
ments transferred to the customs laboratory.60 Some staff members, including
one chemist and five officials, moved to the customs service as well.61
The proximity of the customs laboratory to other scientific units in the area
was important to consolidate its activities, and to become part of different
national scientific networks. The Terreiro do Trigo’s building, and the port area
concentrated different laboratories and chemical experts working in merchan-
dise inspections, food analyses, and public health management. The building
also included depots, as well as a flour warehouse which, in the 1940s, included
an annex with a small agriculture laboratory, which was demolished due to
poor conservation.62
Lisbon’s customs laboratory, the Portuguese agriculture laboratories, as well
as other government laboratories of the area, were faced with the challenge of
following similar chemical methods to enforce similar analytical results. They
needed to create common standards to follow the same analytic procedures,
58 “Decreto aprovando o regulamento do mercado central de productos agrícolas,” Diário do

Governo 236, 15 October 1888.
59 The government also decided that analyses required by the Agriculture Stock Market
should be conducted at the Laboratório da Estação Químico-agrícola (laboratory of the
agriculture station), placed at the other side of the city. However, the real need of having a
laboratory specialised in agriculture in the port area motivated that two new laboratories
were opened after 1895 in the Terreiro do Trigo, one for flour inspections, and another for
wine and oil analyses. In 1901, both laboratories were merged under the name Laboratório
Geral de Análises Chimico-Fiscaes (General laboratory of chemical and fiscal analyses).
60 “Decreto reformando os serviços aduaneiros e fiscais,” Diário do Governo, 89, 22 April 1892.
61 Arquivo das Secretarias de Estado, cx. 231, proc. 8087. Ref: PT/TT/MF-SG/001-90/8087.
Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon, Portugal.
62 “O edifício da Alfândega e o largo do Terreiro do Trigo estão afrontados por um armazém
e por uma casa mal conservada,” O Século, 14 September 1940: 85.
and secure quality, while avoiding controversies and delays in the circulation
of merchandise. Thus, in 1895, the Portuguese government created a scien-
tific commission to set up standardised criteria for the analyses of different
products. The original idea was to create common experimental criteria for
the network of agriculture laboratories across the country. However, it also
included chemists from other Portuguese institutions, like the customs labora-
tory of Lisbon. The commission consisted of nine chemists, with some work-
ing in agriculture stations while the majority worked in official laboratories
across Lisbon. It was directed by Antonio Ferreira da Silva and was set up one
year before a similar commission on wine and alcohol analyses was created
in France. The prescience of this endeavour was due, in part, to the smaller
size and proximity of the Portuguese chemical community, and the fact of the
concentration of many laboratories and chemists working in analyses of mer-
chandise and food in the same area: the commercial cluster of Lisbon’s port.
Initially, it was known as Commissão de unificação dos processos de analyse
dos vinhos e azeites (Commission for the Unification of Analyses of Wine and
Oil), intended for the standardisation of laboratory procedures of a number
of products employed in different laboratories of Portugal.63 Von Bonhorst,
the customs chemist of Lisbon, studied the methods for detecting wine
adulterations.64 In 1901, the government made the commission permanent,
and renamed it as Commissão Technica dos Methodos Chimico-analyticos
(Technical Commission of Chemical and Analytical Methods). Then, it was
reorganised in five sections: wine, beer and drinks; food and water; soil, fer-
tilizers and pesticides; agriculture products; and oil, vinegar, and milk.65 The
commission would later expand its oversight to include other products such as
cheese, alcohols, soil, cereals, flour, bread, etc.66
Technical education was behind another relevant connection between the
customs laboratory and the city. While Mattoso Santos, von Bonhorst, and
Bastos, as well as other customs chemists, were professors at different com-
merce and industry schools of Lisbon, some of the employees hired by the
customs laboratory were students at these schools.
63 “Portaria nomeando uma commissão para estudar e propor a unificação e uniformisação

nos processes de analyses chimicas,” Diário do Governo, 14 December 1895: 284.
64 Trabalhos da comissão encarregada do estudo e unificação dos méthodos de analyse dos
vinhos, azeites e vinagres (Lisboa: Imp. Nacional, 1898), 3.
65 “Decreto approvando a organização dos serviços agricolas,” Diário do Governo, 296,
24 December 1901.
66 “Commmissão technica dos methodos chimico-analyticos,” Revista de Chimica Pura e
Applicada, 3: 78–81.
198 Suay-Matallana
In 1891, the Portuguese curricula for industrial and commercial education

was reorganised, and a new subject entitled Merceologia, estudo o verificação
das mercadorias, legislação fiscal e aduaneira (Chemical and Fiscal Recognition
of Commodities) was created.67 Mattoso was the professor in charge at the
Commercial and Industrial Institute, and prepared a specific textbook on
the issue, which was later updated to include new scientific information as
well as regulatory changes,68 alongside three customs chemists who were pro-
fessors involved in the program – António Lino Neto and Caetano Maria Beirão
da Veiga – and members of the board of the Conselho do Serviço Tecnico
Aduaneiro (Board of Customs Technical Service) and the Conselho Superior
de Comércio e Indústria (Board of Commerce and Industry).
The Commercial and Industrial Institute of Lisbon was created in the
mid-nineteenth-century, in 1869, and, by 1911, was eventually divided into
the Instituto Superior Técnico (Technical Institute) and the Instituto Superior
de Comércio (School of Commerce), for engineering and commerce higher
education respectively.69 For several years, the School of Commerce offered
official degrees as well as courses in customs, finance, and consular and
commerce issues for more diverse audiences.70 In the months following the
creation of the laboratory, the degrees – curso superior aduaneiro (customs
degree), and curso superior do comercio (trade degree) – were recognised by
the government as the most convenient requirement for obtaining a position
as a customs surveyor or official.71
67 “Decreto reorganisando o ensino industrial e commercial,” Diário do Governo, 227,

09 October 1891.
68 Fernando Mattoso Santos, Merceologia: legislação fiscal e aduaneira: programma da
20a cadeira Merceologia legislação fiscal e aduaneira (Lisboa, Imprensa Nacional, 1893);
Fernando Mattoso Santos, Merceologia: direito fiscal e aduaneiro: programma da 20a
cadeira. Instituto Industrial e Commercial de Lisboa (Lisboa: Typographia da “A Editora”,
1906); Fernando Mattoso Santos, Mercadorias, análise, alterações, falsificações: lições anos
lectivos de 1887 a 1920 (Lisboa: Instituto Superior de Comércio de Lisboa, 1921).
69 Isabel Cruz, “Entre a CUF e o Barreiro: que lugar para Alfredo da Silva na química?,”
in Actas do colóquio internacional industrialização em Portugal no século XX: o caso do
Barreiro, ed Miguel Figueira de Faria and José Amado Mendes (Lisboa: EDIUAL, 2010),
181–206.
70 Caetano Beirão Da Veiga and Aureliano Lopes Fernandes de Mira, O Instituto Superior
de Comércio de Lisboa. Breves notas sobre os seus fins e organização (Lisboa: Museu
Comercial, 1922), 13.
71 Other possibilities included the combination of language, geography, and maths followed
in high schools. “Decreto approvando a organisação das alfândegas,” Diário do Governo, 14,
18 January 1888.
The program offered both theoretical and practical teaching, and combined
issues concerning both science and commerce, and included the following
subjects: Métodos gerais fisicos e químicos de análise, and Laboratório de
métodos de análise (analytical chemistry and laboratory of analysis) as intro-
ductory courses, then Matérias primas e Tecnología geral, and Laboratório
de análise de matérias primas (commodities and technology, and laboratory
of commodities), and lastly, Análise e classificação pautal de mercadorias e
Falsificações, and Laboratório de análise de mercadorias (customs tariff and
adulterations, and laboratory of merchandise).72 The academic program also
included an internship of four months at different units of the customs house
of Lisbon. As stated in 1916 by one of the students:
I followed the training period at the customs house with many customs
experts who were also graduated at the Institute […] I appreciated how
useful the subjects were, from geometry lessons […] to physics and chem-
istry lectures, as well as the lessons of analysis (including the subjects on
commodities and adulterations), expertly directed by Srs. Drs. Fernando
Mattoso Santos and Guilherme Wilfried Bastos.73
As this student attests, the circulation of people and knowledge between the
customs laboratory and the School of Commerce was quite intense and was
especially important for the training of future customs employees. Another
example of this exchange was materialized in the textbooks prepared by
Mattoso Santos.
In sum, the customs laboratory was a space linked with many other insti-
tutions of Lisbon, connecting customs chemists, customs officials, students,
traders, etc. In this sense, the customs laboratory of Lisbon became a “perme-
able space,” opened to a wide diversity of publics, and a mediator between
the interests of different stakeholders, boards, commissions, and spaces of
the city.74
72 Caetano Beirão Da Veiga and Aureliano Lopes Fernandes de Mira, O Instituto Superior
de Comércio de Lisboa. Breves notas sobre os seus fins e organização (Lisboa: Museu
Comercial, 1922), 27.
73 Manuel Augusto Edmond Santos, Relatorio do aluno do Curso Superior Aduaneiro (Lisboa:
Tipografía Universal, 1916), 30.
74 Graeme Gooday, “Placing or Replacing the laboratory in the History of Science?,” Isis, 99:
783–95.
200 Suay-Matallana
Figure 6.3 The commercial, and customs cluster of the Lisbon’s port. C Pires.
Planta de Lisboa, Lisboa (Annuario Commercial de Portugal) 1909. http://
purl.pt/23585
4 Conclusions
This chapter has been inspired by historiographical trends that highlight

the significance of biographies, geographies, material culture, and money
for the history of science.75 This combination of approaches offers a rich
image of the customs laboratory of Lisbon, a site of chemistry created in 1887.
Originally established to improve revenue collection, it was soon involved
in relevant economic questions, such as the protection of Portuguese wine
exports, or the control of newly imported substances. In this sense, the cus-
toms laboratory of Lisbon also contributed to the modernisation of Portugal,
understood not as a hegemonic and uncritical concept, but as a process in
which monetary interests, industrial policy, and budgetary and fiscal issues
were all determining factors in the laboratory’s founding, and the scientific
activities carried out in this space.
The Lisbon customs laboratory assumed new tasks and became fully inte-
grated into different Portuguese scientific networks. For instance, the labora-
tory was the technical hub of the customs administration, providing chemical
guidelines to the customs service, and was also employed to distribute and
75 Casper Andersen, Jakob Bek-Thomsen and Peter C. Kjærgaard, “The Money Trail: A New
Historiography for Networks, Patronage, and Scientific Careers,” Isis, 103, nº. 2: 310–5.
calibrate scientific instruments employed at customs. Moreover, the customs

laboratory was part of official commissions to standardise chemical works and
created intense links with industrial and commercial education institutions,
thanks, in part, to two major reasons: the scientific authority of its directors
(Mattoso Santos, von Bonhorst, and Wilfried Bastos), and the physical location
of the laboratory (located in the Terreiro do Trigo building). The laboratory
also enjoyed a substantial degree of stability, considering that both its staff
(with only three directors in more than fifty years) as well as its location in
the same building since its creation. Some of its activities can be explored
through the scientific instruments still preserved at the customs laboratory.
This unique collection offers excellent perspectives for future work at the
intersection of material culture, heritage, and public engagement with both
science and customs.
The creation and evolution of the customs laboratory also tells us about the
kind of future imagined for Lisbon in the late-nineteenth century. Just as trade
and commerce held growing relevance, and promise, for the Portuguese econ-
omy, Lisbon continued to be seen as a gateway for many products imported
from abroad. Many port facilities were placed close to the core of the city, and
were equipped with other private and public infrastructures, as well as trans-
portation systems, namely the train station. In this way, the port of Lisbon
became the most important trade and commercial cluster of Portugal, of
which the customs laboratory was a part. By the late 1910s, thanks to the port
cluster, Lisbon was not just the scientific capital but also the commercial capi-
tal of the country as per the imagination of architects, engineers, and scientists
in their urban utopias.76
As stated by the director of the chemical journal Revista de Chimica Pura
e Applicada, “the prestige of a laboratory cannot be determined by the rev-
enue collected, or the expenses caused, but by the importance of the works
done”.77 In this sense, the customs laboratory of Lisbon was a major player
in Portuguese history. Despite being small size, the laboratory became fully
integrated in the scientific agenda of Lisbon, creating connections with other
institutions, bridging the local chemical community and a large network of
politicians, bureaucrats, customs officials, students, traders, importers, indus-
trialists, traders, and wholesalers. As explored in chapters five and seven in this
book, the scientific and commercial cluster of the port of Lisbon connected
Lisbon with other cities of continental Portugal, its colonies, and the rest of the
world in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century.
76 Simões, “From Capital City to Scientific Capital”, 157.

77 “O Laboratorio Municipal do Porto,” Revista de Chimica Pura e Applicada, 1: 36–8.
202 Suay-Matallana
Thanks to trade exchanges (including agriculture and industry) the city

became a European capital and an imperial metropolis in which science played
a key role. Further historical work could explore the “interurban connections”
created between the customs laboratory of Lisbon and similar ones abroad, as
well as study their possible involvement in the emergence of a “transnational
municipalism.”78 However, this work has shown a wide variety of exchanges:
between the customs laboratory of Lisbon and other scientific institutions
of the city and the country, and between customs experts and non-academic
publics. In this sense, the history of the customs laboratory not only informs
us about the evolution of science in Portugal, but also provides a better under-
standing of the very configuration and transformation of the city of Lisbon
between the 1880s and the 1930s.
Acknowledgements
This chapter has been possible thanks to the support of the Portuguese FCT–
postdoctoral contract offered by the CIUHCT UID/HIS/UI0286/2013, and proj-
ect “Visions of Lisbon” (PTDC/IVC-HFC/3122/2014), and the Spanish projects
“Tóxicos invisibles” (PID2019-106743GB-C21), and (AUT.DSP.ISM.01.20). I am
also grateful to Marta Macedo for her valuable comments.
78 Oliver Hochadel, “Introducción: Circulación de conocimiento, espacios urbanos e his-
toria global. Reflexiones historiográficas sobre las conexiones entre Barcelona y Buenos
Aires,” in Saberes transatlánticos: Barcelona y Buenos Aires: conexiones, confluencias, com-
paraciones (1850–1940), ed Álvaro Girón Sierra, and Gustavo Vallejo (Madrid: Ediciones
Doce Calles, 2018), 22.
Chapter 7
Lisbon after Quarantines: Urban Protection against

International Diseases
Celia Miralles Buil
1 Introduction
At the end of the nineteenth-century, Lisbon aimed at becoming the “gate of

Europe.” So, it was toward this end that municipal and national authorities,
alongside economic actors, planned to adapt Lisbon’s port to the new condi-
tions of world trade. Included among them were designs for the deepening and
extension of its docks to host larger ships, as well as planned improvements to
railway transport to facilitate maritime traffic.1
It was within this context of expansion that critical and dissenting views
were made public, particularly with respect to the obligation to continue prac-
ticing quarantines at the lazaretto of Porto Brandão, located on the other side
of the Tagus River (see chapter 5 in this volume). For its critics, the retention of
goods and people for sanitary purposes restrained the expansion of interna-
tional trade. Their claims were based on the views of physicians and inter-
national public health authorities, both of whom considered the quarantine
unnecessary and/or inadequate considering “medical progress.” They also
pointed out innovative solutions practiced in international ports which found
an intermediate position between health protection and commercial inter-
ests.2 These measures, applied for instance in Britain since 1841, involved
a reduction of mandatory quarantines, resorting to disinfection and the
improvement of hygienic conditions in cities.3 In the face of such criticism,
1 Miguel Carlos Correia Paes, Melhoramentos de Lisboa e o seu porto (Lisboa: Typ. Universal,
1884). Emílio Brogueira Dias and Jorge Fernandes Alves, “Ports, policies and interventions in
ports in Portugal – 20th Century,” Cahiers de la Méditerranée, 80 (2010): 41–64, 54.
2 Domingo José Bernardino d’Almeida, Quarentenas perante a Ciência ou a critica cientifica do
Regulamento geral de sanidade marítima (Lisboa: Livraria Ferin, 1891).
3 On the system established in Britain: Krista Maglen, The English System: Quarantine,
Immigration and the Making of a Port Sanitary Zone (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2014); Anne Hardy “Cholera, Quarantine and the English Preventive System, 1850–
1895,” Medical History, 37 (1993): 250–269. On medical controversies: Jon Arrizabalaga and
Juan-Carlos García-Reyes, “Contagion controversies on cholera and yellow fever in mid
nineteenth-century Spain: the case of Nicasio Landa,” in John Chircop, and Francisco Javier
© Celia Miralles Buil, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004513440_011

204 Miralles Buil
local physicians and healthcare authorities justified the retention measures by

the numerous epidemics, which still reached Europe and Portugal via mari-
time routes. As in other Southern European territories, these controversies led
to a progressive reduction of quarantine instead of a drastic one between 1880
and 1901.4 In 1899, the medical and political controversy was reactivated by
a plague epidemic declared in Porto.5 The disease, which caused 132 deaths
according to official records, arrived by sea from India and spread quickly in
the city revealing both the unhygienic conditions of Porto and the failure of
the system established to prevent epidemics coming by sea. The crisis con-
vinced the Portuguese authorities that it was necessary to entirely re-think the
organisation of the Portuguese health system.
In 1901, new regulations regarding public health services were established
in Portugal by Ricardo Jorge, the physician in charge of the fight against Porto
plague two years prior. It included important instructions for the reorganisa-
tion of the maritime health border.6 Jorge’s new system was based on several
security measures, which organised the circulation between sea and land. This
porous sanitary border, as I will call it, was planned to be permeable at some
points to facilitate traffic on both sides. Nevertheless, the system also permit-
ted the retention of travellers or goods when necessary.7
This chapter studies the implementation of this new and porous sanitary
border in Lisbon, arguing that it was devised as the solution to reconcile com-
mercial interests with the need for preventive measures against epidemics. It
focuses on a period of time ranging from 1901, when the new regulation for health
services grounded on a new conception of maritime health was signed, to 1945,
when, according to physicians, the increased air traffic moved the discussion
Martínez, eds., Mediterranean quarantines, 1750–1914. Space, identity and power (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2018), 170–195.
4 John Chircop, and Francisco Javier Martínez, eds., Mediterranean quarantines, 1750–1914.
Space, identity and power (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018); Pere Salas-Vives,
and Joana-María Pujadas-Mora, “Cordons Sanitaires and the Rationalisation Process in
Southern Europe (Nineteenth-Century Majorca),” Medical History, 62(3) (2018): 316.
5 Myron Echenberg, “They have a love of clean underlinen and of fresh air: Porto 1899”, in
Plague Ports. The global urban impact of bubonic plague, 1894–1901 (New York: New-York
University Press, 2010), 107–132.
6 Ricardo Jorge (1858–1939) was a Portuguese physician. He was nominated responsible for the
organization of the fight against the Porto’s plague in 1899. The same year he became General
Health Inspector and took an active part in the building of the 1901 legislation. He was also an
active participant in international conferences.
7 The expression “porous border” is used in many works on migrations: Julian Lim, Porous
Borders. Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (North Carolina:
UNC Press, 2017). By using the word “porous,” I consider both the circulation between the two
sides (permeability) and the possibility of retaining flows in void spaces.
Lisbon after Quarantines 205
to airports.8 Moreover, the measures taken and daily practices implemented

during this period implied a decrease in control that cannot be disconnected
from its international context. International Sanitary Conferences had an
important impact on practices and legislations in all European countries,
as they aimed at building an international sanitary network that extended
beyond national and European borders.9 In this international network, Lisbon
held a strategic position as it was a port that connected the Mediterranean
Sea to the Atlantic Ocean, and Europe to the Americas.10 As an imperial gate-
way, Lisbon’s port also organised the communications between the metropolis
and its colonies in Asia and Africa. In this sense, then, both the activation of
maritime trade and the preservation against epidemics were principal con-
cerns for Lisbon’s authorities regarding the rest of the world. Therefore, Lisbon
provides a perfect case study for understanding how this new system, which
was applied (with local variations) in all European countries, was organised
and implemented.
To understand this practical implementation of the porous sanitary border,
the chapter focuses on the daily work done by the Maritime Health Service, the
administration in charge of preventing the arrival of epidemics onto Portuguese
shores. Relocated in Lisbon’s port, the sanitary border quickly became an
urban issue. This local administration was tasked with implementing the
national and international health legislation. The physicians and medical staff
employed by the Maritime Health Service controlled the ships according to a
set of procedures, and, to a lesser extent, their own expert judgment. As a local
administration, the Service forged relations with other local administrations
and, in that sense, established links with the city’s agency. Indeed, its integra-
tion in the urban space, and particularly the port zone, modified the medical
geography of Lisbon, the specific organization of the port and travellers’ urban
itineraries. In turn, the Service was also transformed by the city itself.
8 According to the Inspector Superior de Saúde e de Hygiene responsible for the Maritime
Health Service. ASM, box n°10, Correspondência expedida 1950–1951, 7 August 1951, 23.
The evolution of the Maritime Health was also sanctioned by a new legislation: Decree
n°35.108, 7 November 1945 and an International Health Convention in 1944. Nevertheless,
in the following years, the traffic of passengers and particularly of goods in the port con-
tinued to increase.
9 Sylvia Chiffoleau, Genèse de la santé publique internationale. De la Peste d’Orient à l’OMS,
(Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes/Ifpo, 2012).
10 In the beginning of the twentieth century, Lisbon was the first European port of arriv-
als for ships travelling from South America to Northern Europe and from North America
to Mediterranean ports. B. de Paiva Curado, O Porto de Lisboa. Ideias e factos (Lisbon:
Livraria Rodrigues, 1928).
206 Miralles Buil
As a local administration, the Service protected the inhabitants of the city

against epidemics coming from the overseas via foreign travellers or com-
modities. Nevertheless, this protection extended far beyond the city’s borders
to include Lisbon’s regional area, the country, Europe, and the world. These
two faces of prevention embodied the Service’s activities, especially as it was
located in the capital city. In that sense, the “protection against epidemics”
went well beyond local administration: it was also a commitment of the local
authorities toward the country and the world.
This chapter argues that to fully understand the implementation of a porous
sanitary border, through the specific action of the Maritime Health Service,
it is necessary to consider its diverse geographical scales. On the one hand,
the evolution and integration of local activities into the urban space cannot
be understood without considering them as a part of a broader national and
international network. On the other hand, the city was the site where different
issues (health protection in all its geographical dimensions and the improve-
ment of maritime trade) intertwined and/or collided, and where control mea-
sures were put in place. In addition, after the end of the lazaretto, which served
to maintain distances between travellers and goods suspected to be infected
and the city’s inhabitants, and was actively criticized for going against mari-
time trade, other solutions had to be found in order to keep the danger at bay.
This chapter argues that detention was a technique that was reproduced in
other spaces and at different geographical scales. In other words, to vary the
geographical scales of sanitary control was a solution found to reconcile health
and commercial interests.
The first part of the chapter presents the new health legislation and its solu-
tions to secure the smooth flow of traffic through the construction of a disin-
fection station. The second part analyses the integration of this edifice into
the space of the port, focusing on how the territory was negotiated between
all actors. The third part explains how, beginning with the disinfection sta-
tion, the protection against epidemics spread throughout the city, the coun-
try, and the world. The chapter’s fourth and final part studies how the city of
Lisbon was positioned in a broader international network dedicated to health
preservation.
2 From the Lazaretto to the Disinfection Station
The Regulamento geral dos serviços de saúde e beneficiência pública (The

General Regulation for the Public Health and Welfare Services) published in
1901 included an important reorganization of the maritime health services
in Portugal in order to “reconcile quarantine practices with commercial

interests.”11 The first measure of the new legislation to accelerate maritime
traffic ushered in a shift away from a compulsory quarantine in the lazaretto
of Porto Brandão (see chapter 5 in this volume) to a new system, which used
quarantine in targeted cases and favoured disinfection and the fumigation of
goods on board and on land, using the Disinfection Station’s on-site facilities.
Similarly, travel procedures were modified and thus affected the journey of any
of the ship’s passengers. Travellers had to wait on board for the “health bill” ver-
ification, a certificate which mentioned the health conditions at the ports of
departure and transit. The physician from the Maritime Health Service would
board the ship, interrogate the captain and the ship’s doctor, and inspect the
boat. Depending on the result of the first survey both the ship’s passengers and
crew could stay in quarantine for some days, wait for disinfection, a medical
inspection, or were free to leave – the most common recommendation being a
daily medical follow-up.
This new porous sanitary border led to two consequences in terms of spa-
tial organization in Lisbon: firstly, the reduction in Lisbon’s leading role to the
security of the country and public health, and secondly, the protection against
epidemics, which previously took place outside the city, was now included in
the port zone, near the city centre.
Why did Lisbon lose a portion of its national leadership? Before these
reforms, all the ships requesting Portuguese continental ports had to pass
through the lazaretto of Porto Brandão located near Lisbon, as it was the
only one on mainland Portugal.12 Instead of a centralized system articulated
around the lazaretto, the new legislation established a polycentric network.
The Portuguese territory was now divided in four Maritime Health Districts
bringing together Health Stations located in port zones. In each District, the
Health Stations were classified in three categories depending on their spatial
influence, infrastructures, and staff. The “first-class” stations, Lisbon, Porto,
Ponta Delgada (Azores Islands) and Funchal (Madeira Island) were in charge
of supervising the sanitary activities in their respective regions. Thus, Lisbon
maintained its influence on the second district, the south of continental
Portugal, but lost a part of its leading role to the benefit of the other three “first
class” stations. With the new organization, to pass via Lisbon was no longer
mandatory for entering continental Europe.
11 Correia Paes, Melhoramentos de Lisboa e o seu porto.

12 In the nineteenth century, there was a lazaretto in Funchal (Madeira Island) but it was
closed before 1900.
208 Miralles Buil
Figure 7.1 Health Stations in Portugal according to the 1901 legislation

Source: 1901 legislation, base map download on GADM, produced by the
author using the ArcGIS program
Nevertheless, in terms of protection against diseases, the loss of Lisbon’s leader-

ship was progressive. According to the 1901 legislation, the lazaretto remained
active under the supervision of the Lisbon Health Station.13 It received pas-
sengers reaching any Portuguese ports and representing an increased danger.
In that sense Lisbon, through this facility, still played a national role. This role
was reduced during the following years, as the lazaretto was progressively
abandoned, and new decrees opted for reducing the conditions of quarantine.
According to the Health Maritime Inspector, in 1918, the lazaretto was not any-
more in condition to receive any passenger in quarantine.14 However, a part
of the lazaretto remained officially available to receive travellers suspected of
infectious diseases at least until 1924.15
13 Regulamento geral dos serviços de saúde e beneficência publica, Article n°236.

14 ASM, box n°37 Lazareto 1918. File: Vapor ingles Kurak, 1918.
15 ASM, box n°44, Lazareto s/d, Letter of the Maritime Health Inspector to the Public Health
Department, 28 July 1924.
Figure 7.2 Health Station Building in Lisbon (1901–1918)

Sources: base map ANTT, Carta de Lisboa e seus
arredores, F. da Costa, 1909, produced by the author
using the ArcGIS program
If the Maritime Health Service in Lisbon corresponded to a loss of Lisbon’s

national leadership in the fight against epidemics, it gained, in turn, more
influence in the city.
Before 1901, the local prevention against epidemics was organized from the
Health Station Building located in Belém (Bom Successo’s wharf, down-river,
at the entrance of the Tagus estuary), located just outside the city, as well as
from the lazaretto. The 1901 legislation based the new local organization at
the lazaretto, and at the port’s Health Station and the Disinfection Station,
located at “Cais da Rocha de Óbidos,” in Alcântara. As explained before, the
lazaretto’s activities progressively decreased. On the contrary, the Disinfection
Station increased its influence and became a place through which all travel-
lers and goods had to pass before entering the city. Inaugurated in 1906, the
Disinfection Station included various buildings that served to decontaminate
goods and to inspect travellers. And beginning in the 1910s, the administrative
services of Maritime Health, previously located in Belém, were relocated to a
building into the Disinfection Station’s enclosure.16
16 The relocation of the Maritime Health Service in the new Health Station better known
as the Disinfection Station situated on port was planned by a Decree published on
5 December 1907. Nevertheless, in 1913 correspondence revealed that the Health
210 Miralles Buil
In that sense, the new complex situated on port substituted both the laza-
retto and the Health Station at Belém, becoming the new key point of the sani-
tary border. With this substitution, health was no longer controlled from the
exterior of the city. Quite the opposite, the Disinfection Station was integrated
in the port zone right next to the city centre. With this new location, the pro-
tection against epidemics became an urban issue or, at least, a problem posed
to the port of Lisbon.
This new urban and/or port dimension of the Maritime Health Service was
also related with a new way to preserve both health and commercial interests,
based on technical devices and, beyond it, modern medicine. The most impor-
tant commitment of the Disinfection Station, node of the new sanitary border,
was the disinfection and fumigation of merchandise, luggage, and even per-
sonal objects arriving from a suspicious port. Thus, the Service implemented
new procedures, equipment, and instruments. According to J. Domingues de
Oliveira, in 1911, Lisbon’s Disinfection Station included six sulphuration rooms,
one big “house” for sterilization, and three small rooms which included steril-
izing machines dedicated to clothes and other objects in need of additional
care. For prophylactic treatment, staff used a B Type Clayton machine (for dis-
infection by gas) located at the port, three Geneste Herscher sterilisers, two
Ennes formalin machines, 17 bathrooms with showers, two of which contained
buckets for personal disinfection.17
The Clayton machine would become the pearl of Lisbon’s sanitation arsenal:
it was used for the ship’s disinfection, by docking or using a small boat, which
transported the apparatus, and served to inject sulphur dioxide in the holds
and cabins to eliminate germs, rats, insects, or any other non-human organ-
isms that represented a possible source for infection. Like the Disinfection
Station’s other devices and procedures, the Clayton’s machine was not unique
to Lisbon’s Maritime Health Service: the same equipment could be found in
other ports around the world.18 The other equipment mentioned above were
Station at Belém was still used while considering its transfer imminent. ASM, box n°19,
Correspondência expedida, 1913.
17 J. Domingues de Oliveira, Sanidade Maritima (Porto: Typographia Santos, 1911), 80.
18 The disinfection techniques generated numerous works at the beginning of the twen-
tieth century: see Adrien Proust, and Paul Faivre, Rapport sur les différents procédés de
destruction des rats et de désinfection à bord des navires (Melun, Ministère de l’Intérieur et
des cultes. Service sanitaire maritime 1902) ; Albert Calmette and Edmond Jules Rolants,
Sur la valeur désinfectante de l’acide sulfureux et sur l’emploi de ce gaz dans la désinfection
publique (Massons et Cie Editeurs, extract from la Revue d’hygiène et de police sanitaire,
XXV, 5, 1903) Historians of medicine have worked on this subject: Lukas Engelmann and
Christos Lynteris, Sulphuric Utopias. A History of maritime fumigation (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2020).
not entirely new to Lisbon either, as the lazaretto also had disinfection equip-
ment, as did the Public Disinfection Station built by Lisbon municipality in
the 1890s.19
If disinfection was itself not a new procedure, between 1901 and 1940, the
Service’s staff dedicated more and more time to the preventive extermination
of rats and mosquitoes. Beginning in the 1910s, the Certificate of Disinfection
became common practice for ensuring daily protection against disease. Reports
from the Maritime Health Inspector and certificates delivered by the Service
demonstrated that the ships were disinfected periodically in the 1930s, and
that this activity became the priority for the Service.20
The increased preoccupation with disinfection was related to the intro-
duction of practices of “modern medicine,” based on bacteriological discov-
eries, which were carried out in agreement with the International Sanitary
Conferences. Similarly, from 1900 onwards, the Service began an extended
collaboration with the Câmara Pestana Bacteriological Institute by sending
dead rats or faeces samples of suspicious passengers for examination and
bacteriological analyses, while passengers were forced to wait aboard their
ship or at the lazaretto for their results.21 This procedure was defended by the
prestigious physician Ricardo Jorge in International Sanitary Conferences,
and, successively, by the Portuguese representatives using national practice
as a justification.22 During the following years, this “bacteriological control”
increased, becoming the favoured solution for determining whether or not
a given individual or commodity should be authorized to enter Lisbon and
continue their journey. However, this desire to found a sanitary border on
modern medicine and machinery did not mean that all travellers and goods
were considered equally dangerous. On the contrary, the knowledge acquired
19 On the Lazaretto equipment, see chapter 5 in this book. In the first years, the lazaretto’s
facilities were also used for voluminous goods, as the Disinfection Station had no machin-
ery adapted for them. About the Public Disinfection Station of Lisbon: Ennes, Guilherme
José. A desinfecção publica em Lisboa (Lisboa: Imprensa National, 1896).
20 See the “buletins de desratização e desinfecção” signed by the Health Inspectors in 1934
for instance. ASM, box n°37, Lazareto 1901, 1934.
21 The Lisbon Bacteriological Institute or Royal Bacteriological Institute was renamed
“Instituto Bacteriológico de Câmara Pestana” after the death of its Director Luis da
Câmara Pestana during Porto’s plague (1899). The collaborations with the Maritime
Health Service began in June 1900, according to the Correspondence sent by the General
Health Inspection, (L.2, n°279) ANTT, Ministério do Reino (MR), Sanidade Marítima, Lv.
2539.
22 For instance, the bacteriological control was also defended by António Augusto Gonçalves
Braga, physician from the Maritime Health Service and future Maritime Health Inspector
in the 1911–1912 Conference in Paris. See his report: “A conferência sanitária internacional
de Paris de 1911–12,” Arquivos do Instituto Central de Higiene, II, 1 (1916): 16–65.
212 Miralles Buil
allowed physicians to establish different categories for techniques of control.

For example, such a difference was made between cotton and leather, as the
first product appeared less dangerous than the second.23 Tea, by contrast, was
a commodity of relatively high risk given that its port of origin was India. In
1904, the Director of Health Administration explained that the disinfection of
travellers’ clothes was more severe for the third-class passengers because their
clothes were “generally unclean.”24 In this way, the concern for clothes’ disin-
fection legitimised physicians’ discrimination of specific classes of travellers.
That said, it would be wrong to consider that the new controls, based on bac-
teriology and the use of chemicals and machinery, simply replaced the practice
of isolation. Although the use of mandatory quarantine disappeared, isolation
remained an important solution. Like disinfection practices, retentions were
used in targeted cases depending on numerous aspects, such as origin and vis-
ited ports, diseases, type of goods transported by sea, hygienic conditions on
board, as well as social characteristics. For instance, in 1911, economic migrants
in transit to Lisbon were forced to stay in the lazaretto, waiting for the result of
bacteriological analyses, while other passengers were permitted entry under
the condition of submitting to a daily follow-up examination.25
If quarantine was maintained in some way, its importance was reduced dur-
ing the following years – in consonance with the different national and inter-
national legislations and the two reorganizations of the Portuguese Health
Administration in 1926 and 194526 – while disinfection measures and general
inspections on board or medical surveys also declined in terms of their fre-
quency. To favour commercial interests, new techniques were implemented:
for instance, despite the numerous reservations expressed by physicians, radio
began to be used during the 1920s to anticipate the inspection and reduce
the time spent on health control at port.27 In 1934, captains were authorized
to communicate by radio telegraphy to the Maritime Health Inspection in
23 ANTT, Ministério do Reino (MR), Sanidade Marítima lv. 2539, L2 n°248 (p. 26).
24 ANTT, Ministério do Reino (MR), Sanidade Marítima lv. 2541, 1904, L6 n°248 (p. 215).
25 ASM, box n°1, Livro de Revisões em terra, 1911.
26 Decree n° 12.477 on 12 October 1926 and n°35.108 on 7 November 1945. For more infor-
mation about the Portuguese Health Administration see Rita Garnel, “Prevenir, cuidar e
tratar. O Ministério e a saúde dos povos,” in Pedro Tavares de Almeida and Paulo Silveira
e Sousa, eds., Do Reino à Administração Interna. História de um Ministério (1736–2012),
(Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda, 2015), 389–413.
27 According the Maritime Health Inspector in 1949, this solution was always seen with
suspicion by international and national health authorities. Correspondence sent by the
Maritime Health Inspector, February 14th, 1949, p. 67, box n°14, ASM.
order to be exempted from inspection on board,28 and this became a solu-

tion largely applied in the following years, sometimes overruling the control
of the Maritime Health Service. In addition, several modifications were added
to simplify legislations, or to adapt them to the interest of maritime trade: the
staff and number of boats assigned to sanitary purposes were increased, and
special authorization for schedule extension and night work were given to
the Maritime Health Service when the maritime traffic was intense.29 In that
sense, the Service adapted itself to the specificities of its location within the
port of Lisbon.
3 Negotiating Risk (and Territory) between Port and River
Located in a small area, the Disinfection Station shared space with the other
port administrations (Harbour Master’s Office, Customs, Maritime Police,
Transportation Maritime Companies, etc.). This integration into the port
forced the Maritime Health Service to adapt itself to an environment in con-
stant evolution. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the port was being
rebuilt to respond to the maritime trade increase and to Lisbon’s European
and imperial ambitions, requiring the construction of additional storage space
and better transportation facilities.30 In the first decade of the twentieth cen-
tury the implementation of new railway connecting the port’s different wharfs
was a key factor contributing to the accelerated rate of traffic. Indeed, traffic
increased regularly in the beginning of the twentieth century (excluding the
period of the World War I) and, in the 1920s, transformed Lisbon into one of
the most frequented ports in Europe.31 This context of such rapid transforma-
28 See the Decree n°7.719 published in Diário do Govêrno n°268/1933 Serie I on

23 November 1933 and cited by the Maritime Health Inspector António Gonçalves Braga
in his correspondence with the port Administration in 2 December 1933. APPL, box n°84,
file n°21. Correspondence with the Disinfection Station.
29 ASM, box n°19, Correspondência expedida, 1913, p. 304. Box n°19, AHM, Box N°94/95,
Capitania do Porto de Lisboa 1892–1910, Correspondência. Correspondence with the
Maritime Health Inspector Homem de Vasconcellos, 24 March 1910.
30 Francisco A Ramos Coelho, Porto de Lisboa. Nota sucinta dos melhoramentos e trabalhos
realisados e planeados pela Administração do Porto de Lisboa desde 7 de maio de 1907, e pela
mesma, apresentada a S. Exa. O Ministro do Fomento (Lisboa: Conselho de Administração
do Porto de Lisboa, Typographia Baeta Dias, 1912), 6. On the transformation of Lisbon
port see Ana Prata, O Desenvolvimento Portuário Português 1910–1926, PhD Dissertation
(Lisbon: Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2019), 37–63.
31 Prata, O Desenvolvimento Portuário Português, 61–63. From 1907 to 1925, the number of
passengers who were in transit in Lisbon increased from 52 000 to 66 472 passengers.
214 Miralles Buil
tion led to the Service’s modification of its own activities. In turn, the Maritime
Health Service became an issue to be considered for the port’s improvement.
The Disinfection Station was the gateway for a high number of travellers, and as
such it had to be included in the urban and port planning. What is more, con-
nections between the Disinfection Station, the train stations, and services for
luggage transportation to the city were issues frequently cited in port admin-
istration’s correspondence and reports from 1901 to 1930.32 The Disinfection
Station was also an important experience for travellers, who passed through
it, waited for luggage or personal disinfection, before continuing their journey
in the city.
However, the integration of the Maritime Health Service in the space of
the port was never consensual. Since the very beginning, the construction of
the Disinfection Station at Cais da Rocha was critized. The relocation of the
Maritime Health administration into the Disinfection Station’s complex led to
the expropriation of the customs officer’s building, in order to reconvert it for
offices for the Disinfection Station.33 In 1919, the port’s administration formally
required the Maritime Health Service’s relocation, arguing that its location on
the port was more an impediment for maritime trade than a solution to allevi-
ate traffic concerns.34 The request, therefore, was not about the Disinfection
Station itself, but its associated activities, which were supposed to extend
along a large part of the river. According to the numerous correspondence
between the port services, the “Disinfection Station’s private wharf,” as it was
called by health inspectors, was frequently used by other services throughout
the entirety of the historical period under investigation.
The World War I represents a turning point in the interlocking histories of
the Maritime Health Service, its Disinfection Station, and the port of Lisbon.
As traffic was considerably reduced because of the war, health inspectors
began to turn a blind eye to the “invasion” of their private wharf by all kinds
of vehicles, from boats on the river to cars along the quay. During the 1920s,
problems concerning this lack of enforced regulation persisted and became,
once again, a point of contention between the Maritime Health Service and
the port administration. One of the main problems for health authorities
was that the so-called neutral zone, which was intended as a containment
There was also a steady increase in ships, from 2772 in 1900 to 4141 in 1930, corresponding
to an increase in 3 612 051 to 13 152 724 gross tonnages.
32 Prata, O Desenvolvimento Portuário Português, 4. See Correspondence in AAPL, box n° 84.
33 ASM, box n° 19, Correspondência expedida 1913, p. 188.
34 AAPL, box n° 84, n° 17, Report, 21 March 1919.
solution to isolate the Disinfection Station from the rest of the arriving traf-
fic, was occupied for other purposes. This was due to the fact that during the
war, the Transportes Marítimos do Estado (Maritime Company) illegally built
a warehouse for coal within the port’s neutral zone35 to the detriment of public
health. This fact added a new dimension to the conflict, beyond the already
strict negotiation of a space for maritime health activities: the distance needed
for an epidemics’ prevention, according to Lisbon’s health authorities, was not
easily found in the space of the port and was renegotiated daily. The Maritime
Health Inspector sent numerous letters to the port administration complaining
that the Station’s entrance gate remained permanently open due to the war-
time operations within the area. According to the Maritime Health Inspector
and physician, Homem de Vasconcellos, wartime operations transformed the
Disinfection Station into a “public enclosure”36 as the Service was unable to
control movement into this space with dangerous implications for Public
Health. In 1929, the new Maritime Health Inspector, the physician Gonçalves
Braga, continued these daily negotiations to recover what he considered to be
the entire space dedicated to the prevention against epidemics on the port. His
preoccupations collided with those of the Chief Inspector of the port admin-
istration, who considered the space in question as unfeasible for the intended
health purposes, except in situations where an epidemic crisis appeared.37
Facing this seemingly landlocked conflict, the relatively open space of the
river increasingly appeared as the area with the least amount of contestation.
The river, however, was not a free space for the ships’ captains had to drop
anchor in a precise location dictated by harbour officers. Nevertheless, there
was less pressure for dropping anchor far from the principal wharf than mak-
ing use of the ships’ moorings. To some extent, this fact could explain why,
during this moment in Lisbon’s history, the protection against epidemics was
gradually moved to the space of the river and subsequently directed the atten-
tion of authorities to the ships themselves. It was a practical solution for both
parties: the port administration deviated part of its cumbersome activity, and
the Maritime Health Service maintained the distance needed for health pur-
poses, while avoiding tensions.
35 ASM, box n° 37, Lazareto 1918, Hand-written draft for a letter to the port Administration,
15 July 1918.
36 AAPL box n° 84, file n° 21. Correspondence with the Maritime Health Inspector,
23 April 1924.
37 AAPL box n° 84, file n° 21. Correspondence with the Maritime Health Inspector, 1929–1930.
216 Miralles Buil
Figure 7.3 Disinfection Station’s wharf (Lisbon 1906–1910)

Source: Arquivo fotográfico, Câmara Municipal de Lisboa (AF-CML),
1906–1910
Attention paid to the boats on the river began with observation on board,
favoured by the 1901 legislation which progressively replaced the isolation in
the lazaretto. Additionally, using the river allowed for the necessary distance
between a suspected ship and the city to avoid contamination. In 1928, and
confronted by a yellow fever epidemic in Rio de Janeiro, the Maritime Health
Inspector, Homem de Vasconcellos, commanded the ships arriving from
Rio to drop their anchor 200 meters away from land and/or other ships, in
accordance with the International Conference of Paris in 1926.38 This use of
the river involved a displacement of the inspectors, who had to modify their
daily routines for the better part of several decades: in 1949, the working day of
the inspectors still included a large portion of time spent on the river, aboard
ships, and other places situated within this extended area of Lisbon’s port.39
In addition, the attention for the health condition aboard ships increased
during the period. The 1911 handbook, Sanidade Maritima, published by the
Maritime Health Inspector of Porto included an extensive discussion regard-
ing the hygienic conditions needed aboard each ship, which included the
38 Letter to the port Administrator General Officer, AAPL Caixa 84, file n° 21. Correspondence
with the Maritime Health Inspector, 12 July 1928.
39 Correspondence between the Maritime Health Inspector and the Health General Office,
box n° 14, ASM, Correspondência expedida, 1949.
much discussed issue of potable water.40 Meanwhile, the ship’s physician was
to play the role of a referee and became a key actor in the Service activities;
particularly when the ship was used for the transportation of emigrants.
In 1927, a decree was published to officially extend the “Quadro de Saúde”
(the space on the river dedicated to epidemic prevention) to Belém, which
sought to relieve some of the pressure placed on the port’s health workers in
light of a port saturated with maritime traffic.41 In that sense, the Tagus River
served as a buffer space, to maintain the necessary distance between ships and
for the relocation of undesirable activities away from the port if/when needed.
Nevertheless, and aside from the inter-port conflicts, the port’s administra-
tion and Maritime Health Service frequently worked in collaboration with one
another. For instance, the Health Service was in constant communication with
the harbour master in order to authorize or deny the berthing of a given ship,
to decide on the use of the port’s facilities as inclined planes free of charge, and
frequently to ensure the coordination between its maritime inspectors and the
port’s police.
As a large part of passengers and goods passed through the Disinfection
Station, the intensity of traffic modified the local balance within the port and
was eventually considered by both port and city authorities. For port authori-
ties, the question of the passengers’ and their luggage transportation to Lisbon
or other destinations was of central importance, despite giving rise to fur-
ther conflict. Between 1908 and 1925, boats of the Health Service dedicated
to the travellers’ transport from the ship to the Disinfection Station were fre-
quently “attacked” by bellhops and luggage porters in small shuttle boats who
wanted to carry travellers and their luggage.42 Similar events happened on the
Disinfection Station’s wharf, as people could trespass the wharf’s enclosure
without difficulty. Moreover, public authorities reported abuses from inter-
mediaries, transporters, and interpreters, all of whom charged suspiciously
high prices for their services.43 According to reports, an important concern
for public authorities was the bad impression such events left on visitors who
were attacked, abused, or who witnessed scenes of violence between various
intermediaries and the police. These episodes drove port authorities to publish
police instructions, which established fixed prices for transport, transporters,
and forbade entrance to certain private intermediaries. In 1913, a number of
40 Domingues de Oliveira, Sanidade Maritima.

41 Decree n° 14.760, published in Diário do Gôverno n°252, Serie I, 21 December 1927.
42 APPL, box n° 84, n° 12: Reports on the arrival of the ship Arlanza 1915.
43 APPL, box n° 84, n° 12: Surveillance of the Maritime Disinfection Station aboard ships and
other places, 1908–1925.
218 Miralles Buil
transporters were authorized to sell tickets for transportation and to charge for
luggage inside the Disinfection Station in order to facilitate the flow of traffic
out of the port itself. Other transporters, however, objected to this decision.44
In response, the Maritime Health Inspector proposed the construction of a
transportation hut outside the Disinfection Station to address the critics of the
1913 decision. And yet, transportation problems continued to persist, at least
until 1925.
Beyond a new configuration of the port, these incidents demonstrated two
things: firstly, that the Maritime Health Service worried about questions that
it was not institutionally responsible for; second, the Health Service’s ability
to restrict the movement of travellers extended far beyond the wharf. Indeed,
the localisation in the port drove the Maritime Health Service to expand its
capacities, beyond its officially recognised remit. For example, the Service
oversaw medical inspections for port staff and military.45 In the 1920s and
1930s, physicians also cared for the health of sailors, which was a common
concern discussed in many international conferences. On 14 December 1934,
a decree created a dispensary dedicated to venereal diseases in the Station.46
Previously, in 1919, the General Commission for Emigration Services included
a Service assigned to Health Assistance for Portuguese emigrants travelling to
the Americas. This service, inspired by the Italian model, was responsible for
the protection of emigrants at all stages of their trip.47
Finally, the Health Service also called attention to health conditions at the
port, whose physicians frequently reported unsanitary, and therefore, danger-
ous working conditions. Most of the time, their action was limited to inform-
ing the appropriate authorities – the port administration, Health Central
Office, city council, or civil governor. For instance, in 1929 the Maritime Health
Inspector reminded port administration and the city council that they were
responsible for the daily removal of “all the rubbish and waste that existed in
the land situated between and behind the warehouses,”48 and for preventing
44 ASM, box n° 19, Correspondência expedida 1913, p. 45.

45 ASM box n° 37, Lazareto 1918, Correspondence between the Service and the Direction of
Maritime Transport, 1918.
46 Portaria n° 7956, published in Diário do Governo n° 304/1934 Série I, 28 December 1934.
The “Dispensário de higiene social” still existed in 1959 but was considered unnecessary.
ASM, box n° 8, Cópia de Correspondência expedida 1959.
47 Decree n° 13.213, Diário do Governo n° 44, 4 March 1927. See Yvette dos Santos, “Etat et
migration: une action officielle portugaise préférentiellement tournée vers l’émigration
transocéanique, 1880–1969,” Cahiers de la Méditerranée, 80 (2010): 65–85.
48 AAPL, box n° 84, file n° 21. Correspondence with the Maritime Health Inspector, 6 April,
1929.
human filths inside the warehouses. Moreover, the Health Inspector suggested
the building of two urinals and a restroom. On some occasions, however, phy-
sicians were directly involved in improving the health conditions in the port.
In 1929, and in collaboration with the port administration, the port’s physi-
cians implemented a disinfection campaign in order to avoid the infestation
of flies or mosquitos. For its part, the Maritime Health Service seemed par-
ticularly concerned and vigilant when the problem touched its field of action:
disinfection. In 1949, for instance, physicians oversaw the extermination of the
port’s rat population. As experts, they were worried about the risks involved by
using a dangerous gas, both within the port and beyond.49
4 Spreading Control into the City and Beyond
Beginning from within the Disinfection Station, physicians extended the prac-
tice of protective measures against epidemics throughout the city and beyond,
to facilitate maritime trade. As such, the Station became an important part
of the new and porous sanitary border. At the same time, the integration of
the Service’s activities in the city and beyond also modified the medical urban
geography.
The physicians of the Maritime Health Service first established a working
relationship with other institutions in the city, co-creating a mutual-aid net-
work dedicated to health prevention, which included regular collaborations
due to the daily work on port. It was through this mutual-aid network that
the Health Service was in constant communication with the Câmara Pestana
Bacteriological Institute about sample examinations. Similarly, other very
frequent collaborations involved Lisbon’s hospitals, lightening the Service’s
work while including itself within the broader network of institutions protect-
ing against epidemics. With the reduction and progressive abandonment of
quarantine measures at the lazaretto, solutions requiring isolation were dis-
placed to hospitals and/or ships – the Hospital do Rêgo, for instance, had a
specific service of contagious and infectious diseases since 1906. The Maritime
Health Service would rely on Hospital do Rêgo’s services for travellers with a
suspected infection of smallpox and sometimes by other contagious diseases
such as measles.50 In 1926, the reorganisation of the Health Administration
49 AMS, box n° 14, Correspondência expedida, 1949.

50 ASM, box n° 1, Livro de revisões em terra, 1911, 13 September and 27 November 1911.
220 Miralles Buil
confirmed the Hospital do Rêgo’s confinement service, which was renamed as

the Hospital Curry Cabral, for isolation.51
In the documentation consulted, there are no recorded cases of classical
quarantine disease (yellow-fever, cholera or plague) at the Hospital do Rêgo,
at least until the 1930s.52 The Maritime Health Service seems to have favoured
in these cases isolation aboard maritime vessels up until the end of the 1940s,
when the General Health Office assigned a specific pavilion of the Hospital
Júlio de Matos,53 located close to the airport for the purpose of receiving trav-
ellers suspected of having been infected by diseases calling for quarantine.54
Nevertheless, as the Director of the Technical Services of Sanitary Defence of
Ports, Borders, and Public Transport – the new title for the Maritime Health
Inspector – explained, most of the travellers isolated in this pavilion arrived
in Lisbon by air and not by sea. By virtue of these collaborations, protective
measures against epidemics were integrated as part of Lisbon’s medical prac-
tice and thereby, equitably distributed their public health responsibilities by
an expanded network of medical agents.
Despite the fact that the Maritime Health Service no longer controlled all
aspects of epidemic prevention, it still tried to maintain its influence and
decision-making power. In the case of the pavilion at the Hospital Júlio de
Matos, the Health Service sent them instructions concerning isolation and
reported on the building’s degradation and unhealthy environment – although
it is difficult to know to what extent its instructions were followed by staff and
hospital administration. Moreover, to find alternative solutions for the practice
of isolation, physicians from the Health Service maintained daily communi-
cations with urban dwellers, civil governors, transportation companies, etc.,
due to the concern for the free movement of infected persons throughout the
general population. That said, it was not only physicians but municipal police
officers who were also players in this process. For example, in 1918 two soldiers
suspected of being infected with smallpox were conducted to Hospital do Rêgo
by a policeman to prevent communication with the population.55
The regular cooperation by municipal police with medical and city ser-
vices included taking care of people affected by diseases that were not consid-
ered an immediate threat to public health and, for that reason, who were not
incumbent upon the Service. Every day, a preliminary medical inspection on
51 Decree n° 12.447, 12 October 1926, published on Diário do Governo, n.º227, Série I, p. 1522.
52 The 1926 reorganization planned to build a new quarantine station in the location of the
old lazaretto.
53 The hospital Julio de Matos is a psychiatric hospital created in 1942.
54 ASM, box n° 14, Correspondencia expedida 1949, 23, 19 March 1949.
55 ASM, box n° 37; Lazareto 1918, Maritime Health Inspector Correspondence, 21 March 1918.
board a ship led physicians to establish a diagnostic and eventually organise

patient transfers to the appropriate (i.e. less overpopulated) hospital, relative
to the traveller’s status and illness. During the first half of the twentieth cen-
tury, several discussions were conducted between the Maritime Health Service
and the General Health Office to find suitable solutions for the reception of
these different groups of travellers affected by sickness. Sailors, beggars, and
migrants who did not have a fixed address in Portugal, were particularly tar-
geted, and tuberculosis was the disease more frequently cited by physicians.
In the 1930s, when the Portuguese government established a repatriation sys-
tem for Portuguese citizens living in the Americas, many emigrants affected
by tuberculosis returned to Portugal to use this system. The Maritime Health
Service received many emigrants and sent those more affected often to the
Hospital São José.
During times of significant crisis or strain, it was common for the Health
Service to collaborate with its other, partnered, services, as was the case at the
end of the World War I when the Portuguese soldiers returned from the French
front. As the gateway into Lisbon, the Disinfection Station now found itself
at the heart of an expanded network of assistance. Beyond medical control,
physicians from the Health Service were the first to be confronted by a high-
volume of exhausted and sick soldiers who needed assistance. To manage this
situation, soldiers were distributed throughout various hospitals in the city:
the Hospital Militar de Belém, the Hospital Militar de Campolide, the Hospital
Temporário da Cruz Vermelha na Junqueira, the Hospital Militar da Estrela,
the Manicómio de Telhal, the Instituto Médico Pedagógico Anexo à Casa Pia
(de Santa Izabel), and the Batalhão de Infantaria n° 33, located at the Castelo
de S. Jorge.56 In addition to social care, a health control was applied, and the
Maritime Health Service was charged with purifying the blankets distributed to
the soldiers both aboard ships and in each of these hospitals. In October 1918,
the English ship, Kurak, arrived in Lisbon carrying 1,374 Portuguese soldiers
and six officers on board. The physicians decided to send them to the lazaretto
despite its bad conditions for isolation and asked for help from the army. The
reason being: they were particularly concerned by a non-defined disease that
spread throughout the French ports of Brest and Cherbourg and suspected to
be the Spanish Flu.57
Finally, the spread of the Health Service’s activities throughout Lisbon was
also related to the evolution of the protection against quarantine. To reduce
57 ASM, box n° 37; Lazareto 1918, File: Vapor ingles Kurak, Hand-written draft and correspon-
dence with the General Health Office, 1918.
222 Miralles Buil
retention, the Maritime Health Service opted for a method of follow-up care
that did not require restricting travellers’ freedom of movement. Helped by its
collaborations with other healthcare services, the system followed the travel-
lers both in Lisbon and outside of the city limits. For instance, while the physi-
cians sent two soldiers to the Hospital do Rêgo for smallpox, they also kept an
eye on their six companions, who stayed in a house situated at the corner of
Rua da Praia de Pedrouços in Belém.58 During the 1930s and the 1940s, home
inspections became an important activity for Lisbon’s Public Health services.
In 1949, the Maritime Health Service delegated these routine inspections to a
particular class of its workers: the visiting nurses. The Health Service employed
at least two visiting nurses at this time, one of which was sent to the Hotel do
Lis in Lisbon to oversee a traveller who was known to have been in contact
with smallpox.59
In more general ways, the physicians of the Health Service provided instruc-
tions for daily medical follow-ups administered to travellers suspected of
infection, which could be done at the Disinfection Station if travellers stayed
in Lisbon. If travellers were not staying within Lisbon proper, the medical
check-up was administered at their destination. Thus, it was for this reason
that physicians sent travellers to other healthcare services, informed the local
authorities, and asked to remain informed in turn. For example, on 2 April 1913,
the English ship, Silvertown, arrived at Lisbon from Port-Said, which was
known to be infected with the plague. Two Spanish travellers disembarked and
headed towards their country of origin, one to the port city of La Coruña and
the other one to the Mediterranean seaside town of Alicante. Since Portuguese
authorities could not follow them across state borders, the Inspector of
Maritime Health Service immediately informed Spanish authorities that they
had to take them into custody.60 Through the impetus of the Maritime Health
Service, this process allowed for securing and extending control beyond its
jurisdiction, as well as the reduction of time spent at the port’s entrance.
5 The Gate of Europe
As the medical follow-up demonstrated, Lisbon was also included in a broader

international network, where cities protected each other. This international
network and its improvement were another solution to articulate health
59 ASM, box n° 14, Correspondência expedida 1949, p. 134, 13 April 1949.
60 ASM box n° 19 Correspondência expedida 1913.
control and maritime trade. In Portugal, an international system of health bills

was organized in the seventeenth century.61 Health bills were first signed by
national authorities – as the Portuguese ambassador or consul – located in the
country of origin. At the end of the nineteenth century, the national legislation
started accepting information sent by other countries. The system of health
bills improved at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the
twentieth century, thus creating a network in which all the cities collaborated
to avoid epidemics’ spread.62
This network of trust, as it could be called, is evident from the daily commu-
nications sent and received by Lisbon’s Maritime Health Service, and from its
physicians’ daily work. Between 1901 and 1945, the Portuguese health bill was
progressively replaced by a certificate coming from foreign physicians, ship’s
physicians, captains, and foreign authorities63 and an extended exchange of
information between ports was implemented. The periodical reports made by
the Office International d’Hygiène Publique, established in 1907, and the epi-
demiological information sent by the Health Organization of the League of
Nations since 1921, allowed physicians to be aware of all epidemics that raged
in the world.64
However, for the networked Lisbon not all the ports and countries had the
same influence neither represented the same danger. Some ports were more
dangerous than others and were, therefore, subjected to heavy and constant
surveillance. Increased attention was paid to areas considered endemic for
cholera or plague, such as Asia and Africa (particularly Egypt and the Middle
East), or yellow fever in South America, particularly Brazil. By contrast, some
ports and countries benefited from an increased confidence, as was the case
of European countries. In 1900, the Health Service made the decision to admit
cotton, a material often considered risky, from the moment the cargo had been
61 See the legislation for the port of Belém on 16 December 1695, José Victorino de Freitas,
Sanidade maritima. Lições professadas no Instituto Central de Hygiene (Lisboa: Edições da
Bibliotheca Popular de Legislação, 1910).
62 Numerous works focus on this subject, see for instance the recent book by Chircop and
Martínez, eds., Mediterranean quarantines.
63 ASM, box n° 37, Lazareto 1915, Health certificate forms, 1938.
64 The International Office of Public Hygiene was an organization created in Rome with
head office in Paris. It was charged to organize and supervise the fight against quarantine
diseases. The Ligue of Nations Health Organization was created in 1921 with head office
in Geneva. It had the same purposes and established strong relations with the Rockefeller
Foundation. Both organizations coexisted (and competed) until the creation of the World
Health Organization in 1946.
224 Miralles Buil
already accepted in another European port, irrespective of coming from an

infected port.65
Similarly, the attention of Maritime Health inspectors increased in the case
of ships coming from ports under Portuguese responsibility or with which
Lisbon held a special relationship. This was the case of ports of Portugal’s col-
onies on the African continent as well as ports on the Portuguese islands of
Madeira and the Azores. Ships coming from the Azores, where several isolated
episodes of plague suggested that the disease was becoming endemic, were
under constant surveillance regardless of a traveller who presented a “clean
health bill.” In that sense, the Health Service maintained a national and impe-
rial (as the gateway to colonial Africa) role within the security apparatus pro-
tecting Europe from future outbreaks. At the same time, Lisbon was the first
port of arrival for ships coming from Brazil and one of the most important
for ships coming from the American Atlantic coast. Lisbon’s health authori-
ties were particularly careful regarding these ports of origin in accordance to
Lisbon’s European commitments.
This imbalance, which favoured European interests within the larger inter-
national context to which Lisbon belonged, was related to the medical history
of quarantines in Europe and beyond. As many historians demonstrated, at the
end of the nineteenth century and start of the twentieth century, the reduction
of control measures in Europe can largely be explained by the strengthening of
drastic quarantine measures in Asia and in some areas of the Mediterranean.66
In this context, Lisbon occupied an intermediary position. On the one hand,
Lisbon’s physicians and health authorities reinforced their affiliation to a
modern European health network; they endeavoured to be present at all the
International Sanitary Conferences, representing Portugal and subscribing to
the innovative measures of control. During these conferences, Ricardo Jorge
clearly explained that he disapproved of the strong measures of quarantine
that previously characterized Portugal,67 opposing isolation in favour of bacte-
riological control, which used modern medical techniques. On the other hand,
65 Correspondence between Ricardo Jorge, General Health Inspector and the Foreign Office,
ANTT, Ministério do Reino (MR), Sanidade Marítima, Lv. 2539, 20 September 1900.
66 See for instance Mark Harrison, Contagion. How commerce has spread diseases (New
Haven, Yale University Press, 2012); Chiffoleau, Genèse de la santé publique internatio-
nale or Christian Promitzer, “Prevention and stigma: the sanitary control of Muslim pil-
grims from the Balkans, 1830–1814,” in John Chircop, and Francisco Javier Martínez, eds.,
Mediterranean quarantines, 1750–1914. Space, identity and power (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2018), 145–169.
67 Ricardo Jorge, Les Pestilences et la Convention Sanitaire Internationale, (Lisbon, Institut
Central d’Hygiene, extract from Arquivo do Instituto central de higiene, 3, 1, 1926): 11.
as many countries of Southern Europe, the position of Lisbon as a European

gate justified upholding a severe control. During the late-nineteenth century,
Spain and Portugal’s direct connection to South America drove these countries’
representatives to reject the reduction of yellow fever controls proposed by the
International Sanitary Conferences. This ambiguous position of Lisbon and
Portuguese authorities was reflected in the health bill issue. Although Ricardo
Jorge and António Gonçalves Braga recommended removing the health bills
signed by administrative authorities, Portugal did not sign the international
convention for their abolition until 1934.68
At the same time, just as Britain relocated its quarantine in the Mediterranean
ports of Gibraltar, Malta, and Corfu towards the end of the nineteenth century,69
Lisbon also relocated its drastic control measures upstream. When the cholera
epidemic was declared in Funchal, in 1911, the first preoccupation was to detain
all ships. According to Ricardo Jorge, who wrote a complete report about this
event, the single greatest danger such measures posed to public health was its
proximity (due to the maritime road) with Lisbon.70 This threat allowed the
Portuguese government to justify, and subsequently apply, severe measures
of control. Eventually, soldiers from Lisbon were sent to Madeira to maintain
security at Funchal. The soldiers stayed on board to avoid contagion, but their
presence ensured that no ships could sail away. More than resolving the prob-
lem once and for all in Funchal, the objective was to contain the epidemic to
secure an effective protection of Lisbon.
Similarly, physicians considered the danger on both sides of the ocean. This
preoccupation led to the collaboration and exchange of practices to better
understand the epidemics, as well as an exchange of solutions. An example is
provided by several physicians, including Ricardo Jorge, who travelled to coun-
tries, such as Brazil, where yellow fever was endemic, and to Africa to study
the disease.71
68 ASM, box n° 10, Correspondência expedida 1950, 12 July 1950, p. 57.

69 John Chircop, “Quarantine, sanitization, colonialism and the construction of the
‘contagious arab’ in the Mediterranean, 1830s–1900”, in John Chircop, and Francisco
Javier Martínez, eds., Mediterranean quarantines, 1750–1914. Space, identity and power
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018): 115.
70 Ricardo Jorge, “Les bacillifères de la “Zaire” et le système défensif contre le choléra par le
contrôle bactériologique.” Arquivo do Instituto central de higiene, 1 (1913): 1–18.
71 Maria Paula Diogo and Isabel Amaral, eds., A Outra Face do Império Ciência, tecnologia e
medicina (sécs. XIX–XX), (Lisbon: Edições Colibri, 2012); Ricardo Jorge, La fièvre jaune,
(Arquivo do Instituto de higiene Dr Ricardo Jorge, 4, 1, 1938); Jaime Larry Benchimol,
“Ricardo Jorge e as relações entre Portugal, Brasil e África: o caso da febre amarela”, in
História da Ciencîa Luso-brasileira. Coimbra entre Portugal e o Brasil, ed. Carlos Fiolhais
(Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2013), 229–249.
226 Miralles Buil
Physicians also travelled to study the applied solutions for controlling epi-
demics in other countries. Here, the objective was to learn how “advanced”
countries controlled epidemics and built sanitary borders. For example, a
Clayton’s machine, the key solution for disinfection, was bought in France,
after physicians previously observed how it worked in British and American
ports. Moreover, to avoid rats walking on the ropes of ships, the Health Service
used the “rat-stoppers” system implemented in the British ports.72 At times,
this exchange of practices was based on daily communication and collabo-
rations, as was the case when, in 1896, the Health Service received informa-
tion that Italy had decided to exempt ships that had departed from a port in
Europe from the requirements outlined in the health bills (excluding Turkey).
Portuguese physicians found this to be a dangerous decision, and refused
the Italian government’s request for an exemption, while still learning the
methods being applied by the Italian administration.73 In 1902, the Maritime
Health Inspector referred to Brazil, Spain, and Italy, countries that were in
daily collaboration with the Service, to justify the twenty-four hour waiting
period required to obtain the health bill.74 This exchange of practices involved
other actors, which included travellers, sailors, ship physicians, and captains:
these actors experienced control measures in other countries and would share
both their experience and their opinions as to their limitations and virtues.
For instance, towards the end of the nineteenth century, travellers were dis-
satisfied by Lisbon’s continued use of quarantines, arguing that more practical
solutions had been found in other countries.75
On other occasions, passengers and the ship’s crew simply highlighted dif-
ferences between the public health practices implemented in Portugal and
other European countries. In other words, the lived experiences of maritime
travel provided relevant information that helped modify medical practices
at Lisbon’s port. For instance, the medical inspection of emigrants organized
at the Disinfection Station ever since 1919 changed according to the knowl-
edge acquired by its physicians via the immigration regulations in the United
States, Brazil, Argentina, or Canada. In addition to recommendations from for-
eign governments, cases of rejected migrants forced to return home led physi-
cians to establish stricter examinations.76 Captains, sailors, and the harbour’s
72 ANTT, Ministério do Reino (MR), Sanidade Marítima, Lv. 2541, p. 102. 1903.
73 ANTT, Ministério do Reino (MR), Sanidade Marítima, Lv. 2538, 18 January 1896.
74 ANTT, Ministério do Reino (MR), Sanidade Marítima, Lv. 2541, 22 February 1902, p. 14.
75 These critics to the lazaretto were expressed by the journalist William Scully during his
stay: ASM, box n° 9, Circular dos passageiros 1879, 5 March 1880.
76 See the recommendations sent to Portuguese health Services in the countryside from the
Maritime Health Service. ASM, box n° 10, Correspondência expedida 1950.
officers suggested solutions to facilitate traffic, as exemplified by the constant

demand to use radio systems instead of medical inspection in the 1920s.77 As
such, these actors were involved in locally building a porous sanitary border,
which was itself grounded in the appropriation of exogenous experiences
and knowledges.
6 Final Remarks
The articulation of commercial and public health interests was crucial for a
city like Lisbon, which aimed at becoming the gateway of Europe. At the begin-
ning of the twentieth century, tensions and agreements between parties with
different economic and medical interests eventually gave way to a new pro-
tection system against epidemics: a new sanitary border was included within
the urban space. Instead of controlling health from outside the city via the
lazaretto, protection was moved to the port with the Disinfection Station, and
gradually spread into Lisbon’s urban space using the city’s facilities. This situa-
tion led to a reorganization of space with its concomitant negotiations.
Without the lazaretto, the conflicts with the port administration turned the
river into an intermediary zone, conveniently dedicated to health purposes.
Moreover, the integration of the Maritime Health Service into the city con-
tributed to the transformation of urban space with respect to passenger arriv-
als, geographical constraints needed for isolation, and/or the recent use of
Maritime Health inspectors for the control and enforcement of hygienic and
medical standards of practice throughout the city.
At the same time, protection against epidemics evolved into an interurban
endeavour. As we have seen, Lisbon was part of a network of trust in which
port cities protected each other. Just as Lisbon protected other cities and hin-
terlands from epidemics by daily controls, so too was Lisbon protected by
similar practices in other European ports via the construction of a body of
international legislation.78
Thus, to understand the making of a new sanitary border in Lisbon, it is
necessary to consider the different geographical scales upon which it was
materialised. To avoid retention (isolation) and facilitate traffic, medically
77 Reported in ASM, box n° 14 Correspondence sent by the Maritime Health Inspector,

14 February 1949, p. 67.
78 Céline Paillette, “Épidémies, santé et ordre mondial. Le rôle des organisations sanitaires
internationales, 1903–1923”, Monde(s), 2 (2012/2): 235–256, Chiffoleau, Genèse de la santé
publique internationale.
228 Miralles Buil
appropriate, geographical distances were redefined. While maritime trade

yearned for reducing distance between cities/countries, traditional forms of
protection against epidemics were based on the conservation/enforcement
of distance. The new porous sanitary border maintained a certain distance
from danger in targeted cases, in different spaces, and at different geographi-
cal scales. At the local level, the river was used to contain epidemics given that
the port’s on-land conditions for health control were not always respected.
In the city, policemen who accompanied infected travellers maintained a
secure distance from the population. And at the international level, a variety
of procedures (which depended on the sanitary situation of the ports and the
confidence bestowed to each of them) constituted a significant barrier that
protected the health of Europe’s population from the rest of the world.
Alongside these diverse forms of containment, another solution to facilitate
traffic was to resort to modern medicine and machinery. As materialised by the
Disinfection Station, machinery became the new filter, which controlled the
entry to the city and legitimized discrimination. Trusting in medicine and sci-
ence, therefore, enabled the admission of goods and people while focusing on
the transmission of potentially threatening germs in a very precise geographi-
cal scale. In the following years, the vaccination became a current practice,
reinforcing protection based on modern science.79 At the same time, this evo-
lution of the local context was related to international networks, where similar
practices emerged in other ports, due to the recommendation of international
health associations and the exchange of practices related to daily work and
travellers’ experiences.
Furthermore, the new organization was characterized by a protection
against epidemics shared by multiple actors. Internationally, the Maritime
Health Service of Lisbon leaned on the information sent by other ports and
on international legislation, increasing its influence through the World Health
Organization.80 In the city, control was gradually shared by actors working at
city hospitals. During this process, the epidemic control lost its specificity:
travellers began to be assisted in the health institutions as every other inhabit-
ant. Lastly, in the port zone, the activities of the Maritime Health Service pro-
gressively decreased. In the 1950s, the first sanitary inspection on board was
frequently made in collaboration with the customs officers, and both maritime
and international police, with the latter two sharing the same boat.81 Maritime
health became, in that sense, another mere administrative procedure of the
port.
79 In 1948, vaccination against yellow fever became compulsory for travellers going to Brazil
or to the African colonies.
80 WHO was created between 1946 and 1948.
81 ASM, box n° 8, Cópia de Correspondência expedida 1959. July 20th, 1959.
Finally, after the end of the 1940s and with the rise of air transportation, the
same administration that was previously associated with the port, now turned
its attention to air traffic. The health inspectors’ focused on the airport, thus
relegating the seafront to a secondary position, insofar as the potential threat
posed by the transmission of disease by Lisbon’s visitors was no longer coming,
mainly, from the sea. This change impacted on the whole city organization just
as air traffic control implied a drastic redefinition of distance and time. While
the sea trip took days, flight duration was noticeably shorter. And just as peo-
ple and goods before them, germs would be able to reach Lisbon in only a few
hours’ time. This new threat for public health drove Lisbon’s health authorities
to rethink their protection against epidemics, and thus redefine, once more,
their activities both within and beyond Lisbon itself.
Acknowledgments
This chapter has been written with the support of the project VISLIS (PTDC/
IVC-HFC/3122/2014) of the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portugal),
as well as projects UID/HIS/UI0286/2013, UID/HIS/UI0286/2019 and UIDB/
00286/2020 UIDP/00286/2020. I thank Isabel Amaral, Jon Arrizabalaga, Marta
Macedo, Alexandra Marques, my colleagues from the project VISLIS and the
editors of the book for their critical reviews. I also would like to express my grat-
itude to Luisa Peneda and Isabel Martinho from the Administração Regional
de Saúde de Lisboa e Vale do Tejo for facilitating the access to the unclassified
documentation of the Archive of Maritime Health.
Chapter 8
The Colonial Garden and the Colonial

Agricultural Museum: Education, Research and
“Tropical Illusion” in the Imperial Metropolis
Cláudia Castelo
1 Introduction
The Colonial Garden and the Colonial Agricultural Museum of Lisbon created
in the early-twentieth century were simultaneously sites for science, instruc-
tion, and dissemination at the centre of the imperial metropolis. Both insti-
tutions were in line with the eighteenth century epistemological model that
linked Linnaean taxonomy, scientific expeditions, and the “natural history
complex” (garden-museum-ménagerie), for which the utility of the tropical
flora was central. In Portugal, the Royal Botanical Garden of Ajuda (a Baroque
garden for the princes’ education) and the Coimbra Botanical Garden (created
within the Enlightenment reform of the University of Coimbra) were material
embodiments of such a model. Lisbon’s new institutions were a national varia-
tion of other European empires state-funded and centralised effort regarding
the potential for knowledge to transform the natural resources of the colonies
into economic profit, such as the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, Berlin’s
Botanical Garden and Museum, and the Jardin Colonial at Nogent-sur-Marne
in Paris.1 All these institutions shared the same scientific, pedagogical, and
utilitarian agenda, being reoriented or designed from scratch to address the
challenges of the New Imperialism period (circa 1870–1914) concerning eco-
nomic botany and colonial agriculture.2
1 The Jardin Colonial created in 1899, following the botanical complex model of Kew (gardens,
museums and herbarium) and trying to catch up with the Netherlands and Britain in research
on tropical Agriculture, hosted from 1902 to 1940 the École nationale supérieur d’agronomie
coloniale for training the future colonial agriculture engineers for the French colonies, and
was the stage for several colonial agriculture exhibitions. See Robert Aldrich, Vestiges of the
colonial empire in France: Monuments, museums and colonial memories (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005), 61–67.
2 Christophe Bonneuil, “Crafting and disciplining the tropics: Plant science in the French
Colonies,” in Science in the Twentieth Century, ed. John Krige and Dominique Pestre
(Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997), 80. Richard Drayton, Nature’s
Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘improvement’ of the world (New Haven and
© Cláudia Castelo, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004513440_012

The Colonial Garden and the Colonial Agricultural Museum 231
The Colonial Garden was a simulation of the tropical conditions and plant
diversity in the capital city.3 Located at the liminal space between the labora-
tory, the field, and the display, the garden involved a wide range of uses: scien-
tific, practical training, commercial, and popular.4 In this built and controlled
environment, researchers could observe and experiment with immobile
indoor specimens and living outdoor collections from the colonies, without
the logistic, financial, and political problem of travelling to, and living in, the
actual field inhabited and used for other purposes.5 Their mixed lab-field prac-
tices was intended to generate useful knowledge for improving the quality,
productivity, and profits of colonial agriculture – namely of the main food and
cash crops (for instance, cocoa in São Tomé and Príncipe, coffee, cotton, maize,
sisal, and sugar cane in Angola, or cotton and oilseeds in Mozambique). In this
way, the education of Portugal’s future colonial agricultural engineers benefit-
ted from the experimental approach to controlled tropical natural landscapes
prior to their recruitment into colonial agricultural services. At the same time,
the museum displayed plant and raw materials, and transferred products
from the empire to students and broader audiences, fostering public interest
London: Yale University Press, 2000), 220 and 238. Jim Endersby, Imperial Nature: Joseph
Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 2008). Caroline Cornish, “Curating Science in an Age of Empire: Kew’s Museum of
Economic Botany”. PhD thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2013. Katja Kaiser,
“Exploration and exploitation: German colonial botany at the Botanic Garden and Botanical
Museum Berlin.” in Sites of imperial memory: Commemorating colonial rule in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries, ed. Dominik Geppert and Frank Lorenz Müller (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2015), 225–242. Chapters by Sarah Louise Millar and Caroline
Cornish in Diarmid A. Finnegan, Jonathan Jeffrey Wright, eds., Spaces of Global Knowledge.
Exhibition, Encounter and Exchange in an Age of Empire (London and New York: Routledge,
2016).
3 Gardens and museums “have sometimes been seen as a kind of microcosm or world in min-
iature”. Lukas Rieppel, “Museums and Botanical Gardens,” in A Companion to the History of
Science, ed. by Bernard Lightman (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 238. On the concept of
“simulation”, Estelle Sohier, Alexandre Gillet and Jean-François Staszak (eds.), Simulation
du Monde: Panoramas, Parcs à Thème et Autres Dispositifs Immersifs (Gèneve: Mētis Presses,
2019), 14–15. I thank Jaume Sastre for sharing this reference with me and challenging me to
engage with this concept.
4 Similar to the variety of users of the Kew’s Museum of Economic Botany. Caroline Cornish,
Felix Driver, and Mark Nesbitt, “Kew’s mobile museum: economic botany in circulation”, in
Mobile Museums: Collections in Circulation, edited by Felix Driver, Mark Nesbitt, and Caroline
Cornish (London: UCL Press, 2021), 96.
5 For a discussion of the revived interest in natural history in the early twentieth century and
spaces in the laboratory-field border, such as biological farms and field stations, see Robert
E. Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology (Chicago: The
Chicago University Press, 2002).
232 Castelo
in the colonies.6 Through the Colonial Garden and the Agricultural Museum,
Portuguese businessmen and Lisbon’s general population were able to get to
know these plants, their uses, and their economic potential without or before
leaving Europe.
This chapter attempts to analyse the role and place of these institutions in
the imperial metropolis drawing together insights from history of science and
urban social history. In dialogue with the literature on the history of colonial
gardens, museums, and exhibitions, on the one hand, and imperial cities, on
the other, this essay aims to situate these still under-researched cases within
the canon of international historiography and develop a more comprehensive,
comparative, framework on the subject.7 Building on primary sources from the
Colonial Garden and the Colonial Agricultural Museum, and colonial archives,
this chapter follows the parallel path of these two autonomous institutions
from their creation in 1906 until their merger in 1944. The text is composed
of three parts. The first part examines the discussion of the definitive loca-
tion and installation of the garden and the museum in the urban setting of
Belém/Ajuda. The second investigates their users – professionals, students,
visitors – and the conditions of work, research, and circulation of collec-
tions. The last section focuses on the moment in which the garden and the
museum were the stage of the Colonial Section of the Exposição do Mundo
Português (Portuguese World Exhibition, PWE). In 1940, the two institutions
had to reduce their regular pedagogical and scientific activities to a minimum,
in favour of a huge imperial propaganda initiative: large audiences were called
to join an “immersive experience” of the empire.8
2 The Historical Context of the Colonial Garden and the Colonial

Agricultural Museum
Before proceeding, I broadly present the historical context in which the

Colonial Garden and the Colonial Agricultural Museum were created and
operated until the early 1940s.
6 Just like the Berlin Botanic Garden in the first two decades of the twentieth century. See,
Katja Kaiser, “Exploration and exploitation: German colonial botany at the Botanic Garden
and Botanical Museum Berlin,” in Sites of imperial memory: Commemorating colonial rule
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ed. Dominik Geppert and Frank Lorenz Müller
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 227–228.
7 References in footnotes 1 and 2, and Felix Driver & David Gilbert, Imperial cities: Landscape,
Display and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).
8 On the notion of “immersion” see Sohier, Gillet and Staszak (ed.), Simulation du Monde,
16–21.
After the independence of Brazil (1822), Portugal turned itself to Africa,

where it claimed historical rights over the territories under Portuguese domina-
tion based on its “discovery” in the fifteenth century, vis-à-vis its rival European
counterparts. The spheres of influence in the African hinterland resulting
from the Berlin Conference (1884–85) posed a severe problem to Portugal, as
the Portuguese presence in Africa was weak and limited to the coast. To secure
its colonies, the African hinterland had to be “conquered” and “civilized.” Thus
ensued a long, disputed, and negotiated process involving other European
colonial powers, scientific expeditions, technological infrastructures, and mili-
tary campaigns to subjugate resistant African populations. It was only in the
1920s that the administrative network reached all territories, imposing politi-
cal and economic control over the territory, the resources, and the people. And
even so, the Portuguese colonial empire in Africa continued to endure for a
long time, despite the lack of personnel, military and civilian, specially tech-
nicians, white settlers, and material resources, mainly in the most peripheral
regions of Angola and Mozambique.
In the context of the “Scramble for Africa,” three colonial scientific insti-
tutions were created in Lisbon related with geography, at the time an all-
encompassing discipline: 1) the Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa (Geographical
Society of Lisbon, SGL), a private institution created in 1875 emulating simi-
lar European learned societies; 2) the Comissão Central Permanente de
Geografia (Central Permanent Geographic Commission), established in 1876
by the Portuguese Government for organising scientific expeditions to Africa,
and integrated in 1880 in the Geographical Society; and 3) the Comissão de
Cartografia (Cartography Commission), created in 1883, by the Ministry of
Navy and Overseas for the cartographic survey and elaboration of maps of
the overseas possessions. Both institutions were in Lisbon’s downtown: the
Geographical Society of Lisbon was located in Rua das Portas de Santo Antão,
since 1897; the Cartography Commission was located in Terreiro do Paço (also
known as Praça do Comércio), the capital’s epicentre of political decision,
where the ministries functioned.
The management of the Portuguese Empire required a growing, diversi-
fied, and specialised body of knowledge, which included techno-scientific
experts alongside political representatives for the administration, control, and
economic exploitation of colonial territories and the colonised populations.9
On 18 January 1906, the Ministry of the Navy and Overseas created in the SGL
and under its responsibility and government supervision, the Colonial School
dedicated to the education of future civil servants of the overseas possessions.
9 Helen Tilley, Africa as a living laboratory (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011), 58–59 and
chapter 3.
234 Castelo
Figure 8.1 Map with main institutions and spaces mentioned in this chapter:
1. Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa; 2. Comissão de Cartografia, Terreiro do Paço; 3. Jardim
Colonial (1ª. localização); 4. Instituto de Agricultura e Veterinária; 5. Instituto Superior de
Agronomia; 6. Jardim Botânico da Ajuda; 7. Palácio de Belém; 8. Mosteiro dos Jerónimos;
9. Hospital Colonial e Escola de Medicina Tropical; 10. Jardim Colonial e Jardim Botânico
Tropical; 11. Museu Agrícola Colonial
Some days later, on 25 January, a royal decree created the Colonial Garden and
the Colonial Agricultural Museum as part of the organisation of colonial agri-
culture services and colonial agriculture higher education; that is, within the
institutionalisation of colonial agricultural education.10 This institutionalisa-
tion process was due, in no small part, to the fact that Portuguese colonies
depended mainly on agriculture, and agronomic science was, thus, considered
“a powerful and indispensable lever for colonial agricultural progress.”11
The occupation and colonisation of Portuguese Africa was a familiar topic
in the daily press as well as in political and scientific circles; namely in meet-
ings at the parliament and the SGL, since, at least, the last quarter of the nine-
teenth century. The Pink Map – a continuous strip of Portuguese sovereignty
10 “Bases para a reorganização dos Serviços Agrícolas Coloniais,” Diário do Governo, no. 21,
27 January 1906.
11 Carlos de Mello Geraldes, “Fomento Agrícola Colonial,” II Congresso Colonial Nacional:
Teses e Actas das Sessões (Lisbon: [s.n.], 1924).
between the western (Angola) and eastern (Mozambique) coasts of Africa –

faced a definitive setback with the British Ultimatum of 1890, which forced the
retreat of Portugal’s military from the disputed areas.12 In response, Portugal’s
Republican Party attacked the monarchy for its incapacity to defend the
nation’s interest and geopolitical standing, while a wave of popular demon-
strations of patriotism occurred in Lisbon, and soon after spread throughout
the rest of the country. This event had a resounding and enduring effect upon
Portuguese nationalism as one of the main causes that led to the overthrow
of the monarchy and the foundation of the Portuguese Republic in 1910.13 In
1911, the new regime established the Ministry of the Colonies and adopted a
decentralized policy of development for Angola and Mozambique. Hence, the
defence and maintenance of the colonies is often indicated as the justification
for Portugal’s participation in the World War I.14 Later, in 1926, and following
a period of economic, political, and social instability, the First Republic was
overthrown by a military coup, which soon became the Estado Novo (New
State), an authoritarian regime that ruled Portugal until the 1974 Carnation
Revolution.
The dictatorship imposed a centralised and more nationalist character to
the management of the empire. The Colonial Act of 1930 (incorporated in the
1933 Constitution) stated that it was in “the organic essence of the Portuguese
Nation to fulfil the historical function of possessing and colonising the overseas
territories and to civilise native populations.”15 Public investment decreased,
and the effort of economic exploitation was entrusted to the private sector
with the close supervision of the state. Thus, the Estado Novo developed a
vast imperial propaganda apparatus involving the official media, schools and
commemorative events and exhibitions,16 intimately linking the destiny of the
Estado Novo to that of the colonial empire.
12 Charles E. Nowell, The Rose-Colored Map: Portugal’s Attempt to Build an African Empire
from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean (Lisbon: JICU, 1982). Maria Paula Diogo and Dirk
van Laak, Europeans Globalizing. Mapping, Exploiting, Exchanging (Basingstoke (UK) and
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 150–156.
13 Nuno Severiano Teixeira, “Política externa e política interna no Portugal de 1890: o
Ultimatum Inglês,” Análise Social 23, no. 98 (1987): 698, 705–706.
14 Ana Paula Pires, “The First World War in Portuguese East Africa: Civilian and Military
Encounters in the Indian Ocean,” e-JPH 15, no. 1 (2017): 82–104.
15 Decree no. 18570, Diário do Governo, 1st series, no. 156/1930, July 8, 1930, 1309.
16 David Corkill, and José Carlos Pina Almeida, “Commemoration and Propaganda in
Salazar’s Portugal: The ‘Mundo Português’ Exposition of 1940,” Journal of Contemporary
History 44, 3 (2009): 381–99.
236 Castelo
3 The Garden and the Museum Location in the “Mythical”

Space of Belém
According to the foundational royal decree, the Colonial Garden should provide
the indispensable basis for the practical education of qualified technicians for
colonial agricultural services, and regardless of the distance or diversity that
separated them from the Portuguese colonies in Africa, Asia, and Oceania. In
addition to its rigorous scientific experimental demonstrations with pedagogi-
cal purposes, the garden was intended to reproduce, multiply, cross, and select
useful plants for the colonies, pursue research in the field of tropical crops and
tropical plant diseases, and train agronomists who wished to work in the colo-
nies. The garden was also expected to be a centre of information at the disposal
of metropolitan and colonial investors and economic interests, able to provide
answers to technical questions, and a centre and node of material exchange of
plants with similar foreign scientific institutions.17
The Colonial Garden was first installed in 1907 in the glasshouse area in the
privately owned lands of Conde de Farrôbo in Quinta das Laranjeiras, adjacent
to the Zoological and Acclimatization Garden in the northern limits of the city.
The Colonial Garden was only circa 3 km from the Agriculture and Veterinary
Institute (Instituto de Agronomia e Veterinária), located in the Largo da Cruz
do Taboado (today Praça José Fontana). Thus, professors and students had to
move between the two locations. Soon afterwards, the place revealed itself
as inadequate due to the lack of room for the Colonial Garden’s expansion.
The institution required a larger and state-owned space to avoid repeating
their mistake in renting the property and investing in adaptation and improve-
ment works.
After the implementation of the First Republic, the Agriculture and
Veterinary Institute gave way to two higher education institutions: the Faculty
of Veterinary Medicine and the Agriculture High Institute (Instituto Superior
de Agronomia, ISA), founded in Tapada da Ajuda in 1917, on the outskirts of
Lisbon giving it ample room for experimenting with crops. Relatedly, there
was a proposal to transfer the Colonial Garden from the Laranjeiras to the
eighteenth-century Botanical Garden of Ajuda. The director José Joaquim de
Almeida, however, considered the location to be inappropriate and convinced
the authorities to install it in the neighbouring enclosure of the Palácio de
Belém, which offered better topographical conditions as well as an abundant
17 2nd Basis, Royal decree with force of law of 25 January 1906, Diário do Governo, no. 21,
January 27, 1906.
water supply.18 This location was composed of historical semi-abandoned rec-

reational farms of eighteenth-century aristocracy, whose advantage was not
simply its already vacant status but that the land was already owned by the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs that granted them to the Ministry of the Colonies.19
Once officially installed, the Colonial Garden now occupied a total of 50,000
square meters, located between the gardens of the Palácio de Belém (to East),
the Jerónimos Monastery (to West), and flanked by the botanical garden of
Ajuda (North direction). Additional noteworthy institutions in the proximity
of the Colonial Garden was the ISA (to the northeast), the Colonial Hospital,
and the Tropical Medicine School (to the southeast), which had been created
in 1902 and installed in the building of the Royal Cordoaria, in Avenida da
Índia, parallel to the Tagus River.20
It is worth stressing that the Belém district, located in the Western most part
of Lisbon along the Tagus River, is “the most paradigmatic case of inscription
and condensation in the Portuguese public space of the memory allusive to
the Portuguese colonial empire.”21 Under the orders of King Manuel I, Vasco
da Gama’s fleet left for India from the banks of the river Tagus in Belém, in
1497. Its triumphant return was celebrated by the building of the abovemen-
tioned Jerónimos Monastery. The Monastery and the Belém Tower (part of the
defence system of the Tagus estuary), both dating from the sixteenth-century,
were the most iconic elements that materialise Belém as a “complex of mem-
ory” intimately linked to the country’s maritime expansion, and the so-called
Portuguese “discoveries” and colonisation. That is to say, Belém is an open
and dynamic assemblage with a strong emotional connotation that has been
reconfigured and updated over time until the present.22
18 [Letter] from Bernardo de Oliveira Fragateiro to Júlio Henriques, Lisbon, June 2, 1912
[manuscript]. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10316.2/28909.
19 Law of 24 June 1912, Art. 14, Parágrafo Único. Diário do Governo, 1st series, no. 150, June 28,
1912. On the history of the royal farms of Belém, Cristina Castel-Branco and Carla Varela
Fernandes, Jardins e escultura do palácio de Belém (Lisbon: Museu da Presidência da
República, 2005).
20 Cordoaria was a manufacture of the Portuguese Navy created in the eighteenth century
that produced cables, ropes, sails and flags to equip Portuguese ships and vessels.
21 Elsa Peralta, “A composição de um complexo de memória: O caso de Belém, Lisboa,”
in Cidade e Império: Dinâmicas Coloniais e Reconfigurações Pós-Coloniais, ed. Nuno
Domingos and Elsa Perlata (Lisbon: Edições 70, 2013), 361. See also, Helen W. Sapega,
“Remembering Empire/Forgetting the Colonies: Accretions of Memory and the Limits of
Commemoration in a Lisbon Neighborhood,” History and Memory 20, 2 (2008): 18–38.
22 Peralta, “A composição de um complexo de memória,” 365–367. Previously, the site had
already been approached “as a palimpsest of official Portuguese collective memory.” See,
Sapega, “Rememering Empire/Forgetting the Colonies,” 19.
238 Castelo
Figures 8.2a–b Partial view of the Colonial Garden with the Tagus river at the back, 1928,
PT/TT/EPJS/SF/001-001/0009/0464C; Colonial Garden’s entrance in 1939,
PT/AMLSB/POR/056742
The Board of Directors of the Colonial Garden moved to the new facilities
on 6 June 1912, but only after completing the required modifications to trans-
form the existing space. In the meantime, the French horticultural engineer,
Henri Navel, was chosen to draw the plans for the Belém colonial garden and
the glasshouses. Navel graduated from the National School of Horticulture of
Versailles, followed by temporary residencies in Kew Gardens (London) and the
Monserrate Park (Sintra), and was the chief gardener of the Botanical Garden
at both the Polytechnic School and the Faculty of Sciences of Lisbon since
1909.23 On 19 June 1913, the President of the Republic, Manuel de Arriaga, was
invited to plant a palm tree from Mexico (Brahea edulis H. Wendl ex S. Watson)
in the Colonial Garden.24 This symbolic gesture inaugurated the main land-
scape transformation that occurred in the following year. In 1914 the acclima-
tising greenhouses for tropical and sub-tropical species were inaugurated and
a great portion of the “decrepit grove” was replaced by “exotic plants more in
harmony with the characteristics and purpose of the new institution.”25
Figure 8.3
Inside the greenhouse
PT/AMLSB/CMLSBAH/PCSP/004/NUN/001382
23 Tribout de Morembert, “Henri C. Navel (1878–1963),” Académie nationale de Metz, 1965,

http://hdl.handle.net/2042/34102. The Faculty of Sciences was created by the republican
regime in 1911 and installed in premises of its direct predecessor – the Lisbon Polytechnic
School.
24 Cláudia Cardozo, “O Jardim Botânico Tropical IICT e seus Espaços Construídos: Uma
Proposta de Reprogramação Funcional e Museológica Integrada” (Master thesis,
University of Lisbon, 2012), 289.
25 Bernardo de Oliveira Fragateiro, “Jardim Colonial (Belém),” in Guia de Portugal Artístico.
Lisboa Jardins, Parques e Tapadas, ed. Robélia de Sousa Lobo Ramalho (Lisbon, 1935), 23.
240 Castelo
Navel’s project for the Colonial Garden brought together already existing
trees, plants, and sculptures; new, exotic, flora; and modern greenhouses,
through a renewed layout of the existing paths and the adaptation of the
lagoon and its bridge. The result combined vegetal species from different con-
tinents and climates with different ages so that Portugal’s metropolitan capital
would reflect the expanse and variety of its colonial reach. Not simply a design
to appease a colonial power, this design also created proto-laboratory condi-
tions allowing for the observation and experimentation with flora, both new
and old.
The renovation process, however, was not without controversy. In Parlia
ment, the engineer and politician Ezequiel de Campos, was especially criti-
cal of the destruction of the Colonial Garden’s trees, which he deemed to be
a national heritage worth of preservation.26 Likewise, José de Castro, in the
Senate, denounced the destruction of more than one hundred European trees,
some of which were centuries old.27 What is more, Castro claimed the destruc-
tion of the trees as an “act of vandalism” not “scientific nor patriotic,” and con-
trary to the Tree Day – a national festivity created, and strongly encouraged,
by the Republicans.28 Indeed, the European centennial trees had been rooted
out, using even extreme measures such as dynamite, because “they hindered
the tropical illusion.”29 Senator Manuel de Sousa da Câmara, the ISA’s vice-
director, supported the modifications on the grounds of the scientific author-
ity of the Garden’s director and chief horticulturalist. Câmara depicted the
director as a “very intelligent man, who had already been in Africa,” and Henri
Navel as “a foreigner,” with “experience in similar gardens in other countries,”
who knew “the best gardens of the world.”30
26 Câmara dos Deputados, Diário da Câmara dos Deputados, Session no. 75, 17 April 1914, 20.
27 Senado, Diário do Senado, Session no. 75, 17 April 1914, 3. The 1911 Republican Constitution
implemented a parliamentary model, with two elective chambers: the Chamber of
Deputies and the Senate, whose mission was to moderate the political aggressiveness of
the Lower Chamber.
28 Celebrated for the first time in 1907, the tree festivity grew in importance in the first years
of the Republican regime. During the festivity, school children planted trees. The act had
a symbolic character. Above all, the tree was a symbol of regeneration, that is, it repre-
sented the capacity for renewal of nature, just as the Republic intended to present itself
as the regenerator of a long period of decay of the country during the Monarchy. The tree
also symbolised other civic and moral values dear to republicanism such as homeland,
freedom, solidarity or life. Joaquim Pintassilgo, “Festa da Árvore,” in Dicionário de História
da I República e do Republicanismo, ed. Maria Fernanda Rollo (Lisboa: Assembleia da
República, 2014), vol. II, 81–82.
29 Senado, Diário do Senado, Session no. 75, 17 April 1914, 6, and no. 77, 21 April 1914, 12–13.
30 Senado, Diário do Senado, Session no. 75, 17 April 1914, 4.
The decree that created the Colonial Garden required the installation of
the colonial agricultural education facilities to include offices, a laboratory,
and a museum.31 The Museum dedicated “exclusively to teaching and dem-
onstration” was initially located in ISA facilities. In 1914, the Museum was
installed in a room of the Palácio dos Condes da Calheta, on the northern bor-
der of the Colonial Garden, contiguous to the working-class neighbourhood
of Ajuda, with Carlos Eugénio de Mello Geraldes, professor and director of
ISA’s Laboratory of Colonial Agricultural Technologies, as museum director.
Between August and October 1910, Geraldes had visited several institutions of
colonial agricultural development in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and
England to learn from their experiences and subsequently plan and curate the
museum according to the models, which inspired him the most.32 The new
and definitive location benefitted from the proximity of the Colonial Garden
and the imperial setting of Belém, and accommodated a larger and more het-
erogeneous public.
In 1915, despite being transferred from the Ministry of Public Instruction to
the Ministry of the Colonies, both institutions were kept under ISA’s direction
so that full professors continued to educate the future agricultural technicians
to serve in the colonial administration, without interruption.33 Then, in 1919,
the Museum was reorganized in accordance with a two-fold social mission:
(i) the scientific and technical study of the agricultural and forestry products
of the Portuguese colonies and their derivatives, as well as those coming from
foreign colonies and warm countries, whose production should be established
in the Portuguese colonies; (ii) disseminating knowledge regarding the ori-
gin, production, value, and application of these products. Together with the
Colonial Garden, the Museum allowed for the economic study of tropical and
subtropical plants, as well as their products, in order to identify the possibility
of their economic exploitation in the Portuguese colonies or the improvement
of existing ones. Moreover, this new initiative contributed to the dissemina-
tion of knowledge regarding colonial flora and agriculture and provided infor-
mation on matters related to the Garden’s techno-scientific activities upon
request, whether from official or private entities.34 Although the Colonial
Garden’s internal regulation dates from 1920, its official inauguration took
place on 22 May 1929.35
31 2nd Basis, Royal decree with law force of 25 January 1906.

32 Carlos Eugénio de Mello Geraldes, Instituições de Fomento Colonial Estrangeiras (Relatório
de uma Missão Oficial) (Lisbon: Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa, 1912).
33 Decree no. 2080, Diário do Governo, 1st series, no. 242, 25 November 1915, 1301–1302.
34 Decree no. 5717, Diário do Governo, 1st series, no. 98, 10 May 1919, 1131–1134.
35 Decree no. 7192, Diário do Governo, 1st series, no. 252, 11 December 1920, 1697–1700.
242 Castelo
Figures 8.4a–b
Partial view of the Colonial Garden with the
Palácio da Calheta at the left, 1928. PT/TT/EPJS/
SF/001-001/0009/0469C; Colonial Garden. Partial
view of the lake, [1939?]. PT/AMLSB/POR/060431
The Colonial Garden and the Colonial Agricultural Museum moved to facili-
ties, which were not vacant. There were several apartments inhabited by low-
income families that paid a small rent to the Ministry of Finance. The Museum
endured a long struggle to force tenants to leave their homes. After almost two
years, in November 1916 the problem was not completely solved, since half a
dozen families still lived in one of the wings of the Palace. The museum’s direc-
tor criticised the Ministry of Finance for subordinating and underestimating
the national colonial responsibilities, and the mission of the new scientific
institution vis-à-vis the residents’ interests.36 In its turn, the Municipality of
Lisbon publicly recognised the importance of the role played by the museum
by naming the square in front of its entrance as the Largo do Museu Agrícola
Colonial (Square of the Colonial Agricultural Museum).37 Even after all the
buildings were completely transferred to the Colonial Agricultural Museum,
there is evidence that the relation with its neighbours was, quite understand-
ably, not entirely peaceful. In 1918, the director of the museum often com-
plained of boys throwing stones at the building’s glass works, putting both the
workers and the collections in danger, in particular those items preserved in
the vitrines and in glass bottles, and petitioned the municipality to increase
the number of police officers in the Museum’s surrounding area. Problems,
however, would continue to persist.38
4 Professionals, Publics, and Collections
Both the Garden and Museum depended on small professional teams and,
since 1919, shared a common administrative staff. Included among the Colonial
Garden’s technical staff were the following: the director; the full professor
responsible for the Economic Geography and Colonial Cultures courses of the
Agriculture and Veterinary Institute and later of the ISA (first, José Joaquim de
Almeida, succeeded in 1912 by Bernardo de Oliveira Fragateiro); the chief bota-
nist (Santos Machado and after his dismissal in 1922, Paulo Emílio Cavique dos
Santos, agronomist and forest engineer, who was still in function in the early
1940s); the head gardener (Henri Navel until 1914, later replaced by António
Louro (1930s–40s); the herbarium curator, herbalist draughtsman, and two
36 Portugal, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Ministério do Ultramar, Jardim e Museu Agrícola

do Ultramar, Information of Carlos de Melo Geraldes, 17 November 1916.
37 Portugal, Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa, Arquivo Histórico, Chancelaria da Cidade,
Colecção de editais da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, fl. 77 and 77v.
38 Portugal, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Letter of Carlos de Melo Geraldes, 12 March 1918.
244 Castelo
gardeners.39 Included among the Museum’s technical staff were the following:
the director, the full professor of ISA responsible for the discipline of Colonial
Agricultural Technologies (Carlos Eugénio de Mello Geraldes), two chemical
analysts, and a curator.40 For both the Garden and Museum, their directors
were individuals with prior experience working in the Portuguese colonies.
The aim behind the creation of the colonial agricultural courses and the
Colonial Garden, in 1906, as well as the series of legislation (1914, 1919, 1920)
that restructured “tropical agricultural education,” was to prepare a set of
agricultural and forestry technicians to serve in the colonies. Yet only a small
number of students enrolled in colonial courses – Colonial Crops, Colonial
Technologies, Colonial Mesology, Sugar Chemistry, and Colonial Economic
Regime (the first two offered since 1910 and the other three since 1919) – and an
even smaller number enrolled in the colonial traineeship program (tirocínio
colonial) in the Colonial Garden. Between 1914 to 1940, 60 male students
enrolled in the traineeship,41 with the program’s first three trainings taking
place in its first year.42 According to agricultural engineers and professors,
the colonial career did not appeal to agricultural and forestry engineers, given
the low-pay, the shortened time period of contracts, and unattractive work-
ing conditions.43 Other factors also played a role: the omnipresent image of
a dangerous and mysterious Africa, where the European confronted tropical
diseases, an unhealthy climate, rebellious peoples, wild animals, and the lack
of the comforts and advantages offered on continental Europe. In the First
Colonial Agricultural Congress held in Porto, in 1934, several voices advocated
that the practical training of colonial agricultural experts should not be done in
the metropolis, but in experimental stations in the colonies where technicians
39 Fragateiro, “Jardim Colonial (Belém),” 29.

40 See the above mentioned internal regulation of 1920.
41 Portugal, Arquivo do Instituto Superior de Agronomia, Qualification examination records.
From the list provided by Mendes Ferrão from 1914 until 1939 only 23 students completed
the final report under the supervision of the professors of the ISA colonial agriculture
group. Between 1940 and 1945 no student completed a final report on colonial agriculture.
José Mendes Ferrão, “A evolução do ensino agrícola colonial,” Anais do Instituto Superior
de Agronomia 43 (1983): 62–63.
42 Among them, Armando Zuzarte Cortesão who would work in the Agriculture Service in
São Tomé e Príncipe.
43 Paulo Cavique dos Santos, Os serviços de Agricultura e o Jardim Colonial. Quais são, nas
condições presentes, as ligações do Jardim com os Serviços de Agricultura das Colónias. Como
estreitá-los em benefício dos principais objectivos do Jardim. Tese apresentada ao Primeiro
Congresso de Agricultura Colonial (Porto: Tip. Sociedade Papelaria, 1934), 4; José Cunha da
Silveira, Alguns pontos de vista acerca da preparação dos agrónomos coloniais. Tese apresen-
tada ao Primeiro Congresso de Agricultura Colonial (Porto: Imprensa Moderna, 1934), 14.
should pursue their careers.44 The simulation of the tropics should be replaced
by actual tropical nature, as a space of experiment and training.
Projects that could favour an increase in frequency of the Colonial Garden
were not implemented. For instance, in 1916, a law project regarding the trans-
portation by the Portuguese government of 500 Portuguese colonisers to dedi-
cate themselves to the agriculture colonisation of the Bié Plateau (or Central
Plateau of Angola), predicted that, before leaving for Angola, colonisers should
receive practical instruction regarding colonial crops in the Colonial Garden.45
However, subsequent, official, government initiatives to transport and settle
Portuguese colonisers in Angola and Mozambique did not require any contact
with the Colonial Garden. Beginning in the 1940s, colonisers had to attend con-
ferences on tropical hygiene at the Tropical Medicine Institute before leaving
to the colonies. These conferences, however, did not provide any further edu-
cation with respect to agriculture and agricultural practices.
Regarding the public that visited the Colonial Garden, only some qualita-
tive information is available. Published in 1924, one Lisbon city guide states
that the Garden was not open to the public, “but it was easy to obtain per-
mission to visit, between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. every working day.”46 In a guide of
Lisbon’s gardens published in 1935, Bernardo de Oliveira Fragateiro, member
of the Colonial Garden’s technical staff, mentions that regardless of its lack
of popularity, save the ladies with their children and former military officers
who served in Africa, the Garden deserved to be visited by every Portuguese
person.47 The recreational use of the Garden by Portuguese citizens who had
lived in the colonies and longed for their return reveals that the 400 specimens
from abroad, notable species include succulent plants, palm trees, and a huge
Yucca,48 succeeded in creating a “tropical illusion.”
The Colonial Agricultural Museum received a twofold public: the scholarly
and the entrepreneurial. The students who had contact with the museum were
not only from ISA or from higher education institutions but included students
from primary and secondary schools as well. However, between the years
1906–1944, it was more common for the Museum to go to the schools than for
44 José Cunha da Silveira, 1934.

45 Art. 16 “Accepted by the settler the terms of the contract the Government will send the
settler to the Colonial School and Colonial Garden where for four months he will be
given a practical, rudimentary and direct instruction on colonial cultures.” Câmara dos
Deputados, Diário das Sessões, 6 May 1916.
46 Raul Proença, Guia de Portugal. I Generalidades, Lisboa e Arredores (Lisbon: Biblioteca
Nacional de Portugal, 1924), 402.
47 Fratageiro, “Jardim Colonial (Belém),” 23.
48 Proença, Guia de Portugal I Generalidades, Lisboa e Arredores, 402.
246 Castelo
the young students to visit the Museum. Mobile display cases containing five
categories of products – oil products; cereals, flour, and starch; vegetables; and
other products – were offered to schools with a small publication listing the
products (in 1939, 1000 ex. imprinted), including their name, the producing
plant (vernacular and botanic), and the relevant, supplemental, information.49
Another potential public interested in visiting the Museum were colo-
nial farmers, plantation owners, metropolitan traders, and industrialists; the
premise of their visit being the receipt of information regarding the agricul-
tural products from tropical regions. It was with this public in mind that the
Museum published descriptive catalogues of the displayed products along with
practical explanations that could be bought by visitors. The Museum director
considered it his institutional mission to provide guidance to entrepreneurs
from the metropolis on matters concerning the economic possibilities of the
colonies, foster private investment in the colonies, and promote commercial
relations between Lisbon (metropole) and the colonies, all in the defence of
the national interest.50
Finally, members of the public who attended national, colonial, and inter-
national exhibitions and world fairs also, indirectly, encountered the Colonial
Agricultural Museum, through its presence and products at said exhibitions.
This form of indirect contact between Museum and public is best exempli-
fied in the following series of events: the International Exhibition of Tropical
Products held in London (1915), the Seville Ibero-American Exhibition (1929),
the Antwerp International Colonial Exhibition (1930), the Paris International
Colonial Exhibition (1931), the Portuguese Colonial Exhibition in Porto (1934),
and the IX Tripoli International Fair (1935).51 In addition to these exhibitions,
the Garden and the building of the Museum received an impressive number
of visitors during the PWE, wherein imperial propaganda overshadowed the
educational and scientific dimension of the two institutions.
49 Museu Agrícola Colonial de Lisboa, Catálogo dos mostruários de produtos agrícolas coloni-
ais distribuídos às Escolas (Lisbon: Papelaria e Tipografia VEROL & C.ª, 1939).
50 Portugal, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Information of Carlos Mello Gerlades to the
General Direction of the Colonies, about a letter of the Ministry of Finance regarding the
eviction of a wing of the Palácio dos Condes da Calheta, 1916.
51 On the international and national exhibitions, see Rui Afonso Santos, “Exposições
Internacionais,” Dicionário de História do Estado Novo, edited by Fernando Rosas and
J.M. Brandão de Brito (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 1196), vol. 1, 333–339. Ana Paula Lopes
da Silva, “Portugal nas Exposições Internacionais Universais e Coloniais (1929–1939):
A Retórica Científica e Tecnológica” (Master Thesis, New University of Lisbon, 2000).
Margarida Acciauoli, Exposições do Estado Novo, 1934–1940 (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte,
1998).
The Colonial Garden’s collection of seeds, botanical specimens, and living

plants arrived through the usual channels of circulation of agricultural col-
lections, involving professional and amateur collectors, requested shipments,
and ad hoc initiatives. One of the first collections of the Colonial Garden’s her-
barium was sent by José Joaquim de Almeida, the first director of the Colonial
Garden, who collected a substantial number of specimens during his official
missions in Angola.
The Garden’s most consistent collection, however, was the set of materials
sent by John Gossweiler, Swiss technician hired by the general government of
Angola in 1899, who collected plenty of material during his missions for the
Department of Agriculture until the 1940s. Gossweiler’s collections were sent
to Lisbon’s Colonial Garden, the herbaria of the University of Lisbon, and the
University of Coimbra. The collection is in the British Museum, while dupli-
cates were freely distributed to the Kew, Berlin, and Washington herbaria.
Along with hired experts (Gossweiler) and notable colonial personnel
(Almeida) in the Colonial Garden’s documentation of seeds and/or plants
received from overseas correspondents, were colonial officers (not exclusively
from the Colonial Agricultural and Forestry Services) and individual civilians
from all the colonies (namely Portuguese India and Timor).52 However, while
the nature of the relationship between the garden and the people who studied
the herbarium specimens remains unclear, what is clear is that the Garden’s
correspondents were expected to work and deliver lectures in the Colonial
Garden whenever they were in Lisbon.
From Gossweiler’s list of travellers to explorers who assembled botani-
cal collections in Angola, it is clear that most of the foreign collectors sent
their collections to Kew Gardens and the Berlin Botanical Garden, while
Portuguese collectors usually sent their collections to the Coimbra Herbarium,
the older and more prestigious in Portugal, and to the Herbarium at the
University of Lisbon, and not to the Colonial Garden.53 The reason for this dis-
crepancy in collection practices most likely stems from the long-lasting invis-
ibility of the Colonial Garden: “It is unknown to a large number of people, the
largest number of which are Portuguese. And this ignorance seems to extend
to the governmental spheres […] with few exceptions.”54 Interviewed by the
major print media outlet, Diário de Notícias, Fragateiro explained:
52 Memoranda of the Colonial Garden, published in the Boletim da Agência Geral das
Colónias (the propaganda department of the Ministry of the Colonies), 1924 onwards.
53 John Gossweiler, “Elementos para a História da Exploração Botânica de Angola: Itinerário
e Relação dos Viajantes e Exploradores que Fizeram Colecções Botânicas em Angola,”
Boletim da Sociedade Broteriana, 13 (1939): 283–305.
54 “O Jardim Colonial,” Diário de Notícias, no. 21232, 15 February 1925, 1.
248 Castelo
The crisis that has been holding back the Garden has become more acute
since 1918, and its management has been forced to reduce the labour
force which has become insufficient for its multiple services, affecting
cash crops and the heating of the greenhouses which stopped causing
the death of many plants.55
While the Museum faced similar problems, Diário de Notícias praised the effort
of Carlos de Mello Geraldes who
has been able to carry out budget prodigies to reach the extraordinary
degree of development that the Museum attained presently, almost
unhelped by public powers, almost forgotten by those who are the first
to proclaim, as an undisputed principle, that the salvation of us all is in
the colonies.56
However, another daily newspaper, the Diário de Lisboa, published a harsh crit-
icism of the Colonial Garden, denouncing its careless management and assert-
ing the herbarium’s uselessness.57 Ten years later, Geraldes still complained
that, since its inception, “colonial agricultural education lived in a precarious
financial situation.”58
How did the materials arrive at the Colonial Agriculture Museum? The direc-
tor issued instructions to Portugal’s colonial governments to collect, store, and
transport the display cases of products (mostruários de produtos). While seed
and crop samples proved easy to transport, the traffic of living plants, roots,
and big fruits required extra care. Thus, for example, most of the museum col-
lection that was extracted from Cape Verde was sent to Portugal by Barjona de
Freitas, the head of the local agriculture services stationed at Santiago Island,
in 1914.
In 1920, due to the deterioration of the fruits, Geraldes encouraged the
director of Fomento Colonial (Colonial Development) to issue an order for the
Cape Verdean government to send a new collection that included fruits from
other islands within its archipelago.59 According to the Museum’s correspon-
dence records, Geraldes’ suggestion was a response to the scarcity of resources:
55 “O Jardim Colonial,” Diário de Notícias, no. 21232, 15 February 1925, 2.

56 “O Museu Agrícola Colonial,” Diário de Notícias, no. 21219, 15 February 1925, 1.
57 Diário de Lisboa, 10 March 1924, 5 and 22 March 1924, 8.
58 Carlos de Melo Geraldes, “Alguns alvitres para o aperfeiçoamento do nosso ensino
agronómico colonial,” Boletim Geral das Colónias 11, 120 (1935): 18–19.
59 Portugal, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Letter of Carlos de Mello Geraldes to the
Director of Fomento Colonial, Lisbon, 20 May 1920.
since the government of Portuguese Guinea was unable to send agricultural

products to the Museum (no agriculture technician worked in the Agriculture
Services) and the Cape Verdean government lacked flasks and other appro-
priate transportation containers, Geraldes proposed that the storage material
supplied to Portuguese Guinea in 1916 – two boxes of formalin and foil con-
tainers with pressure lid – be sent to Cape Verde for their safe keeping.60 As
for the inclusion of fruits, Geraldes suggests that they be stored in a solution of
formaldehyde at twenty degrees Celsius for every one litre of water in empty
gasoline/petroleum cans, with a foil numbered tag.61
For Portugal’s colonial governments, traffic of flora from the colonies was
an opportunity they had to seize, given the colonies’ typical practice of using
commercial intermediaries for the commercial export of plants to Lisbon. A
worker of the colonial garden picked up the plants or fruits in the Lisbon’s
headquarters of those commercial firms. For instance, in 1917 the government
of Cape Verde sent a three year old São Nicolau cassava tree with fifty-two kilo-
grams through the liner “Araguaya” of the English Royal Mail, to the care of
their agents in Lisbon, Mr James Rawes & Sons.62
After several delays in bringing the Museum’s collection to completion, in
1929, the Colonial Agricultural Museum finally opened to the public. The col-
lections were shown in different rooms and in accordance with the colony of
their provenance and exhibited the collection’s items in cabinets and display
cases, which were themselves made from wood indigenous to the colony as
well. The products of Cape Verde and Portuguese Guinea, however, were exhib-
ited in the same room with display cases made of wood from Guinea since
Cape Verde’s wood was deemed inadequate.63 Those who visited this exhibi-
tion of the Museum’s collection were shown various kinds of wood, seed, oil-
seed, fibres, and medicinal plants. Alongside the exhibited samples, the visitor
was informed about the origin, technological transformation (clothing, weav-
ing, containers, etc.), uses, most up to date price, and importance of each of
the collection’s items.64 As Pascal Clerc has noticed, regarding Lyon’s colonial
60 Portugal, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Letter of Carlos de Mello Geraldes to the

Director of Fomento Colonial, Lisbon, 5 June 1920. Letter from the head of the depart-
ment of Agriculture and Livestock to the director of Colonial Agriculture Museu, Praia,
29 July 1920.
61 Portugal, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Letter of Carlos de Mello Geraldes to the direc-
tor of Colonial Fomento, Lisbon, 11 September 1920.
62 Portugal, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Letter from the Governor of Cape Verde to the
Ministry of the Colonies, São Vicente, April 10, 1917.
63 Portugal, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Letter of Carlos de Mello Geraldes to the 3rd
Division of the Ministry of the Colonies, May 13, 1915.
64 “Museu Agrícola Colonial,” Boletim Geral das Colónias 5, 48 (1929): 117–118.
250 Castelo
Figure 8.5
Inside the Colonial Agricultural
Museum. PT/UL/IICT/JBT/25934
museums, the displays functioned as a pedagogy of the senses (visual, olfac-

tory and tactile) and were “testimony-objects” of the colonial, and economic
promise.65
5 Imperial Simulation and Immersive Experience
Ever since the late-nineteenth century, Portugal’s imperial nationalism has

been a common characteristic shared by otherwise different political regimes:
from the Constitutional Monarchy to the First Republic and dictatorship of
the Estado Novo. In the 1930s, and without having democratic legitimacy, the
Estado Novo sought to consecrate and legitimise itself publicly by associat-
ing Portuguese nationalism with a glorious past, thereby presenting Portugal
as always having been a multi-continental and multi-racial country. Hence,
during the period of Portugal’s dictatorship, the state actively promoted a
65 Pascal Clerc, “Une pédagogie de l’empire. Les colonies françaises à Lyon entre la fin du 19e
siécle et la second guerre mondiale.” In Simulations du monde. Panoramas, parcs à thème
et autres dispositifs immersifs, edited by Estelle Sohier, Alexandre Gillet, Jean-François
Staszak, 181–197. Genève: MétisPresses, 2019. (189, 194).
“colonial consciousness and mentality” among the young students and the
general population via school curricula, mass media, and events of national
commemoration.66
The past which the regime chose to celebrate and which was the ground
on which the present was to be built included the foundation of the nation in
1140, the restoration of independence after a period of Spanish domination,
in 1640, but also unsurprisingly the so-called “discoveries” of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries and the subsequent colonization of overseas territories.67
With this in mind, the Estado Novo launched the ambitious program of “cel-
ebrations of the double centenary” for 1940, the year of the “apotheosis resur-
gence of the Nation,” and the PWE held in Belém was its central initiative68
(see chapter 9 in this volume). It should be noted that Portugal celebrated the
“victory of the race in eight centuries of history,”69 while officially remaining
neutral throughout World War II. For the Estado Novo, international exhibi-
tions proved to be one of the most popular institutional means for the repro-
duction of an ideology that combined cultural particularism and universalism,
fusing historicism to progress. The city reshaped its traditional national sym-
bols within the context of an ideology of modernity, scientific and technologi-
cal progress, industry, and consumption.70
To house the PWE, Belém was subject to profound changes (demolition of
the popular housing and commercial buildings, opening of Praça do Império,
urban redesign, and large-scale ephemeral buildings to name but a few).
Although the Estado Novo’s official discourse claimed Belém to be scarcely
urbanised and therefore available to host the event, it was necessary to remove
66 On colonial education in the metropolitan school see, João Carlos Paulo, “A honra da ban-
deira. A educação colonial no sistema de ensino português (1926–1946)” (Master thesis,
New University of Lisbon, 1992). On colonial propaganda, see Heriberto Cairo, “‘Portugal
is not a Small Country’: Maps and Propaganda in the Salazar Regime,” Geopolitics 11,
no. 3 (2006): 367–395, DOI: 10.1080/14650040600767867. On the Estado Novo’s exhibitions,
Margarida Acciaiuoli, Exposições do Estado Novo: 1939–1940 (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte,
1998).
67 “With Salazarism, the Discoveries were “strategically” invoked in the service of regime
legitimacy and nationalist ideology”. Paulo S. Polanah, “‘The Zenith of our National
History!’ National identity, colonial empire, and the promotion of the Portuguese
Discoveries: Portugal 1930s,” e-JPH 9, 1 (2011): 39–62 (58).
68 António Ferro, “Carta Aberta aos Portugueses de 1940,” Revista dos Centenários, 1 (1939):
19–23. (19).
69 The quote refers to the Monument to the Portuguese Colonization Work at the Colonial
Section of the PWE. Exposição do Mundo Português. Secção Colonial (Lisbon: s.n., 1940), 286.
70 Peralta, “A composição de um complexo de memória,” 362–363.
252 Castelo
Belém’s local housing, thereby erasing the traces of that which did not conform
to the mythical Lisbon that the dictatorship intended to stage.71
The Colonial Section of the PWE, also known as the Colonial Ethnography
Section and benefited from a pre-existing delimited space, required substan-
tial renovations within the Colonial Garden and the Colonial Agricultural
Museum and suspended the normal course of its activities for a couple of years.
Captain Henrique Galvão, superior officer of the Ministry of the Colonies for-
merly in charge of the 1934 Colonial Exposition in Porto, was appointed as the
Colonial Section’s director in preparation for the PWE. Galvão’s program was
an attempted recreation of the geographic, human, cultural, and economic
diversity of the empire in the seven hectares of garden and museum allotted
to the Colonial Section, so that “the visitor could, in two hours, go through
all our empire from Africa to the Pacific, with stops full of charm.”72 Visitors
were to be dazzled with the exuberance of the tropical flora, the economic
potential of natural resources and the exoticism of the people. In view of the
scarcity of money allocated to the Colonial Section, Galvão wanted to “sup-
ply the material constraints with originality of technique and presentation by
affirming in some way a superiority of spirit.”73 The ideas of moral superiority
and the civilising mission were an integral part of the official discourse of the
Estado Novo.74
Since the Colonial Section could not be “the most grandiose” of the PWE,
Galvão wanted it to be “the most complete documentary, the newest in its
presentation form.”75 To accomplish such a task, the Colonial Section made
extensive use of the most recent technologies, including photography and pho-
tomontage, dioramas, relief maps, large-scale sculpture, low-reliefs in wood,
loudspeakers describing the colonies, and revealing the mastery of modern
strategies to captivate and involve the masses.
Even before the public inauguration of the Colonial Section on 27 June 1940,
children from the nearby school visited and witnessed the unveiling of Africa
before their eyes. According to the memories of F. Eduardo Nunes, then a
young boy, the most eye-catching attractions were the “Blacks’ coffees,” that
71 Acciaiuoli, Exposições. Pedro Nunes Nobre, “Belém e a Exposição do Mundo Português:

cidade, urbanidade e património urbano” (Master Project, New University of Lisbon,
2010).
72 Title of an article published in Diário de Lisboa, 16 June 1940, p. 4.
73 Henrique Galvão, “Prefácio,” Exposição do Mundo Português. Secção Colonial (Lisbon: s.n.,
1940).
74 For instance, Maria Isabel João, Memória e império: comemorações em Portugal (1889–
1960) (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2002), 579.
75 Galvão, “Prefácio.”
could be seen and tasted at the Portuguese Coffees Pavilion, the “natives’ vil-
lages,” the “exotic animals,” all of which were said to be so “real,” so “authen-
tic,” that visitors felt they were actually in Africa.76 Additionally, a huge water
tank was built near the Palace’s façade facing the garden in order to receive
wild animals from the African continent. From their school windows, young
students could see African people unloading the wooden boxes that carried
crocodiles and alligators, which then dived into the water: “A big and thrilling
attraction.” Besides wildlife, the boys were also marvelled by the technology:
an aerial shuttle used to transport tools and other materials as well as people in
suspended chairs/seats offered a panoramic view of the entire area, connect-
ing the lower and upper zones of the garden.77 The visitors could “view from
above” the magnitude of the Portuguese empire, views presenting them with
a clear and recognisable image that was accessible only from the domineering
perspective of the colonizer: the god’s eye at the colonisers’ reach.78
The Garden was stripped of the eighteenth-century sculptures (moved to
the adjacent garden of the Belém Palace) to give room to a simulation of the
Portuguese empire. Several new constructions were built: the pavilions of
the colonies (Angola and Mozambique, Portuguese Guinea, and the islands
of Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe and Timor), two “typical” streets (from
India and Macao), other pavilions (Catholic missions in Africa, native art, a
model of a Portuguese house for the colonies, raw materials, tourism and hunt-
ing), the Avenue of Colonial Ethnography (gallery of sculptural reproductions
of busts representing the “races and tribes of the Portuguese Colonial Empire,”
based on photographic documentation from the Institute of Anthropology of
Porto), exhibition stands of colonial products, monuments, public buildings,
official exhibitors of art, and replicas of dwellings and villages.79
For Galvão, it was important to emphasize “the role of exhibitions as spaces
of faithful recreation of colonial life, revealing confidence in the authenticity
of reconstitutions.”80 Just as in the 1932 Lisbon Industrial Exhibition, or in the
76 F. Eduardo Nunes, “O Sítio de Belém no seu tempo,” Colóquio. Artes, no. 87 (1990): 28. The
Black’s coffeeshop is a recurrent theme in Lisbon’s African imagery. It was recreated in the
Luna Parks of Palhavã and Entrecampos. See chapter 14 in this volume.
77 Nunes, “O Sítio de Belém no seu tempo,” 28.
78 On the power of the view from above entailed by the aerial photography see Denis
Cosgrove, and William L. Fox, Photography and flight (London: Reaktion, 2010), 8–9.
I thank Marta Macedo for this reference.
79 Patrícia Ferraz de Matos, As Cores do Império: Representações Raciais no Império Colonial
Português (Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2006), 212–215.
80 Nadia Vargaftig, “Para ver, para vender: o papel da imagem fotográfica nas exposições
coloniais portuguesas (1929–1940),” in O Império da Visão: Fotografia no Contexto Colonial
Português (1860–1960), ed. Filipa Lowndes Vicente (Lisbon: Edições 70, 2014), 348.
254 Castelo
Figures 8.6a–b Portuguese Timor dwelling. PT/AMLSB/CMLSBAH/PCSP/004/

EDP/002280; Native village of the Typungo from Angola (at the left the
African brewery). PT/BAFCG
1934 Colonial Exhibition of Porto (and in many other exhibitions held abroad
before and, at least one which took place afterwards, in Brussels in 1958), it
included a living ethnic exhibition combining spectacle and science81 that
became one of the main attractions for the estimated total of three million
visitors that attended the PWE. To provide the visitor with a greater level of
“authenticity,” indigenous peoples from Portugal’s colonies performed their
daily practices, namely “spontaneous” demonstrations of their craft skills and
artistic abilities, their music and dance.82
Natives considered uncivilized and subject to a different juridical statute
coming from Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea, families from
Cape Verde, São Tomé and Principe, persons from India and Macao, the King of
Congo (Angola), his wife and daughter, and a chief of suco (a group of villages
from Timor), together with his wife, two sons and a male and female servant,
were put on display at the Colonial Section. People with western civilisation
habits and consumer patterns were placed side by side with the indigenous
people who were perceived as the main subject of the European civilizing mis-
sion, thus in need to become civilised through the catholic faith and the moral
duty of work. The function of the performance was clear: to translate the racial
and civilizational hierarchy within the Portuguese World. White, Catholic, and
Europeans were on the top of the hierarchy and were granted the privilege
to observe the others, even if they had already been “civilised.” How did the
different displayed living subjects understand and experience their journey to
Lisbon and their participation in the PWE, a performance created by white
colonialists? How to reach their point of view, emotions and agency is still in
need of theoretical and methodological reflection and innovative historical
research, but a postcolonial critique will not be achieved without the assump-
tion of the violence and coercion involved.
The exhibition of 138 colonised persons in “flesh and blood” served ideo-
logical and propaganda purposes, but also “scientific” purposes. The Colonial
Section was also a laboratory, where teams led by scientists, António de Almeida,
professor of the Colonial High Institute, and the zoologist Ricardo Jorge, direc-
tor of the Museum Barbosa du Bocage (Faculty of Sciences of Lisbon), mea-
sured the natives according to various parameters of physical anthropology.
81 On this junction of exoticism and knowledge in the “human zoos” see Pascal Blanchard,
Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boëtsch, Éric Deroo and Sandrine Lemaire, “Human Zoos: The
Greatest Exotic Shows in the West,” in Human Zoos: Science and spectacle in the Age of
Colonial Empires (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 16–21.
82 This more dynamic performance did not represent a true epistemological break with for-
mer human zoos: its more modern presentation only intended to demonstrate the ben-
efits of colonial development in visible form. Blanchard et al., “Human Zoos,” 36–37.
256 Castelo
Figure 8.7 Sewing lesson: Missionary sister of Mary with Mozambican women
and children at the Colonial Section of the PWE
PT/TT/EPJS/SF/001-001/0076/2323O
The victory of the “civilising race” was also accomplished through “scientific”
practice. While it is not possible to confirm if these scientists influenced the
decision to send these individuals back to their places of origin before the
winter came, it is certain that the PWE Executive Commission unanimously
decided so, arguing health reasons, in October 1940.83
If physical anthropologists benefitted from the exhibition, the technical
staff of the Colonial Agricultural Garden and Museum and the students of
Colonial Agronomy saw their work reduced to a minimum, or even interrupted.
The tensions and conflicts behind this suspension did not have public expres-
sion given the censorship and the repression that the dictatorship imposed,
but they were echoed in the colonial archive. Since the preparation stage of
the Colonial Section, the director of the Colonial Garden and the director of
the Colonial Section had a difficult relationship. Fragateiro blamed Galvão for
making decisions without his agreement while Galvão claimed that Fragateiro
was frequently away from the garden, working in a bank in downtown Lisbon,
and accused him of instructing Colonial Garden workers to not cooperate
83 Portugal, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Secretariado Nacional de Informação, cx.

2820, “Acta da Comissão Executiva da Exposição do Mundo Português, 17 October 1940.”
with the Colonial Section.84 The Minister of the Colonies was informed of
this apparently irresolvable authority dispute.85 The director of the Colonial
Agriculture Museum was also relegated to a second plan. To make room for
the Tourism and Hunting pavilion, which displayed several embalmed wild
animals and a vast array of documentary photographs, the first floor of the
Colonial Agriculture Museum was emptied. The director’s complaints against
the construction of a false wall placed on the museum facade, which blocked
out all the natural light from the building’s interior and compromised the regu-
lar work of the Museum were not taken into account.86
The return of the Colonial Garden back to its teaching, experimentation,
and research mission, and its merger with the Colonial Agricultural Museum
in 1944, do not correspond to the future envisaged by Galvão – a permanent
“Popular Museum of the Colonies,” which in his regard “incomprehensibly does
not yet exist in the capital of the world’s third colonial power.”87 Galvão would
have liked to “do as much durable work as possible,” endowing the city with an
extra permanent attraction (next to the Jerónimos Monastery and the Torre
de Belém) and contributing to the strengthening of the “Portuguese colonial
spirit.”88 However, from the mid-1940s onwards, the scientific popularisation
of the colonies within this urban locale was modestly materialized by the exhi-
bition of agricultural and forestry products and ethnographic objects from the
colonies, mostly visited by student-visitors. The PWE took thousands of people
to these scientific spaces, but it was responsible for a long period of invisibility.
The Garden and Museum remained closed to the public for almost eight years
after the end of the exhibition. During this period repairs were carried out,
including the rehabilitation of the “settler house” (previously the headquarters
of the Colonial Section) and the colonial restaurant; the arrangements of the
stone staircase to access the Museum and the basalt cladding of the area near
84 Portugal, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Ministério do Ultramar, Comemorações

Centenárias, Letter from the director of the Colonial Section of the PWE, Henrique
Galvão, to the director of the Colonial Garden, Belém, November 18, 1939.
85 The General Commissioner of the PWE, Augusto de Castro, exposed these problems
to the Ministry of the Colonies, saying that he was not able to solve the constant inci-
dents between the two men. Portugal, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Comemorações
Centenárias, Letter from The General Commissioner of the PWE to the Ministry of the
Colonies, Belém, 29 November 1939.
86 Portugal, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Comemorações Centenárias, Letter from the
cabinet of the Minister of the Colonies to the cabinet of the Minister of Public Works,
Lisbon, 26 July 1939, transmitting the preoccupation of the director of the Colonial
Agricultural Museum regarding the building adaptation work.
87 Henrique Galvão, “Prefácio.”
88 Henrique Galvão, “Prefácio.”
258 Castelo
Figure 8.8 Experimental agricultural field. PT/UL/IICT/JBT/25966
the entrance gate; and the demolition of some of the structures built in the
space on purpose for the event.89 The eighteenth-century sculptures returned
to the garden in 1943. The pavilion of Angola and Mozambique built in perma-
nent materials was demolished by Fragateiro’s request arguing that the space
was necessary for an experimental agricultural field and a weather station.90
6 Conclusion
As with other colonial botanic gardens and museums in Europe’s imperial cen-
tres in the beginning of the twentieth century, Lisbon’s Colonial Garden and
the Colonial Agricultural Museum worked at the intersection of natural his-
tory, economy, and imperial propaganda. Independent but related institutions,
89 Portugal, Secretaria Geral do Ministério da Economia, Arquivo Histórico do Ministério

das Obras Públicas, PT/AHMOP/CAPOPI/Secretaria/031, cx. 31, Execução de trabalhos
no Jardim Colonial (1941–1947).
90 Portugal, Secretaria Geral do Ministério da Economia, Arquivo Histórico do Ministério
das Obras Públicas, PT/AHMOP/CAPOPI/Engenharia/010/014, cx. 10, Muros de vedação
entre os jardins do Palácio Nacional de Belém e do Jardim Colonial e remoção de entulho
(1943).
the Colonial Garden and Agricultural Museum shared similar and comple-
mentary purposes. They were laboratories in the capital of the Portuguese
empire; places of experimentation, study, and training for future colonial agri-
cultural workers and forestry engineers; nodes within an inter-imperial, and
international, scientific network responsible for the exchange of botanical
material with similar institutions abroad; and loci of propaganda of the eco-
nomic potentialities of the Portuguese colonies for the public at large and the
entrepreneurs.
In contrast with similar institutions across Europe, Lisbon’s Colonial Garden
and Colonial Agriculture Museum were located in, and mutually benefited
from, the heart of the most acknowledged and visited “site of national mem-
ory” in the country’s capital. The two institutions took advantage of Lisbon’s
symbolic status, “where nationalism and commemoration have been long
intertwined.”91 That said, the Colonial Garden and the Colonial Agricultural
Museum also reinforced Belém’s status as a “memory complex,” adding new
scientific and technological elements in the process, and thus connecting
Portugal’s territorial occupation and exploitation of colonial agriculture to a
constructed image of an historical past (“golden age of discoveries”) with a
desired future of rational economic development of the Portuguese empire
and subsequent international prestige.
As this chapter has shown, both the Garden and the Museum faced sev-
eral difficulties along their existence – scarce budget and lack of personnel,
but also the competition of more prestigious national botanical institutions,
in particular the Botanical Garden and the herbarium of the University of
Coimbra – and were not fully acknowledged as vital educational and scientific
institutions within the metropolis capable of transforming knowledge into
profit and power. Thus, it was for this reason that their presence in the city was
relatively unknown to the public before the 1940 PWE.
During the PWE, and amidst an unprecedented propaganda campaign by
the Estado Novo, Belém became a living stage glorifying Portugal’s colonial
empire at the heart of a major European metropolis; a miniature assemblage
exhibiting the natural, cultural, and human diversity from the Portuguese colo-
nies to a metropolitan public. The simulation of diversity via representations
of Portugal as a multi-continental nation was taken to an extreme, providing
many thousands of Portuguese who had never visited these colonies with an
immersive experience at an entirely unprecedented scale. After Portuguese
decolonisation (1975), the renamed Tropical Botanical Garden was integrated
as part of the Tropical Research Institute, which was itself the former Colonial
91 Helen W. Sapega, “Remembering Empire/Forgetting the Colonies,” 19.

260 Castelo
Research Institute. And since 2015, the Tropical Botanical Garden belongs to
the University of Lisbon.
Side by side, one observes a mid-seventeenth century baroque residential
palace, eighteenth century Italian and Portuguese sculptures, the centenary
European plant cover, tropical flora, greenhouses, the gardener’s house of the
early-twentieth century, the remains of the Colonial Section of the 1940 PWE
(part of the empire’s people busts, the Macao Arch, the settler house, the colo-
nial restaurant, or the raw materials pavilion), and subsequent interventions.
Until the beginning of 2020, no explanation or information was provided to its
visitors, leaving them confounded by the Garden’s historically eclectic archi-
tecture in the absence of its complex history.92 Lisbon’s Tropical Botanical
Garden, saturated with the vestiges of the empires’ politics, from the economic
program of colonial agriculture education and research to the ideological pro-
gram of imperial glorification with a “human zoo” included, calls for being fur-
ther decoded.
Acknowledgments
I thank Isabel Zilhão and João Machado for sharing information on the Diário
de Notícias and Diário de Lisboa. I am also grateful for the comments of the
VISLIS project’s members. This work was supported by Fundação para a
Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal, under Grants IF/00519/2013, PTDC/IVC-
HFC/3122/2014 and UIDB/00286/2020 and UIDP/00286/2020.
92 On the strangeness feeling in front of the empire’s people busts that remain in the
Tropical Botanical Garden, Ana Duarte Rodrigues, “A linguagem do império nas escul-
turas do Jardim Botânico Tropical em Lisboa,” Revista Brasileira de História da Mídia 5,
1(2016): 61–84.
Chapter 9
Urbanising the History of “Discoveries:” The 1940

Portuguese World Exhibition and the Making of a
New Imperial Capital
Carlos Godinho and Antonio Sánchez
1 Urban Exhibition as a Place of Knowledge
The “urban turn” in the history of science acknowledges that the “particular-
ities of urban contexts” affect the practice of scientific knowledge; in other
words, that science is a “product of the city.”1 Urban history of science analyses
the link between science and the city from different perspectives; among these,
we highlight the role of scientific experts in the regulation of urban space, the
function of scientific knowledge in the cultural representation of the city, and
the places of knowledge in the urban space.
From this historiographic standpoint, this chapter focuses on urban exhibi-
tions as a medium for urbanising scientific knowledge, a subject still underde-
veloped in the exploration of the connections between science and the city.
It analyses Lisbon’s urban renewal in the first half of the twentieth century
through the lens of the 1940 Exposição do Mundo Português (Portuguese
World Exhibition, and hereafter PWE). The exhibition, which took place in the
symbolic neighbourhood of Belém, the area from where the Portuguese fleets
left for the Atlantic and Indian Oceans’ exploration, served as the main axis
of the city’s modernisation.2 The urban restructuring was aimed at turning
1 Sven Dierig, Jens Lachmund and J. Andrew Mendelsohn, “Introduction: Toward an Urban
History of Science,” Osiris 18 (2003): 1–19, 3.
2 Although we can identify in the PWE some of the most defining features – such as signs
of national propaganda and cultural manifestations of modernity – of some contemporary
world’s fair – Paris (1937), Dusseldorf (1937), New York (1939–40), Tokyo (1940), and Rome
(1942) –, the 1940 Lisbon exhibition was not a world fair, but a national exposition. There is
an extensive bibliography on world expositions. Among them, see Robert W. Rydell, World
of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). As
Robert Kargon et al. have shown, the world’s fairs of the inter-war period used national sci-
entific and technological developments as a vehicle of modernity to flex their muscles in the
public showcase of science vis-à-vis other technological powers. Robert H. Kargon, Karen
Fiss, Morris Low, and Arthur Molella, World’s Fairs on the Eve of War: Science, Technology, and
Modernity, 1937–1942 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). The political context
© Carlos Godinho and Antonio Sánchez, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004513440_013

262 Godinho and Sánchez
Lisbon into a modern capital of an extended colonial empire. In line with the
politics of the Estado Novo (New State) dictatorship, the city’s renovation and
expansion was informed by the historical vision at the core of the regime’s
ideology. The focus of this historical vision was the so-called Portuguese Age
of Discoveries in the beginning of Europe’s maritime expansion in the fif-
teenth century. This chapter shows how and why its related scientific sym-
bols were urbanised in Lisbon’s major modernisation. Foremost among these
was the armillary sphere, an astronomic model of the cosmos turned into a
national symbol.
2 The PWE in Salazar’s Dictatorship
The dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar (Estado Novo) was the political
regime which governed Portugal from 1933 to 1974.3 Under this dictatorship the
national commemorations and exhibitions were fundamental for the politi-
cal construction of a national identity.4 These tools of propaganda played a
major role in the regime’s political agenda, mostly through the Secretariado de
Propaganda Nacional (National Propaganda Secretariat) led by António Ferro,
and were used to enforce social cohesion and ideological normalization.5 And
in which the PWE was held, its use of science and the strong historical perspective present in
the exhibition allow comparisons to be drawn with the Rome World’s Fair (EUR) scheduled
for 1942, an exhibition that was never held due to the consequences of the Second World
War for Mussolini’s Italy. Both exhibitions took place under dictatorial regimes. However, as
Geert Somsen has recently pointed out, the Rome exhibition was intended to vindicate the
universal and international character of science – highlighting the Italian contribution to the
history of science – as an instrument of foreign policy. See Geert Somsen, “Science, Fascism,
and Foreign Policy: The Exhibition “Scienza Universale” at the 1942 Rome World’s Fair,” Isis
108, 4 (2017): 769–791. The Lisbon exhibition, on the other hand, had a much more local and
national character, symbolically claiming the achievements of Portuguese science for the
construction of the colonial empire. More similarities can be found, however, in the urban
planning strategy of both exhibitions, but for lack of space this subject cannot be analysed
in this chapter.
3 “Estado Novo” (New State) is the self-titled name of the regime. The adjective ‘New’ was
used to stress the presidential, authoritarian and anti-parliamentary identity of the regime
as opposed to liberalism, a broad concept in which were included both the Constitutional
Monarchy (1820–1910) and the First Republic (1910–1926). The regime´s use of the scientific
past of Portugal through its urbanism and the PWE is connected with this idea.
4 See Margarida Acciaiuoli, Exposições do Estado Novo, 1934–1940 (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte,
1998).
5 Augusto de Castro, the general commissioner of the PWE, openly declared that one of the
main roles of the exhibition was propaganda. Augusto de Castro, A exposição do mundo
português e a sua finalidade nacional (Lisboa: Edição da Empresa Nacional de Publicidade,
1940). This idea was also explicit in the twenty-four issues of the Revista dos Centenários,
Urbanising the History of “ Discoveries ” 263
among the most notable variety of tools used for this purpose was the PWE,
the most ambitious national exhibition of the Estado Novo. The PWE was, in
Ellen W. Sapega’s words, “an excellent example of the commemorative impulse
put at the service of communicating an official view of national culture.”6 In
other words, the PWE embodied a rich source of historical, political, economic,
religious, and scientific representations. Moreover, it delivered an open-air
lesson in history aimed at normalising the regime’s ideology through the so-
called “política do espírito” (politics of the spirit), a designation for Ferro’s pro-
paganda of national identity, exceptionality, and pride, which was ultimately
built on the myth of the eternity of Portugal’s colonial empire.7
For Alberto de Oliveira, the Portuguese ambassador to Brussels and first
promoter of the PWE, the year of 1940 should serve as the year to “recreate
ourselves [the Portuguese].”8 Thus, the official aim of the exhibition was to
definitely sacralise the so-called “Portugueseness,” ritualising a kind of nation-
alism aimed at surpassing the decadence attributed to the previous republican
regime (1910–1926).9 This “Portugueseness” was founded on dichotomies, such
as the metropolis and the colonies, the humility of Portuguese people and the
Portuguese civilizing vocation, and the traditional as opposed to the modern.10
These oppositions composed a “museology’s park with a historicist vain”11 that
taught its visitors “how to be Portuguese.”12 In reality, it served to glorify the
monthly published between 1 January and 31 December 1939 for informing about the
working progress of the PWE.
6 Ellen W. Sapega, Consensus and Debate in Salazar’s Portugal. Visual and Literary
Negotiations of the National Text, 1933–1948 (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP,
2008), 41.
7 See Fernando Guedes, António Ferro e a sua Política do Espírito (Lisboa: Academia
Portuguesa da História, 1997).
8 Alberto de Oliveira, “1140-1640-1940,” Revista dos Centenários, 1 (January 1939): 9–11, 9.
9 David Corkill and José Carlos Pina Almeida have been pointing out the role of the PWE
in surpassing the widespread feeling of decadence and anti-nationalism. See David
Corkill and José C.P. Almeida, “Commemoration and Propaganda in Salazar’s Portugal:
The ‘Mundo Português’ Exposition of 1940,” Journal of Contemporary History, 44, 3 (2009):
381–399.
10 The idea of a civilizing mission was a typical rhetoric used by imperial nations to jus-
tify their colonial politics. For example, the planned science exhibition at the 1942 Rome
World’s Fair had also the final aim of expressing fascist Italy’s civilizing mission. See
Somsen, “Science, Fascism, and Foreign Policy”.
11 Elsa Peralta, “A composição de um complexo de memória: O caso de Belém, Lisboa,” in
Cidade e Império. Dinâmicas coloniais e reconfigurações pós-coloniais, eds. Nuno Domingos
and Elsa Peralta (Lisboa: Edições 70, 2013), 361–407, 381.
12 J.C. Pina Almeida, “Memória e identidade nacional: as comemorações públicas, as grandes
exposições e o processo de (re)construção da nação,” in Congresso Luso-Afro-Brasileiro de
Ciências Sociais 8 (Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra, 2004), 1–27, 9.
regime, maintain social hierarchies, neutralise political opposition, and pro-

vide legitimacy to the colonial empire.
The president of the Portuguese Republic, António Óscar de Fragoso
Carmona, inaugurated the PWE on 23 June 1940. Considered as the “New State’s
most important political-cultural event,”13 the exhibition was planned within the
Comemorações do Duplo Centenário (Double Centenary Commemorations),
which celebrated the Fundação da Nação (Nation’s Foundation) in 1140 and
the Restauração da Independência (Restoration of Independence) in 1640,
and was considered by its Executive Commission, headed by the writer Júlio
Dantas, as its principal event. By celebrating the foundation of Portugal and
the restoration of its independence, the New State asserted a nationalistic lin-
eage that was part of its legitimation strategy.14 The year of 1940 was, there-
fore, an opportunity to materialize the main lines of the regime’s propaganda
as the year of “national resurrection,” or the “resurrection of collective faith.”15
The importance bestowed by the regime on the event is clear in the economic
investment of 35,000 contos in an area of 550.000 m2 for an exhibition made
by almost 5,000 workers, 17 architects, 15 engineers, 43 painter-decorators, 129
assistants and 1,000 modeller-plasterers.16
The PWE was commissioned by Augusto de Castro, a journalist faithful to
the regime and the head of the newspaper Diário de Notícias (Daily News),
and was planned by the architect, José Ângelo Cottinelli Telmo, and the
engineer, Manuel Duarte Moreira de Sá e Melo, in collaboration with other
13 Júlia Leitão de Barros, “Exposição do Mundo Português,” in Dicionário de História do

Estado Novo (vol. 1), eds. Fernando Rosas and J.M. Brandão de Brito (Venda Nova: Bertrand
Editora, 1996), 325–327, 325.
14 The 1940 commemorations were suggested by the Portuguese ambassador in Brussels,
Alberto de Oliveira, in a letter published in the newspaper Diário de Notícias issue of
20 June 1929 with the title “1140-1640-1940”. Reproduced in the first issue (January 1939) of
the Revista dos Centenários, 9–11.
15 As Yves Léonard argues, the category of “resurrection” had a decisive role in the regime’s
propaganda of the commemorations of 1940. In the words of António Ferro in the Diário
de Notícias of June 1938: “1140 explains 1640, as 1640 prepares 1940. These are the three
sacred years of our history, the year of birth, the year of rebirth and the year which glo-
rifies the resurrection!”. Quoted in Léonard, “Le Portugal et ses ‘sentinelles de pierre’.
L’exposition du monde portugais en 1940,” Vingtième Siècle, revue d’histoire, 62 (1999):
27–37, 29. The notion of resurrection, as well as rebirth, was used regularly by the regime’s
advisors.
16 The data was taken from Leitão de Barros, “Exposição”, 326. See also Artur Portela,
Salazarismo e Artes Plásticas (Lisboa: Instituto da Cultura e Língua Portuguesa, 1987), 70.
One conto was the informal name for 1000 escudos, the Portuguese currency before the
euro. According to https://www.pordata.pt/Portugal 35.000 contos (35.000.000 escudos)
in 1960 is equivalent to 15.561.688, 00 euros in 2020.
Figure 9.1 Plan of the Portuguese World Exhibition of 1940 (“1140 Exposição do Mundo
Português 1940”). Perspective of Fred Kradolfer (1940)
Photographer: Mário Novais’ Studio. In Art Library – Fundação
Calouste Gulbenkian (CFT003.023751.ic)
artists.17 The exhibition was articulated along three main thematic axes – his-
tory, metropolitan ethnography, and colonial ethnography – and in two oro-
graphic planes – one close to the river Tagus and the other further way into
the Belém neighbourhood (Figure 9.1). The exhibition was composed of ten
pavilions (Foundation, Formation and Conquest, Independence, Discoveries,
Colonization, Brazil,18 Lisbon, Portuguese people in the World, Sea and Earth,
and Crafts and Industry), and other monuments and spaces (House of Saint
Anthony, Commercial and Industrial Neighbourhood, Regional Centre,
Monument of the Discoveries, Portugal Ship, Garden of the Poets, Playground,
Reflecting Pool, Amusement Park) (see chapters 8 and 14 in this volume). In
17 The Diário de Notícias is one of the oldest and largest print run newspaper in Portugal. It
has a tradition of being close to governmental positions.
18 Brazil was the only country invited to join the exhibition. According to Maria Isabel João,
it was due to the diplomatic efforts of the regime to foster good relations with the old
colony. Maria Isabel João, Memória e Império. Comemorações em Portugal (1880–1960)
(Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian and Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia,
Ministério da Ciência e do Ensino Superior, 2002), 456.
general, a team consisting of a director, one or more architects, and other col-
laborators including engineers, sculptors, decorators, navy officials, and his-
torians, was responsible for the construction of each pavilion and of each
monument.19
The predominant historical epoch represented in the PWE was the fifteenth-
century imperial maritime expansion, which was translated into a variety of
spaces, monuments, symbols, and other elements, among which were the
Pavilhão e Esfera dos Descobrimentos (Discoveries Pavilion and Sphere), the
Praça do Império (Empire Square), the Padrão dos Descobrimentos (Monument
of the Discoveries) and the Nau Portugal (Portugal Ship). The focus was on the
aspects and symbolic reminiscences directly or allusively linked to the history
of the maritime expansion, and more concretely to its techno-scientific realm,
that is, to the practices and techniques behind the so-called “Discoveries,”
which mostly dealt with navigation and cosmography. Among the scientific
symbols represented, it was the armillary sphere that stood out from the rest.
While the rest of Europe was living through very dark times (with the end
of the Civil War in Spain and the beginning of the World War II), Portugal
began the celebrations of the country’s eight centuries of national history.
On 2 December, five months after its opening and roughly 3,000,000 visitors
according to official records, the PWE closed its doors.
3 Belém and the Urban Modernisation of Lisbon in the 1930s
After the end of the Portuguese Monarchy (1910), the Republican regime ruled
until the coup d’état of 1926. Under the pretext of growing political, social, and
economic instability, the Estado Novo was established in 1933, a dictatorship
sympathetic with the fascist regimes of Europe. The 1930s is the decade of
the dictatorship consolidation. While the glorification of the national/histori-
cal past was a continuation of its Republican predecessor, for Estado Novo it
served to consecrate the political and identitarian foundations of Salazarism:
imperialism, colonialism, Catholicism, corporatism, regionalism, and tradi-
tionalism. Therefore, the regime used the commemorations of 1940 to build
a new capital city in its own image. Within the framework of the “politics of
19 For an account on the organization (themes and pavilions) of the exhibition see Guia
Oficial da Exposição do Mundo Português (Lisboa: Litografia de Portugal, 1940); Guia
da Exposição do Mundo Português (Lisboa: Neogravura, 1940); “Exposição do Mundo
Português,” Revista dos Centenários 19–20, 17–31; Henrique Galvão, Catálogo da Secção
Colonial (Lisboa: Comissão Nacional dos Centenários, 1940).
the spirit,” this renovation also meant an increase of public statuary and the
commission to a new stream of Portuguese artists (considered the first gen-
eration of modernists who innovatively represented the historical revisionism
of the Estado Novo).
The year of 1940 became an opportunity for the culmination and materi-
alization of the historico-ideological vision of the regime, synthetising, in the
words of the regime’s architects, “the civilizing action of the Portuguese in
the World’s History.”20 In this context, the PWE constituted a key piece in
Lisbon’s plan of urban renovation, which aimed at building a new imperial
capital. This renewed image of the city started in the historical neighbourhood
of Belém, in the civil parish of Santa Maria de Belém, located in the south-
western part of Lisbon.21 Belém inspired the new urban politics of the Estado
Novo, led by the engineer Duarte Pacheco,22 Minister of Public Works and
Communications (between 1932–1936 and 1938–1943), president of Lisbon’s
City Council (1938), and member of the Double Centenary Commission.23
The new urban politics, with a strong sculptural and commemorative char-
acter, used Belém as an urban laboratory to experiment with the dictatorship’s
various ideological representations. In other words, Belém was built as a “sym-
bolic city of the History of Portugal”24 and a “nation’s representation space.”
20 For Fernando Catroga the regime success in the 1930s was celebrated in the commemora-
tions of 1940 “thought to stage the apotheosis of the regime started in 1926.” F. Catroga,
“Ritualizações da História,” in História da História de Portugal, sécs. XIX–XX (Lisboa:
Círculo de Leitores, 1996), 579–601, 579. Catroga also argues that the PWE “arises as the
logical consequence of the previous movement” of other international exhibitions of the
1930s, 585.
21 Belém is the Portuguese word for Bethlehem (today located in the West Bank, Palestine)
which means birth and origin. Marcus Power and James D. Sidaway, “Deconstructing
twinned towers: Lisbon’s Expo ’98 and the occluded geographies of discovery,” Social &
Cultural Geography 6, 6 (2005): 865–883, 870. According to Raphael Bluteau, Belém is
“where Infante D. Henriques […] started the discovery of new seas and lands”. Bluteau,
Vocabulario Portuguez e Latino, Vol. 2 (Coimbra: Collegio das Artes da Companhia de
Jesus, 1712), 88.
22 For a deeper account about the plans and the public and urban works of Duarte Pacheco,
see Sandra Almeida, O Pais a régua e esquadro. Urbanismo, arquitectura e memória na
obra pública de Duarte Pacheco (PhD dissertation, Universidade de Lisboa, 2009). For the
urban plans that transformed the Belém neighbourhood for the PWE see pages 207–301.
See also Margarida Sousa Lobo, Planos de Urbanização. A Época de Duarte Pacheco (Porto:
FAUP, 1995).
23 It is important to mention that the Direcção-Geral dos Edifícios e Monumentos Nacionais
(General Directorate of Buildings and National Monuments), created in 1929, was also
under the control of the Minister of the Public Works and Communications.
24 Also called the “mythical city” and “historical city.” Augusto de Castro, “Inauguração da
exposição do mundo português,” Revista dos Centenários 19–20 (1940): 10–15, 10.
The ideological staging within which Belém was built can be seen as a singular
space of experimentation where architects and artists translated, and shaped,
the myths constructed by the regime.25 The ephemeral character of the PWE
was seized by Cottinelli Telmo as an opportunity for an architectural vanguard-
ism that potentiated the aesthetic experimentation of spaces and images. In
this way, there was a condensation of the Estado Novo’s version of the past
and the urban plan for the future of Lisbon as an imperial capital.26 As Marina
Tavares Dias put it, 1940 was considered “the year of great material and spiri-
tual accomplishments of New State.”27
Given its historical character, and its propagandistic and pedagogic aims,
the decision on where to place the PWE was crucial.28 The chosen location
was the emblematic neighbourhood of Belém, between the Mosteiro dos
Jerónimos (Jerónimos Monastery) and the Tagus River. Considering that mari-
time expansion and the Portuguese Colonial Empire were central themes of
the PWE, and that the Tagus represented a living link of its history, there could
hardly be any other place with greater symbolic weight. In other words, “the
area of Belém is the place of the city of Lisbon where the Portuguese empire’s
public memory is more expressively inscribed.”29 Being an open-air museum,
the PWE simulated a mythical trip to the age of “Discoveries.” On one hand,
the Tagus River was considered a “subtle intromission in the symbolic uni-
verse of the Portuguese people.”30 On the other hand, the historicity of the
25 About the work of Cottinelli Telmo and other architects in the PWE see Joana Pereira,
“A exposição Histórica do Mundo Português e os seus arquitectos. Subsídios para a melhor
compreensão da Arquitectura Nacional no dealbar da década de 40,” Revista Arquitectura
Lusíada 7 (2015): 93–108.
26 According to Fernando Catroga the main aim of the commemorations was “to consecrate
Portugal as an Empire”. F. Catroga, “Ritualizações da História,” in História da História de
Portugal, sécs. XIX–XX (Lisboa: Círculo de Leitores, 1996), 598.
27 Marina Tavares Dias, Lisboa desaparecida, vol. 5 (Lisboa: Quimera, 1996), 194.
28 The choice of Belém for commemorations of Portuguese historical events was not new.
From the end of the nineteenth century several commemorations took place in this neigh-
bourhood, as the case of the Commemorations of the Tercentenary of Camões (1880) and
the Commemorations of the 4th Centenary of the Discovery of the Maritime Route to
India (1894), among others. Elsa Peralta, “A composição de um complexo de memória:
O caso de Belém, Lisboa,” in Cidade e Império. Dinâmicas coloniais e reconfigurações pós-
coloniais, eds. Nuno Domingos and Elsa Peralta (Lisboa: Edições 70, 2013), 372–373.
29 Peralta, “A composição,” 367. Peralta interprets the neighbourhood of Belém as a “com-
plex of memory,” a “mnemonic complex,” in short, a “symbolic synthesis of the national
identity” where the Portuguese public memory is set up since the nineteenth century.
30 Inês Felgueiras, “1940. A Exposição do Mundo Português,” Oceanos 6 (1991): 38–44, 39.
Augusto de Castro words are suggestive: “It seems to me that from the first moment on
an Exhibition of the Portuguese World, which is to say, an Exhibition of the History of
Portugal, couldn’t turn away from the Tejo’s life, which is our highway, the historical path
space was fostered by two Manueline emblems that symbolized the time of the
empire’s formation, linked to the reign of Manuel I (1495–1521): the Jerónimos
Monastery and the Belém Tower.31
The choice of Belém was not free from controversy; the decision implied
the expropriation, eviction and demolition of some areas of the old neigh-
bourhood.32 Examples of this were the quarters annexed to the future Praça
do Império (Empire Square, former Vasco da Gama Square) and the area sur-
rounding the Belém Tower, whose gas factory was moved to the Matinha area,
situated in the eastern side of the city.33 Before the PWE, Belém was a periph-
eral neighbourhood of the city connected to the urban core of Lisbon through
Rua de Belém (Belém Street), a fishing based locality whose commerce activity
was rooted on the raw fluvial beaches. Nevertheless, it was an emblematic area
connected to the symbolic imperialism of the Monastery (legitimised in 1907
as a national monument) and the Tower. Both monuments were used in the
official discourse to justify the demolition of the surrounding houses: mainly
the three southern neighbourhoods of the Vieira Portuense Street (formerly
Cais da Cadeia Street) and a few houses on Belém Street (the ones which were
closest to the monastery where the future Empire Square was planned).34 The
demolition decision moulded the future growth of the south-western area
of the city. The strategy behind the PWE was to reurbanize Belém, highligh
ting the expansionist heritage of the fifteenth- and sixteenth centuries (lead by
the aforementioned monuments) to the detriment of the later urban develop-
ment. For such a purpose, a modernist aesthetic (mixing the traditional and
the modern) was applied, as is the case of the Padrão dos Descobrimentos
(Monument of the Discoveries, a monument that symbolically synthetized the
exhibition).
Everything started in 1938 when Duarte Pacheco (mayor of Lisbon and
the leader behind the reconstruction of the city) elected the urbanization of
Belém as the springboard behind the creation of a new capital of an extended
of our immortality, geographic centre of our Latin and Atlantic civilization.” Augusto de
Castro, A exposição do mundo português e a sua finalidade nacional (Lisboa: Edição da
Empresa Nacional de Publicidade, 1940), 15.
31 The Jerónimos Monastery was declared a national monument in 1907, and in 1983 the
Jerónimos Monastery and Belém Tower were inscribed in the List of World Heritage of
UNESCO.
32 Dias, Lisboa desaparecida, 202.
33 This move and the consequent urban renovation of the Belém Tower was planned for the
PWE but took place years later.
34 For a detailed description of the demolished areas see Helena Elias, “A emergência de um
espaço de representação: arte pública e transformações urbanas na zona ribeirinha de
Belém,” On the w@terfront 6 (2004): 43–135, 96.
colonial empire. This urban expansion was based on the vision of the French
architect Alfred Agache who, in 1936, envisioned the new city expanding along
the marginal road of Lisbon-Cascais “facing the river, enamoured by the sea.”35
Following Agache’s study, Pacheco invited the Polish urbanist Étienne De
Groër, who collaborated with the engineer António Emídio Abrantes to carry
out the “Plan of Urbanization and Expansion of Lisbon between 1938–1940”
(see chapter 4 in this volume). The extension of Lisbon translated the ideologi-
cal foundations of the regime into urbanism, architecture, and art.36 As will be
demonstrated in what follows, the organization of urban space accorded with
differences in social class, thus reflecting the dictatorship’s hierarchical struc-
ture for the Portuguese society. Similarly, “public art” was used as an urban
device to instil values and shape social environment and in this case for a ped-
agogy of glorification of the nation’s history.37 It is via this urban-pedagogic
goal that some of the scientific symbols fashioned in the PWE were integrated
in the construction of the city. Such is the case regarding the armillary sphere.
In June 1938, the new Bairro Económico (Economic Neighbourhood) of
Belém was strategically opened, consisting of a set of houses aimed at revital-
ising the area.38 This was the beginning of a strategy for the partial destruction
of the old neighbourhood, resulting in a dramatic eviction of families and busi-
nesses, which were denied the right to protest and given minimal compensa-
tion. In a political context of censorship and repression, a dissenting voice for
urban and political contestation was the newspaper, Ecos de Belém. Although
isolated, this case expressed popular disapproval regarding the people’s urban,
cultural, and commercial loss of estate.39 Attempting to justify the evictions,
control the climate of unrest, neutralize any opposition, and save the image of
35 “A Cidade Futura: o plano do urbanista Agache para modernizar Lisboa tem a concordân-
cia do Governo”. Diário de Lisboa, 2 July 1936. See Paula André, “As cidades da cidade.
Lisboa na primeira metade do séc. XX: nova Lisboa (1936) e Lisboa nova (1948),” Urbana:
Revista Eletrônica do Centro Interdisciplinar de Estudos sobre a Cidade 7, 1 (December 2015):
89–111, 100.
36 Vasco Brito and Catarina Teles Ferreira Camarinhas, “Elementos para o estudo do Plano
de Urbanização da Cidade de Lisboa (1938),” Cadernos do Arquivo Municipal 9 (2007):
162–189.
37 See architect Paulino Montez in H. Elias, Arte pública e instituições do Estado Novo – Arte
pública das Administrações central e local do Estado Novo em Lisboa: Sistemas de enco-
menda da CML e do MOPC/MOP (1938–1960), PhD dissertation, University of Barcelona,
2006.
38 Dias, Lisboa desaparecida, 179 and ff. The book section devoted to Belém presents a set of
photographs that clearly show the urban area before and after the transformations made
by the PWE.
39 Dias, Lisboa desaparecida, 165 and 184.
Salazar,40 Pacheco created a polemical legal instrument for qualifying private

properties as “lands of public interest.”41 This urban surgery had lasting effects
to this day.42
From the summer of 1939, the area was prepared for the construction of
the PWE (Figures 9.2a and 9.2b), which opened to the public on the follow-
ing year.43 Besides the renewal of the area of Belém, the “Future Lisbon” room
of the Lisbon Pavilion exhibited “the guiding principles of the urban develop-
ment of the capital.”44 Shortly after its closing, the PWE was struck by a cyclone
that destroyed many of its ephemeral buildings.45 In the meantime, the
Comissão Administrativa do Plano de Obras da Praça do Império (Managing
Commission of the Empire Square Public Works) was created in order to man-
age and preserve the area together with the City Council.
In parallel with educational and cultural politics, the urban intervention
served as an ideological instrument to instil the imperial and colonial vision
of the regime. This vision centred on the history of the maritime expansion.
Thus, the neighbourhood of Belém was rebuilt as a complex of national
memory (as the Empire Square and the Monument of the Discoveries still evi-
dence) and used by Salazar’s regime to materialise an ideological revisionism
of national history inscribed in the urban space of the capital to this day.46
40 Some local press reinforced this image, as the case of the Revista Municipal owned by the
city council. The words of Matos Sequeira are relevant: “The urbanization of the chosen
area implied a severe set of problems and difficult works, expropriations, street making,
paving, gardening, lighting, all essential for transmuting the undisciplined urban fringe,
provisional gardens and rough lands, uncultivated and abandoned, in an urban centre of
exhibition”. Sequeira, “A acção da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa na Exposição do Mundo
Português,” Revista Municipal II, 6 (1940): 24–26, 25.
41 Elias, “A emergência,” 94. There is no need to insist on the fact that the PWE was an issue
of “public utility” for the regime.
42 The thesis about the PWE’s lasting imprint on the Belém neighbourhood was defended
in recent works. See Pedro Nobre, “Belém e a Exposição do Mundo português. Cidade,
Urbanidade e Património Urbano” (Master dissertation, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa,
2010). This work analyses the urban transformations in the Belém neighbourhood before,
during and after the PWE.
43 In the providential rhetoric of the regime, the opening was a miracle, the “miracle of
Belém”. Sequeira, “A acção,” 25.
44 Sequeira, “A acção,” 26.
45 About the tempest, see, for instance, the issues of 16 and 23 February 1941 of Diário de
Notícias.
46 Others as Elsa Peralta had highlighted the “lasting impact” of the PWE in the “configu-
ration of Belém as a space of mystification of Portuguese national identity”. Peralta, “A
composição,” 362.
Figure 9.2a Aerial image of the Belém area before the PWE
Photography from Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa (Municipal
Archive of Lisbon) (MBM000040)
Figure 9.2b Image of the PWE preparation works

PHOTOGRAPHER: ESTÚDIO HORÁCIO NOVAIS. IN ART LIBRARY –
FUNDAÇÃO CALOUSTE GULBENKIAN (CFT164.102172)
4 The Science in the History of Maritime Expansion
History was the main tool of the politics of memory and national identity
intended to legitimize Salazar’s dictatorship. It glorified selected historical
periods and elements as part of a teleological narrative culminating in the
Estado Novo.47 The central tenet of this mythical history was Portugal’s mari-
time expansion (the so-called “Discoveries”),48 in which techno-scientific ele-
ments played a significant role.49 If the use of history and all the symbolism
of the location chosen for the PWE have already been discussed at length in
scholarly works, the role of science in the ideological construction of the exhi-
bition has not yet attracted much attention.
Central to every national celebration since 1880 – then mostly by the
republicans – the imperial dream, now appropriated by the Estado Novo,
proved useful once again considering political opposition and helpful in the
fabrication of a national consensus. Its seductive appeal accounted for the
regime’s political growing support despite divergences and was at the core of
the regime’s propaganda. As a result, a massive symbolic production ensued.
Instruments like the press, arts, cinema, commemorations, and, as we here
propose, urbanism, were used to ritualise the history of the “Discoveries” –
understood as the mythical genesis of the empire. As historian Fernando
Catroga pointed out, the focus on maritime expansion evidenced the “crucial
importance of the African problem for the regime,” which directly or indirectly
determined “the course of the most significant propagandistic manifesta-
tions of New State.” Considering that “summoners are the ones which conse-
crate themselves,” the commemorations were therefore used by the regime as
47 For a detailed study of the commemorative fever about the discoveries’ memory between
1880 and 1960 as a tool for the collective memory and national-imperialistic identity, see
Maria Isabel João, Memória e Império. Comemorações em Portugal (1880–1960), (Lisboa:
Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian and Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Ministério
da Ciência e do Ensino Superior, 2002).
48 According to Paulo S. Polanah the link between the maritime expansion and the “forma-
tion of the modern Portuguese national identity” came from the idea of colonial empire
built during the nineteenth century. Polanah, “‘The Zenith of our National History!’
National identity, colonial empire, and the promotion of the Portuguese Discoveries:
Portugal 1930s,” E-Journal of Portuguese History 9, 1 (2011): 1–24, 2.
49 According to Arlindo Manuel Caldeira the New State’s official history of Portugal was
opposed to change and stuck to traditional values, a messianic, providential, discon-
tinuous, Manichean, and ethnocentric history that overestimates the individual hero.
See Caldeira, “O poder e a memória nacional. Heróis e vilãos na mitologia salazarista,”
Penélope 15 (1995): 121–139.
“mobile festivities of history” to “reinforce the national consensus” and assert

abroad “a new image of Portugal (and of its Empire).”50
A cardinal feature of the PWE was “Portuguese (colonial) science;”51 i.e. the
science behind the so-called period of discoveries. Many coeval texts at that
time referred to maritime expansion as a “scientific expansion,” and the PWE
referred both to its “scientific character” and “scientific spirit.”52 Moreover,
and aside from the symbolism of the PWE’s urban location, the artistic and
architectonic representations of science were crucial for the support of the
regime’s ideology. For science was at the core of the regime’s articulation of
a grand civilizational narrative,53 including historical characters, past “sci-
entists,” and architects, as well as objects and symbols of maritime expan-
sion and the colonial empire connected with scientific advances, practices,
and events.54 Through architecture, statuary, and imagery an ode to applied
50 Catroga, “Ritualizações,” 580–587; Catroga, Nação, Mito e Rito. Religião Civil e Comemora
cionismo (EUA, França e Portugal) (Fortaleza: Edições NUDOC/Museu do Ceará, 2005),
126 and ff.
51 The sources used for this historical reconstruction of Portuguese science were not dif-
ficult to find. Since at least the last quarter of the nineteenth century, several Portuguese
historians have analysed the theme of Portuguese science in maritime expansion. In
1940 these studies already had a solid establishment through works of some central
figures of Portuguese historiography, such as Luciano Cordeiro, Sousa Viterbo, Ernesto
de Vasconcelos, Luciano Pereira da Silva, Joaquim Bensaúde, António Barbosa, Abel
Fontoura da Costa, and Carlos Viegas Gago Coutinho, among others. The works of these
authors were the basis of the scientific material exhibited at PWE, which was consulted,
by the way, by experts such as Quirino da Fonseca, who conceived the contents of the
Discoveries Pavilion and Sphere.
52 “Exposição,” 22; Guia da Exposição, no page. Previously, in 1923, the future president of the
Junta de Educação Nacional (Board of National Education) and the Instituto para a Alta
Cultura (Institute for High Culture), Augusto Celestino da Costa, defended the decisive
character of science in the Portuguese expansionist process, and consequently that of
Portugal’s fundamental role in modern civilization. See A. Costa, “O problema da investi-
gação scientífica em Portugal,” Homens Livres 2, 12 (December 1923), 3–4.
53 One of the few articles on the representation of science (in this case, contemporary sci-
ence and scientific politics, not historical science) in the New State political discourse is
Tiago Brandão, “A representação da Ciência no discurso político do Estado Novo,” in O
eterno retorno: estudos em homenagem a António Reis, eds. Maria Inácia Rezola and Pedro
Aires Oliveira (Lisboa: Campo da Comunicação, 2013), 545–561.
54 See Léonard, “Le Portugal”. Léonard uses the expression “stone sentinels” used by the
French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry to refer to the statues of Portuguese
poets, explorers, and conquerors represented at PWE. The author of the famous novel The
Little Prince (1943) was one of PWE’s distinguished visitors, and considered that “every-
thing was close to perfection,” and that Lisbon it was “a clear and sad paradise.” Quoted
in Léonard, “Le Portugal,” 27. The visit of important foreign personalities and the impact
that PWE had outside Portugal is an interesting question, but it goes beyond the limits
mathematics (namely cartography), cosmography, navigation, nautical astro

nomy, naval architecture, and natural history was staged.55
On the one hand, the focus on the nautical sciences in the exhibition recov-
ered an acknowledged historical era of national glory (seen as the essence of
the nation restored by New State), and on the other, reinforced the mythic
claim of the civilising nature and craftsmanship of the Portuguese people (pre-
sumed to have brought modernity into the world with their maritime endeav-
our). Nautical sciences were represented by many symbols, amongst whom the
armillary sphere held a prominent place.
5 Scientific Instruments as Symbols of National Identity:

The Armillary Sphere
In 1940, the presence of the armillary sphere in the urban landscape of Lisbon
was not new. The model was represented in historical monuments such as
the Jerónimos Monastery and the Belém Tower. Moreover, since the end of
the nineteenth century and mostly during the Republican regime – when the
symbol was integrated in the national flag – the sphere was significantly
reproduced in the city’s public space. However, the urban presence of the
symbol increased significantly by virtue of the PWE. Controlling national sym-
bols allowed the political elites to control the past and regulate social order,
using them as instruments for legitimating and sacralising their position of
power.56 However, to generate consensus, national symbols required an open
and ambiguous polysemy. For the Estado Novo, the armillary sphere signified
the colonial empire – an appropriation from the Republican regime that lent
of this chapter. For example, on PWE echoes in England, see David Corkill, “The Double
Centenary Commemorations of 1940 in the Context of Anglo-Portuguese Relations,” in
Os descobrimentos portugueses no mundo de língua inglesa, 1880–1972, ed. Teresa Pinto
Coelho (Lisboa: Edições Colibri, 2005), 143–166. M.I. João referred to those sentinels as
“discovering heroes” and “conquering heroes” who personalized the epic and built the
empire. Among the first highlights are the figures of Vasco da Gama, Pedro Álvares Cabral,
and Fernão de Magalhães. Between the seconds the figure of Afonso de Albuquerque. See
João, Memória, 701 and ff.
55 The naturalistic motifs coming from the “Discoveries”, such as the elephants of India,
were frequent at PWE. In addition, flora and fauna played a prominent role “at the ser-
vice of the scientific expansion of the Portuguese Overseas” in the East Room (Sala do
Oriente) in the Colonization Pavilion. Guia da Exposição, no page.
56 Gabriella Elgenius, Symbols of Nations and Nationalism: Celebrating Nationhood
(Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 63.
itself to the desired identification across different socio-political sectors – thus

mythically unifying Portugal with its historical destiny of civilising the world.
The abundance of representations of the armillary sphere reflected its
various possible meanings. Only in rare occasions, as in the case of an Estado
Novo primary schoolbook for moral and civic education, was its meaning
directly defined. The schoolbook postulated that the “armillary sphere was
King Manuel I’s emblem, [and] was included in our flag during his kingdom.”57
Despite the armillary sphere being Manuel I’s personal symbol, the dictatorial
regime deliberately ignored the fact that it was only included in the national
flag by the Republicans in 1911 and not in 1495. Moreover, a territorial and
colonial connotation was imposed on the astronomic model of the armillary
sphere by claiming that it meant “the lands discovered and conquered by the
Portuguese people in all parts of the world.”58
Among all the representations of the armillary sphere in the PWE, one in
particular stood out: the Discoveries Sphere, a monumental pavilion full of
symbolism with an “unusual curious aspect” due to its spherical shape that con-
trasted with an area mostly dominated by perpendicular lines (Figure 9.3).59
Part of the PWE’s Historical Section (which also included the Formation and
Conquest Pavilion and the Independence Pavilion), the Discoveries Sphere was
a thematic extension of the Discoveries Pavilion,60 and both were conceived
by the same production team, which included Quirino da Fonseca (historian),
Porfírio Pardal Monteiro (architect), Cottinelli Telmo (interior designer), and
ten painters.61 Placed between the Tejo coastline and the Estoril railroad line,
this pavilion was opened to the public on 28 June 1940.62
The huge Discoveries Sphere formed “half an armillary sphere.”63 It repre-
sented the northern hemisphere of the astronomic model, including the polar
circle, the tropic of cancer, the celestial equator circle, and a zodiac band. At its
base, twenty columns were aligned with the meridians, which intersected the
57 José M. Gomes, Educação Moral e Cívica: Para todas as classes do Ensino Primário (Lisboa:
Livraria Popular, 1941), 47.
58 J.M. Gomes, Educação Moral e Cívica, 47.
59 O Século (June 1940), 365.
60 Guia da Exposição; Sequeira, Mundo Português. Imagens de uma Exposição Histórica 1940
(Lisboa: Oficina Gráfica, Neogravura e Litografia Nacional, 1956), offprint.
61 The unexpected death of Quirino da Fonseca led Cottinelli Telmo to play a major role
in the realization of these pavilions, who, in turn, counted on the advice of Fontoura
da Costa, Gago Coutinho, Damião Peres, and Manuel Múrias, all of them historians and
naval officers with a strong vocation for the history of maritime expansion.
62 As in the case of the Monument of the Discoveries, the Portugal Ship, a technological
symbol of Portuguese maritime expansion, will be analysed elsewhere.
63 Costa Lima, “A Beleza das Exposições Comemorativas,” Brotéria (December 1940), 636.
Figure 9.3 Esfera dos Descobrimentos (Discoveries Sphere). This monumental building in
the shape of an armillary sphere was 30 meters in diameter and 24 meters high.
(1940), “Exposição do Mundo Português”
FUNDAÇÃO MÁRIO SOARES/ARQUIVO MÁRIO SOARES, PERMANENT
EXHIBITION PHOTOGRAPHY, http://hdl.handle.net/11002/fms_dc
_114733 (20202-1-16)
upper circles.64 The zodiac band was composed of the detailed constellations
of Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, and Virgo; each represented by relief
figures. This starry order suggested the submission of the individual to the
nation, as in the widespread regime’s slogan “everything for the nation, noth-
ing against the nation,” and the submission of the different colonies (qua the
different constellations) to the same political structure (qua the sphere itself).
A coeval cartoon pictured this submissive meaning of the zodiac figures.65
As in an armillary sphere, at the centre in the interior of the Discoveries
Sphere stood a terrestrial globe, a “great spinning globe” that “inscribed the
64 The number of meridians is not described anywhere, so that it is only possible to

estimate them in photographs that, however, do not show all angles of the pavil-
ion. F. de Pamplona, “Uma Obra de Arte: A Exposição do Mundo Português,” Ocidente
(October/December 1940), 164–180.
65 Carlos Botelho “Ecos da Semana,” Diário de Lisboa, 5/12/1940.
navigation’s routes of the Portuguese people,” as the Exhibition’s Guide informed

visitors.66 An article in the newspaper Ocidente stated that “in its centre, under
a gloomy sky pecked by stars, and under the spell of the black light, slowly
swirled a great globe with the representation of the continents and of the
seas, in which the bright route of the caravels stretched and shined.”67 Thus,
the pavilion offered visitors an immersive experience and internalization of
Portugal’s maritime expansion and the making of the Portuguese Empire.
The aim of the Discoveries Pavilion and Discoveries Sphere was to “certify
our nautical science born and raised in Sagres” – a reference to the myth of a
nautical school allegedly founded by Prince Henry the Navigator in the mid-
fifteenth century – and was therefore used as a scientification of Portugal’s
early past despite lack of historiographic evidence.68 The Discoveries Pavilion
was structured by nine sequential rooms: the Atlantic Room, Ship Room,
Prince Room, King Afonso V Room, King João II Room, King Manuel I
Room, Boats Room, Scientists and Chroniclers Room and Epic Room. According
to the Exhibition Guide, these last two rooms joined the “Evocation of Camões’
genius” with the “scientists, cartographers, and chroniclers represented by
their works” and culminated in the entrance to the Discoveries Sphere.69
The Epic Room displayed a prominent statue of the national poet, who
praised the “Discoveries” in his epic poem Lusíadas, and featured a wall topped
by the word “scientists” and filled with representations of sixteenth-century
book covers, many depicting an armillary sphere, such as the Munich Guide
(c.1509) and the “Sun’s declension regiment” of the Évora Guide (c.1516).70 The
contiguity of the poet with the mathematicians’ works purposefully related
him and his magnum opus to science (Fig. 9.4). This connection was reinforced
by a large sculpture of an opened Lusíadas book, whose verses alluded to the
66 Guia da Exposição, no page.

67 Ocidente 31 (November 1940), 170.
68 Rollim Macedo and André Lourenço, “Roteiro dos Pavilhões (descrição pormenorizada
do seu conteúdo),” Lisboa: Comemorações Centenárias – Exposição do Mundo Português,
Série B, 1940.
69 Guia da Exposição, no page.
70 This arrangement of elements can be seen in a photograph published in Sequeira, Mundo
Português, no page. About the works represented in the Camões Room see Luís de
Albuquerque, Os Guias Náuticos de Munique e de Évora (Lisboa: Junta de Investigações do
Ultramar, 1965). The Nautical Guides of Munich and Évora are the two oldest Portuguese
navigational manuals, and are both anonymous. In these manuals, different proce-
dures for obtaining latitude are presented, one through the astrolabe and the quadrant
(Munich), the other through the declination of the Sun (Évora).
Figure 9.4 Epic Room – Discoveries Pavilion

Image from Gustavo de Matos Sequeira, Mundo Português.
Imagens de uma Exposição Histórica 1940 (Lisboa: Oficina Gráfica,
Neogravura e Litografia Nacional, 1956), N.P.
role of science in Camões’ literary production, an approach put forward in 1915

by Luciano Pereira da Silva in the book The Astronomy of the Lusíadas.71
The armillary sphere also appeared in the King Manuel I Room, forming part
of the sculpture called the “maximum glory synthesis,” which portrayed a time
when “the world [was] Portuguese … and Lisbon was the great emporium of
the world.”72 By choosing to name the event as the Portuguese World Exhibition
an implicit connection to the armillary sphere was established: for all intents
and purposes the armillary sphere symbolized the exhibition’s name.73 That
is to say, the idea of a Portuguese World stamped in the exhibition’s name
71 Luciano Pereira da Silva, A Astronomia dos Lusíadas (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade

de Coimbra, 1915).
72 O Século (June 1940), 360.
73 The armillary sphere was also represented in the sculpture of a book in the Colonization
Pavilion, where one could read: “through the explorations of people from the west of
Europe, that is due to the Portuguese discoveries, the Atlantic became a new center of
civilization.” Guia da Exposição, no page.
expressed the myth of the Portuguese golden age of “Discoveries,” which the
regime connected to the justification of the colonial empire. These ideological
associations, however, were already present before the PWE, as can be seen
with the magazine O Mundo Português published since 1934. Its cover included
an armillary sphere, and the journal’s aim was to arouse the public’s interest in
the exploitation of the colonies by promoting a so-called “imperial mystique.”74
Therefore, we argue that the most prominent symbol representing the idea
of the (colonial) Portuguese world was indeed the armillary sphere.
The plan for the Discoveries Sphere changed up until its official installation
for the exhibition. On 3 February 1939, the PWE commissary Augusto de Castro
published a text stating that there would be a “Great Sphere,” which “repre-
sents our Historical World” complementing a “preview of future Lisbon.”75 This
vision, presented as the apex of the PWE and part of the Pavilion of Lisbon,
consisted of a “huge, embossed model of the Lisbon of the future, [including]
the new Europe’s airport.” In this model, the old seaport, the point of departure
of the voyages of exploration, was connected to the new airport, from which
airplanes flying to all parts of the world departed. Old and new routes illumi-
nated the course of Portuguese history and by implication that of the world,
such that light connected, both metaphorically and literally, the routes of
the Historical World’s Sphere and the Vision of Future Lisbon. Although in the
PWE the Pavilion of Lisbon and the Sphere became two different buildings,
the luminous technology worked as a metaphorical device for the modernity
brought about by the Portuguese “Discoveries.” The game of darkness and light
in the interior of the Discoveries Sphere was also accentuated: “an amazing
dream voyage across the enlightened ways of History.”76
Moreover, the same light metaphor was used in the opening speech of the
Commemorations by Salazar on 4 June 1940. The dictator stated that Portugal’s
civilizing values were “guiding principles of universal action … irradiating
beams of light which enlightened the World.”77 In the exhibition catalogue
published sixteen years later, the Discoveries Sphere was described as “the
magnificent globe, whose interior was illuminated more by our wonder than
74 Sérgio Neto, “Representações Imperiais n’ O Mundo Português,” in Estados autoritários

e totalitários e suas representações: propaganda, ideologia, historiografia e memória, eds.
Luís Reis Torgal and Paulo Heloísa (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra,
2008).
75 Augusto Castro only mentions that the text was published in “Portuguese newspapers”;
See Castro, A exposição, 24.
76 Luís Teixeira, “1140–1940: as Festas do Duplo Centenário na Estremadura,” Da Estremadura:
Boletim da Junta de Província da Estremadura (1940), 33–35.
77 Anonymous, “A capital do Império comemora duas datas centenárias,” Da Estremadura
(1940), 46.
Figure 9.5 Image of the statue called “sovereignty” with an armillary sphere in the hands and
other armillary spheres at the top of the Portuguese people in the World’s pavilion
(Portuguese World Exhibition, 1940). The architect responsible for the pavilion
was Cottinelli Telmo and the author of the sculpture Leopoldo de Almeida
Photography from Mário Novais studio. In Art Library – Fundação
Calouste Gulbenkian (CFT003.061407.ic)
by the splendour of its light, in which the Portuguese navigation routes, pro-
genitors of the modern world, were inscribed.”78 The light technology of the
twentieth century together with the astronomical technology of the fifteenth
century were thus mixed in this ideological cocktail in order to glorify the
Estado Novo and its colonial politics.
Besides the Discoveries Sphere, the representation of the armillary sphere
abounded in the PWE: from its appearance in many structures and a panoply of
promotional materials to a decorative ornament in many pavilions (Figure 9.5),
as well as other featured objects of the exhibition such as Portuguese pave-
ment. Examples of this myriad representation are the three large panels of
Portuguese sidewalk in the Empire Square (see chapter 1 in this volume), the
sculpture of the time zones in the Colonial Section, and the streetlamps used
in the exhibition.
6 The New Imperial Lisbon
Several scientific symbols experimented in the PWE were also represented in

the reurbanization of the city, but it was the armillary sphere, symbol of the
imagined future Lisbon, that was most frequently used. Systematically spread
around the new capital of the empire, ensconced in its new zones and new
buildings, the sphere was materialized in the urban space in many instances,
among which two are particularly relevant. The first was planned for upper-
middle class housing (by the urbanist João Guilherme Faria da Costa), as in
the case of the strategic zone of urban extension called Avenidas Novas (New
Avenues), which included the monumental new city’s entrance of Praça do
Areeiro (Areeiro Square). The second was planned for entertainment and ser-
vice buildings spread across the city.79
In line with the politics of the Estado Novo, the reurbanisation established
a clear division between first- and second-class citizens. For each there was
a standard housing type: for the common population a type called “prédios
de habitação” (housing buildings) and for the upper-middle class there was
the “prédios de rendimento” (income buildings). The regime favoured an elite
minority over most of the population, which was reduced to a working force
to give, as per the regime’s slogan, “everything for the nation.” Thus, represen-
tations of the armillary sphere were integrated mostly in the buildings of the
most powerful sectors of Portuguese society.
78 Sequeira, Mundo Português, no page.

79 Catroga, “Ritualizações,” 221–361.
The model of the armillary sphere most frequently used was a particular
ornament designed for the elite’s “income buildings,” and not only in Lisbon but
also throughout the country.80 This model was an ornament for the iron balcony
guards of the buildings’ windows that consisted of two metallic spheres of less
than a foot in length in each of its corners.81 It is likely that one of the first uses
of this ornament was in Areeiro Square (Figure 9.6), which was planned by the
architect Luís Cristino da Silva in 1938.82 Both its main tower and the adjacent
buildings include, to this day, an armillary sphere in the balconies of the first
floor. Afterwards, the same model was applied in many buildings constructed
in Lisbon, such as the buildings along the Sidónio Pais and António Augusto
Aguiar Avenues – considered to be the prototype of the regime’s “Português
Suave” (Soft Portuguese) architectural style, which mixed the modern and
the traditional.83 Other examples include the “Bairro dos Actores” (Actors
Neighborhood) and other buildings around D. Afonso Henriques Avenue and
António Sardinha Square in Penha de França.84 In an interview, Cristino da
Silva asserted the regime’s control over the city’s architecture stating that it
“imposed the condition of being city-like, of being Lisboner” and that it was
“very hard for an artist to embrace modern architecture and simultaneously
represent in its façades the architecture of a past epoch.”85 This statement
suggests that the use of the balcony spheres was a reference to the bygone
“Discoveries” age. Once more, as in the PWE, the armillary sphere was fash-
ioned as the scientific symbol of colonial expansion.
The second most prominent armillary sphere model used during the renova-
tion of the city can be found in entertainment and service buildings. This model
consisted of a large armillary sphere as a finial in the top of many buildings
80 These representations of the armillary sphere representation have not been addressed in
any study, but they can be integrated into what Inês Marques defines as “Public Art”. See
Inês Maria Andrade Marques, “Arte e Habitação em Lisboa 1945–1965: Cruzamentos entre
desenho urbano, arquitetura e arte pública” (PhD diss., University of Barcelona, 2012), 34.
81 The wrought iron with which the armillary spheres were made was considered by the SPN
as part of a group of “certain forgotten materials,” such as tile and cork, so that its use was
in line with the policy of reviving traditional materials in national production. António
Ferro, Catorze Anos de Política do Espírito (Lisboa: Secretariado Nacional da Informação,
1948).
82 It should be noted that another building in Restauradores Square, also designed by
Cristino da Silva integrates armillary spheres in the balcony guards, which reinforces the
architect’s association with the ornament.
83 Marques, “Arte e Habitação,” 34.
84 José Manuel Fernandes, Três Modernistas: Arquitectura do Modernismo em Portugal uma
síntese e alguns autores (Lisboa, Coimbra: Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda, Imprensa
da Universidade de Coimbra, 2015), 78.
85 “Entrevista a Luís Cristino da Silva,” Arquitectura (January 1971).
Figure 9.6a Armillary spheres on the balconies of Praça do Areeiro (Lisbon)

Image from the Exhibition “Os anos 40 na arte portuguesa”
Photographer: Horácio Novais’ Study. In Art Library – Fundação
Calouste Gulbenkian (CFT164.45128)
Figure 9.6b Photograph of the Monumental Cine-Theater in the Duke of Saldanha square
(Lisbon) with an armillary sphere at the top
Photographer: Horácio Novais’ Studio. In Art Library –
Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (CFT164.160877)
spread across Lisbon. This is seen, for example, with the 1951 Cine-Teatro
Monumental (Monumental Cine-Theatre), in the Duque de Saldanha Square,
which displayed a large sphere in its central tower (Figures 9.6a and 9.6b). It was
once again featured in the 1952 Cine-Teatro Império (Empire Cine-Theatre),
along the D. Afonso Henriques Avenue, which had two monumental spheres in
both of its side towers. Besides these entertainment buildings various service
buildings ornamented with similar models, as for example the 1953 Central
Telegráfica e Telefónica de Lisboa (Telegraphic and Telephonic Central of
Lisbon) in D. Luís Square, located in Cais do Sodré. As in the case of the urban
“income buildings,” these monumental entertainment and service buildings
held a privileged material and symbolic status as evidenced by the inclusion
of the sphere.
7 Conclusion
The urban renovation carried out in Lisbon by the Estado Novo since the
1930s had its epicenter in Belém with the PWE. In this historical exhibition
the glorious myth of “Discoveries” gave ideologues and urban planners the pro-
pagandistic framework for an imperial and colonial imagined community. We
argue that the presence of objects that materialize the role of past scientific
symbols within the city context are critical to fully understand Lisbon’s urban
history.
The PWE urbanised the scientific symbols of the Portuguese so-called
“Golden Age,” ritualising nationalism and sacralising the Estado Novo and its
colonial empire. As with all political strands of socio-cultural intervention,
such as public education, commemorations, press, and cinema, the new urban
space instilled the ideology of regime by representing the colonial “Portuguese
World.” Following the liberal and republican traditions once more, the histori-
cal and scientific right of possession of the overseas colonies anchored the
regime’s rhetoric of the civilizing mission of Portugal. Not only for the dicta-
torship, but also for many Portuguese intellectuals, the nation’s raison d’être
was overseas colonization. This was the nationalist keystone for the politics
of international legitimacy and colonial conservation. Given that colonization
was necessarily justified on civilizing competence, the regime produced an
account of the Portuguese inauguration of the modern world. The alleged pro-
ficiency in civilization and the modernity of Portugal were necessarily founded
on scientific knowledge, while the Estado Novo appropriated the historical
symbols of the maritime expansion in the urban renovation of Lisbon.
Thus, the dictatorship mixed urbanism, history, and arts in its city plani-
fication. For the construction of this Portuguese urbanized world, modernist
sculptors and architects crafted elements of the age of “Discoveries”, among
which the armillary sphere stood out. Thus, we argued that the sphere can be
understood as a scientific symbol for the materialization and normalization
of the idea of an extended Portuguese colonial empire. The symbol itself was
couched within a class-based framework and hierarchical distribution of the
city, which took advantage of areas that were under urban development at
the time. In upper- and middle-class housing, cine-theatres, restaurants, and
libraries, the sphere bestowed status to the buildings. Moreover, the symbol
was instilled in the rest of the population, but at physical and symbolic dis-
tance, through its display in the ubiquitous national flag as well as in places
people did not inhabit or used. Therefore, the urbanization of the sphere con-
stituted an important aspect of Lisbon’s transformation into an imperial capi-
tal by the Estado Novo. The representations of the armillary sphere aimed at
symbolically modelling urban spaces with the “empire’s spell” – the name of
a movie produced by the dictatorship.86 This empire, comprised of overseas
86 Feitiço do Império. dir. António Lopes Ribeiro (Agência Geral das Colónias/Missão
Cinematográfica às Colónias de África, 1940).
colonies, was the inalienable foundation for the nation’s identity legislated and
consecrated by the regime.87
Insofar as the new Lisbon should infuse feelings of pride, submission, ven-
eration, and greatness, such affects were revived daily via the symbols that rep-
resented Portugal as an historical agent of the global progress of civilization.
Tacitly disseminated in a hierarchy of urban spaces, these symbols aimed at a
permanent instillation of an identity and emotional bond of the city’s popu-
lation with the regime’s ideology. To live with objects that ritualized a myth
of a glorious past was a kind of enchantment: neutralizing critical attention
to political and social issues, normalizing the regime as the natural political
structure of the nation, and stating the collective illusion of an eternal colonial
dictatorship. What is more, the symbolic urbanization of Lisbon remains to
this day. It is still an open question to understand critically and historically, and
to contextualize, its repercussions, and to uncover the extent of its influence
on subsequent generations of city dwellers.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the FCT for the support it has given in carrying
out this research, as well as the members and advisors of the VISLIS research
project (UID/HIS/UI0286/2019 and UIDB/00286/2020 and UIDP/00286/2020)
for their enlightening comments about this text. The authors would like to
thank especially Ana Simões and Maria Paula Diogo for their efforts to bring
this text up to date.
87 Patrícia I. Vieira, “O Império como Fetiche no Estado Novo: Feitiço do Império e o
Sortilégio Colonial,” Portuguese Cultural Studies 3 (Spring 2010): 126–144.
Part 3
The Daily Life in the City
⸪
How did Lisboners experience science and technology in their city? And how
were they shaped by the new city to become “modern” citizens?
Developments in both science and engineering gave rise to a host of new
European cities, which are now associated with the period of economic indus-
trialization and laid the groundwork for the new modern bourgeois lifestyle:
Haussmann-like boulevards flanked by grands magasins, elegant and well-
structured green spaces, new organizations of labour-time and leisure-time in
light of the “technical night,” additional leisure spaces, efficient sanitary, as well
as innovations in the means of transportation and communication infrastruc-
tures. Lisbon, too, participated in this imaginary, whether by adapting foreign
models to local conditions or by devising entirely new, yet specific, solutions.
In part three, The daily life in the city, we attend to the ways in which Lisboners
made use of the city for purposes that were entirely their own, while looking
for STM expertise in everyday urban life. We focus not on canonical objects
typically used to highlight the bourgeois experience of living in a modern and
techno-scientifically driven city, but rather on “marginal” objects, which afford
additionally the condition of possibility for providing an account of the experi-
ence of the “new” city of Lisbon with respect to the working class itself.
In chapter 10, “A Liberal garden. The Estrela garden and the meaning of
being public,” Ana Duarte Rodrigues and Ana Simões analyse the Estrela gar-
den and suggest that the Estrela garden is best understood as an “urban Liberal
laboratory.” Firmly rooted in the political agenda of the liberal regime and the
techno-scientific expertise of its time, the garden became a privileged site to
test urbanism’s most progressive ideas, which included issues concerning rec-
reational common spaces, issues of hygiene, and sought out ways to address
the education needs of a growing public body. That said, despite the fact that
education was not something that was typically associated with the image of
public gardens, the Estrela Garden would be the site of Portugal’s first kinder-
garten in the entire country. Moreover, its public dimension announced the
emergence of outdoor urban spaces as new habitable spaces at the reach of
all citizens.
In chapter 11, Inês Gomes’s “Allies or enemies? Dogs in the streets of Lisbon
in the second half of nineteenth century” explores the entanglements between
humans and non-human animals in shaping urban development, unveiling
the strong existing tensions beneath the “civilizing” agenda that underlies the

building of modern Lisbon. Dogs are used to illustrate these opposing forces,
being, at the same time, city inhabitants, friends of residents, and invaders,
rabies-prone, and a danger to humans.
Chapter 12 returns the reader to the domain of human concern with Daniel
Gamito-Marques’ essay, “Intellectuals and the city. Private matters in the public
space.” With Gamito-Marques, we explore the conflicting relationship between
the socialist and revolutionary intellectual circle known as “the Cenacle” and
the bourgeois neighbourhoods of Lisbon. While this group of young rebels pre-
ferred to meet in more secluded public spaces located on the “wild bohemian
side” of the city, they attracted the attention of the educated public and had
a lasting impact on Lisbon society. Most notably was the Cenacle’s promotion
of a series of conferences intended to publicly address the causes of the back-
wardness of the Iberian countries while redeeming the virtues of science for
the sake of the moral and technical progress of humanity.
In chapter 13, “Working-class universities. Itinerant spaces for science, tech-
nology and medicine in republican Lisbon,” Ana Simões and Maria Paula Diogo
analyse Republican institutions of education in Lisbon and its image of educa-
tion as the precondition for the cultivation of the new Republican citizen. As
such, adult education soon became part of the pedagogic and civic mission of
the recently re-founded University of Lisbon and the new Technical Institute
connecting them with informal teaching institutions of higher learning such
as the Free and the Popular universities. By exploring the teaching of STM “on
the move,” the authors provide an account of what has long-since remained
invisible, and thus excluded, from urban historical accounts of Lisbon: the
invisible network of the circulation of teachers and people among various
locations across a sprawling, urban, Lisbon.
Finally, in chapter 14, “A Fascist Coney Island? Salazar’s dictatorship, popu-
lar culture and technological fun (1933–1943),” Jaume Valentines-Alvarez and
Jaume Sastre-Juan focus on the ideological agenda behind the three major
spaces of technological entertainment that blossomed during Salazar’s dicta-
torship, the Estado Novo: the short-lived Luna Park at the top of the Avenue of
Liberty, 1933–35; the amusement park of the 1940 Exhibition of the Portuguese
World in Belém; and the Feira Popular created in 1943 in the neighbourhood of
Palhavã. With each iteration, Valentines-Alvarez and Sastre-Juan limn the way
in which the cultural programs of the dictatorship selectively appropriated an
increasingly globalized culture of leisure and enjoyment within spaces orga-
nized around technology-as-source-of-entertainment.
These five chapters clearly exemplify the three axes upon which this book
is organized. Progress, modernity, and a cosmopolitanism anchored in sci-
ence and technology are the backbone of the socio-technical imaginaries of
the port city, the imperial metropolis, and the scientific capital. They not only
underlay the process of infrastructuring the city, but also the less obvious and
equally effective process of “infrastructuring” the citizens’ mind, by establish-
ing spaces for education and leisure, which are themselves conducive to the
modernist program of socially engineering a new urban order.
Chapter 10
A Liberal Garden: The Estrela Garden and the

Meaning of Being Public
Ana Duarte Rodrigues and Ana Simões
1 Introduction
Following the rising interest of history of science and technology for gardens
and landscapes, fostering the interbreeding of formerly unconnected scientific
disciplines, this chapter explores how scientific and technological expertise,
including engineering, horticulture, botany, and, quite unexpectedly, educa-
tion, converged in the emergence and development of the Estrela Garden:
the first public garden of the Liberal regime created in Lisbon, in 1852. It is no
coincidence that this followed the establishment of a new Liberal government,
which marked the birth of the Regeneration Period and its characteristic eco-
nomic reforms, which helped propel techno-scientific change. Celebrated by
Lisboners and protected by both the national government and city council, the
Estrela Garden became a cornerstone of the Liberal agenda that viewed
the “greening” of the city of Lisbon as a fundamental part of urban renewal
in the second half of the nineteenth-century.
Despite Portugal’s political and social instability during the early nineteenth-
century,1 the institutional structure of public education was reformed accord-
ing to the utilitarian approach that matched the needs of the new Liberal state.
These reforms led to the founding of two major Lisbon institutions for higher
education – the Polytechnic School and the Army School. In addition to the
founding of these institutions, and due to the onset of the Regeneration Period
in 1851, Portugal endorsed a new paradigm of progress marked by a strong,
technology-driven, agenda, which focused on the building of a network of
1 M. Villaverde Cabral, O desenvolvimento do capitalismo em Portugal no século XIX (Porto: A

Regra do Jogo, 1976); Jaime Reis, O atraso económico português em perspectiva histórica: estu-
dos sobre a economia portuguesa na segunda metade do século XIX, 1850–1930 (Lisboa: Imp.
Nac.- Casa da Moeda, 1993); Pedro Lains, A economia portuguesa no século XIX: crescimento
económico e comércio externo, 1851–1913 (Lisboa: Imp. Nac.- Casa da Moeda, 1995); Maria de
Fátima Bonifácio, O século XIX português (Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2005).
© Ana Duarte Rodrigues and Ana Simões, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004513440_015

A Liberal Garden 295
transport and communications infrastructure and the designing of a general

improvement plan for the city of Lisbon.2
Thus, from the 1870s onwards, Lisbon was the site of the renewal of urban
infrastructure, including water pipelines, gas and electric lighting, improve-
ments in the sewage system, new sanitary measures, and new modes of trans-
portation and communication.3 All of these changes aimed at bringing a new
degree of comfort desired by Lisbon’s burgeoning urban-middle-class. As such,
the Liberal agenda for the Portuguese capital did not restrict itself to the grey
infrastructures of progress – often the central concern of Portuguese historians
of science and technology – and included considerations of their green coun-
terparts.4 This consideration of green infrastructures was so prominent that
gardening, horticulture, botany, as well as their popularisation, became cor-
nerstones for the greening of Lisbon.5 Among them, the building of the Estrela
Garden as the first Liberal public garden holds a special place.
2 On Regeneration see: Vítor Quaresma, A Regeneração: Economia e Sociedade (Lisbon: Dom

Quixote, 1988); Joel Serrão, Da ‘Regeneração’ à República (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 1990);
David Justino, Fontismo: liberalismo numa sociedade liberal (Alfragide: D. Quixote, 2016.) On
the construction of the techno-scientific nation by engineers, military men, and politicians
see Tiago Saraiva, “Inventing the Technological Nation: the example of Portugal (1851–1898),”
History and Technology, 2007, 23: 263–271; Marta Macedo, Projectar e Construir a Nação.
Engenheiros, Ciência e Território em Portugal no século XIX (Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências
Sociais, 2012); Marta Macedo, and Jaume Valentines-Álvarez, “Technology and Nation:
Learning from the Periphery,” Technology and Culture, ‘FORUM STEP Matters’, 2016, 57(4):
989–997.
3 José-Augusto França, Lisboa. História Física e Moral (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 2008); Ana
Cardoso de Matos, Fátima Mendes, Fernando Faria, and Luís Cruz, A Electricidade em
Portugal. Dos Primórdios à Segunda Guerra Mundial (Lisboa: EDP, 2004); Tiago Saraiva,
Ciencia y Ciudad. Madrid y Lisboa, 1851–1900 (Madrid: Ayuntamiento de Madrid, Area de
Gobierno de las Artes, 2005); Maria Helena Lisboa, Os Engenheiros em Lisboa, Urbanismo e
Arquitectura (1850–1930), MSc unpublished thesis, Lisboa, 1996.
4 The terms gray and green infrastructures are commonly used in history of technology,
environmental history, and urban history, as well as in blogs and newspaper articles. See,
for instance, John Talberth and Craig Hanson, “Green vs. Gray Infrastructure: When Nature
Is Better than Concrete,” Blog of the World Resource Institute (June 19, 2012) or John
Talberth, Erin Gray, Logan Yonavjak, and Todd Gartner, “Green vs. Gray: Nature’s Solutions
to Infrastructure Demands,” Blog of the Ecology Global Network (March 14, 2013). For a
recent academic review of the terms see Y. Depietri, and T. McPhearson, “Integrating the
Grey, Green, and Blue in Cities: Nature-Based Solutions for Climate Change Adaptation and
Risk Reduction,” in N. Kabisch, H. Korn, J. Stadler, and A. Bonn, eds. Nature-Based Solutions
to Climate Change Adaptation in Urban Areas. Theory and Practice of Urban Sustainability
Transitions (Springer, 2017), 91–109.
5 Dorothee Brantz, and Sonja Dumpelmann, eds., Greening the City. Urban Landscapes in the
Twentieth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011); Ana Duarte Rodrigues,
“Greening the city of Lisbon under the French influence of the second half of the nineteenth
296 Rodrigues and Simões
Founded by a government initiative, the Estrela Garden was intentionally

located in the neighbourhood that housed the Portuguese Parliament ever
since the 1830s. For the Garden’s designers, it became the green embodiment
of the Liberal ideals characteristic of Portugal during the second half of the
nineteenth-century. Moreover, the Estrela Garden stood in sharp contrast
with the Passeio Público (Public Promenade), which was built in 1764 dur-
ing the Absolutist Monarchy of the enlightened despot, Marquis of Pombal.
Now, while the Passeio Público was associated with the ancien régime, the
Estrela Garden came to be associated with the new constitutional regime of
the Liberal governments’ Regeneration Period: the Passeio Público served
royal subjects, while the Estrela Garden helped mould the liberal citizenry
of Portuguese modernity. Therefore, while both the Passeio and the Estrela
Garden were public gardens, they embodied incommensurably different con-
ceptions regarding the very constitution of the Portuguese public sphere and
the relationship between the elected and the electorate.
Building upon the work of Sven Dierig, Jens Lachmund and J. Andrew
Mendelsohn in their edited volume, Science and the City,6 Portuguese histori-
ans of science have paid increasing attention to the role of science in the mak-
ing of Lisbon and have joined those who have gone beyond the capitals of the
great European powers in exploring instances of the co-production of science
and the city.7
In this chapter, we follow this trend and explore the intersection of the
urban history of science and the history of gardens and landscapes through the
perspective of a piece of green, and public, infrastructure despite its relatively
century,” Garden History 45, 2 (2017): 224–250; Ana Duarte Rodrigues, and Ana Simões,
“Horticulture in Portugal 1850–1900: The role of science and public utility in shaping knowl-
edge,” Annals of science 74, 3 (2017): 192–213.
6 Sven Dierig, Jens Lachmund, and J. Andrew Mendelsohn, eds., Science and the City, Osiris 18
(2003).
7 Saraiva, Ciencia y Ciudad; Antonio Lafuente, and Tiago Saraiva, “The Urban Scale of Science
and the Enlargement of Madrid (1851–1936),” Social Studies of Science 34, 4 (2004): 531–569;
Oliver Hochadel, and Agustí Nieto-Galan, eds., Barcelona. An Urban History of Science and
Modernity, 1888–1929 (London: Routledge, 2016); Oliver Hochadel, and Agustí Nieto Galan,
“How to write an urban history of STM on the periphery,” STEP FORUM, Technology & Culture
57, 4 (2016): 962–972; Tiago Saraiva, and Ana Cardoso de Matos, “Technological Nocturne:
The Lisbon Industrial Institute and Romantic Engineering (1849–1888),” Technology and
Culture 58 2 (2017): 422–458; Tiago Saraiva, and Marta Macedo, Capital Científica. A Ciência
Lisboeta e a Construção do Portugal Contemporâneo (Lisboa: Imprensa Ciências Sociais, 2019);
Ana Simões, “From Capital City to Scientific Capital. Science, Technology, and Medicine in
Lisbon as Seen through the Press, 1900–1910,” in Agusti Nieto-Galan, Oliver Hochadel, eds.,
Urban Histories of Science. Making Knowledge in the City 1820–1940 (London: Routledge, 2019),
141–163.
small urban footprint. We do so by engaging with international scholarship

exemplified by Antoine Picon’s work on the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont – built
in the 1860s during France’s Second Empire – and Norton Wise’s consider-
ations on the role of Berlin’s Museum Island gardens from the 1830s.8
In Picon and Wise’s case studies the scientific and technical apparatus
behind the gardens, as well as the agencies underlying their construction, are
brought to the fore, unveiling the complex entanglement between ideological,
political, economic, cultural, aesthetic, and social forces. Despite the respec-
tive differences between Lisbon, Paris, and Berlin regarding each city’s degree
of industrialisation, similar statements can be made concerning the creation
of the Estrela Garden. In our view, each of these cities illustrates instances of
what we call the “political urban ecology of science.” This is a notion that we
have appropriated from David Livingstone’s plea for historians to consider the
political ecology of science and extend it beyond its nature-centred context
into a specifically urban setting. Seen in this light, public gardens are the ideal
urban phenomena to explore the various ways in which scientific knowledge
becomes politically constituted in different ways and often merge nature and
culture in striking and unexpected ways.9
In the case study offered here, we argue that one of the hallmarks of
Portugal’s Liberal period of Regeneration was the construction of a public gar-
den for the rapidly growing urban-middle-class, which catered to the residents
of nearby neighbourhoods while serving as the pretext for the further experi-
mentation with liberal strategies of urban renewal.10 Following Picon and Wise,
we argue that the public garden provided a place to test the most progressive
ideas of urbanity insofar as it involved addressing a set of common issues – e.g.
the need for recreational spaces and questions of public hygiene – and not
so typical features in a garden’s context – e.g. education. At the same time,
its construction experimented with liberal definitions of the nature of public
life through concrete scientific practices. Therefore, and due to the Liberals’
impetus, the Estrela Garden became an urban laboratory for both grey and
green infrastructure, infrastructure that is still perceived as the epitome of an
emerging bourgeois public sphere up to the present day. Moreover, the Estrela
Garden became the crucial site for experimenting with the horticultural
8 Antoine Picon, “Nature et Ingénierie: le Parc des Buttes-Chaumont,” Romantism 4 (2010):

35–49; M.N. Wise, Aesthetics, Industry, and Science: Hermann von Helmholtz and the Berlin
Physical Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
9 D.N. Livingstone, “Landscapes of knowledge”, in P. Meusburger, David N. Livingstone, and
Heike Jöns, eds., Geographies of Science (Springer Netherlands, 2010), 3–22.
10 Chris Otter, “Making Liberalism Durable: Vision and Civility in the Late Victorian City,”
Social History 27, 1 (2002): 1–15.
techniques analysed in an array of French literature, which was collected in

the specialised library of the City Council’s Department of Gardens and Green
Grounds (see chapter 2 in this volume). Moreover, and beyond mere accli-
matisation, the plants and trees grown in the nurseries at the Estrela Garden
transformed Lisbon’s landscape into the city we know today. Thus, despite
engineers’ predominance in the construction of Lisbon during the latter half
of the nineteenth-century, this chapter focuses on a particular period of the
Department of Gardens and Green Grounds in which engineers qua urban
experts did not yet play the hegemonic role they would come to assume after
1886. Prior to the technocratic hegemony of engineers, it was the collaboration
among agronomists, gardeners, botanists, and horticulturists that allowed for
the greening of Lisbon’s urban landscape.
Since the Estrela Garden became the site of the Department of Gardens and
Green Grounds in 1859, the Departments’ nurseries, specialised library, and
gardener-in-chief, were all concentrated within its premises. As we will show,
it was due to the role of the gardener-in-chief that the Estrela Garden became
central to the education of practitioners. Moreover, as the location selected for
the construction of Portugal’s first kindergarten, the Estrela Garden also con-
tributed to the nation-wide process of forging a new kind of citizenry. An anal-
ysis of the Estrela Garden qua liberal laboratory enables us to account for the
difference between the Liberal dream of a garden that is free (of any entrance
fee) and open to the public in theory and the demographic make-up of the
citizens who used the garden in practice. By accounting for such discrepancies,
we can understand how a particularly modern vision of Lisbon’s public sphere
was articulated in the latter half of the nineteenth-century.11
2 A Liberal Garden
The Estrela Garden occupies an area of the city, which historically belonged
to the monastic enclosure of the Benedictine convent of Our Lady of Estrela
during the sixteenth-century.
However, new neighbourhoods were built in this area during the eighteenth-
century: the neighbourhood of Santa Isabel was created in 1741, followed by
the Nossa Senhora da Lapa in 1770. In 1771, the English Cemetery – the oldest
cemetery in Lisbon – was built on a portion of the premises formerly used by
the convent and dedicated to the burial of deceased British citizens who lived
11 J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category
of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Figure 10.1 Map of Lisbon by J. Henshall, indicating the Passeio Publico in green and the future
location of the Estrela Garden in blue, 1833. Detail from the Estrela Garden made in c.1910,
based on the map by Filipe Folque in 1858. AML, PT/AMLSB/CMLSB/UROB-PU/05/03
in the city. Moreover, the area gained additional significance with the erection
of the Basilica of Estrela, dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and built in
1789, under the patronage of the Queen Maria II. By consequence, this newly
minted neighbourhood attracted wealthy foreigners, diplomats, and ambas-
sadors to a particular area called Buenos Aires, which was located behind the
Basilica, and eventually became the area most favoured by Lisbon’s English
residents.12 However, and despite the particular charm of Buenos Aires, by the
mid-nineteenth-century the other area bordering the Basilica – in the direc-
tion of the British cemetery and the Estrela Garden’s future site13 – was still
seen as “cultivated lands of little value,” which displayed “a few small houses of
unpleasant and very poor appearance.”14
Eight years after the extinction of religious orders by the liberal regime, and
the ensuing expropriation of their properties, an open field approximately 750
meters northwest of the convent of Our Lady of Estrela, then belonging to a
private owner who eventually declared bankruptcy, was expropriated by the
City Council in 1842. The Liberal Deputy, state reformer, and then-president of
the Council of Ministers, Costa Cabral, decided that this piece of land should
become Lisbon’s first public garden.15 Cabral’s decision followed the recent
establishment of the City Council’s Department of Gardens and Green Grounds
12 A Handbook for Travellers in Portugal, 4th ed. (London: John Murray, 1887), 11.
13 Duarte José Fava, Carta topographica de Lisboa e seus suburbios (Lisboa: Caza do Risco das
Obras Publicas, 1833). BNP, C.C. 1067 R.
14 “O Passeio da Estrella,” Archivo Pittoresco 17 (1858): 129–130, 129.
15 “O Passeio da Estrella,” 129.
in 1840, the department deemed responsible for Lisbon’s afforestation, as well

as the construction of its plazas, square-gardens, and major public gardens.
Despite the backing by private donors for Lisbon’s first public garden, the
project was postponed due to Portugal’s mounting financial and economic cri-
sis, and the government’s instability due to the disagreements between rival
factions within the Liberal regime. Thus, it was due to the compounding effects
of financial crisis and political instability that it would take another eight
years before the projected public garden would become a reality. Additionally
important for the project’s realisation was its new-found impetus in the shape
of the Minister of Kingdom Rodrigo da Fonseca, and despite his divergent
inclinations than those of the garden’s initial promoter. Notwithstanding polit-
ical rivalries and economic crisis, what is clear is that the idea of the Estrela
Garden was a vision that was shared by all. Therefore, we follow the historical
work of Livingstone and argue that the political ecological niche of the first lib-
eral public garden was intimately linked to the political nucleus of the liberal
nation: Parliament. Thus, novel values of citizenship were not just supported
by legislative measures; new urban spaces, and most especially this public gar-
den, embodied a new conception of the rights of citizens and redefined the
meaning of both the responsibilities of the state and everyday public life. Once
again, private donations from a wealthy Portuguese merchant16 who emigrated
from Brazil (Rio de Janeiro), supplemented the government budget, and aided
efforts to involve Lisboners in the creation of the Estrela Garden.
In 1853, one year after its founding, the location of the Estrela Garden was
already the topic of an article in the weekly journal Panorama, directed by the
writer, historian, and liberal intellectual, Alexandre Herculano. For Herculano,
the ideals of Liberalism were to be realised by virtue of both the economic
advantages of techno-scientific discoveries and the cultivation of an edu-
cated moral character, which he viewed to be proper to the model citizen of a
modernised Lisbon. What is more, the location of the new public garden was
particularly discussed by comparisons to Lisbon’s only other existing public
garden, which the city’s residents inherited from the former Absolutist regime:
the Public Promenade. By contrast, the Estrela Garden perfectly embodies
Chris Otter’s emphasis on the visual character of liberal cities, given its loca-
tion wherein “nature and art” were said to “mingle,” while profiting from the
altitude, which afforded its visitors broad and airy vistas of both the city and
the river.17 Thus, as J. Cascaes wrote in his 1854 article for Panorama, the “public
16 “Vista do Interior do Passeio da Estrella,” Archivo Pittoresco 27 (1863): 209; and Synopse
1851: 12–13.
17 Otter, “Making Liberalism Durable.”
punishes” those who conceived the Public Promenade as encircled by walls

and buildings.18
In January 1850, a committee, which included Lisbon’s mayor and the
Councillor of the Department of Gardens and Green Grounds, worked
directly with the Ministry of the Kingdom to secure the concerted support
of the government and City Council alike. However, due to the importance
of this project for all parties involved, a project already led by the initiative of
Parliament and under a special mandate from the Ministry of the Kingdom,
the City Council appointed an extra Councillor to the Department of Gardens
and Green Grounds exclusively dedicated to supervising its construction.19
Trenchant bureaucracy, however, inevitably hindered the immediate access to
available funds. Despite initial ups and downs, the Ministry of the Kingdom
deposited the projects funding and donations at the Bank of Portugal, and on
behalf of the City Council, effectively financing the project for several years
into its construction. The government’s political commitment was, thus, made
clear. Amounts were always accounted for in the city’s revenue,20 and, always,
correctly matched any expenses incurred for both the construction and main-
tenance of the garden.
The special political status of the Estrela Garden is evident from its leading
position in the hierarchy of the Department of Gardens and Green Grounds
of the city council. It materialized in the allocation of a considerable fraction
of its budget, expertise, and personnel to the garden. By analysing the minutes
and budget reports of the City Council, we can “follow the money”21 and com-
paratively assess the personnel and expenses allocated to the Estrela Garden
with those of the Public Promenade, thereby uncovering the privileged posi-
tion of the Estrela Garden within the Liberal government’s urban agenda. Now,
despite the Municipality’s construction of a garden that is a meagre one-third
(4,6 ha) of the area of the Public Promenade, the budget for the Estrela Garden
was double the amount allocated for the Public Promenade’s construction
by the ancien régime.22 Only further underscoring its singular importance for
the urbanisation of Lisbon was the fact that, since the creation of the Estrela
Garden, there was a consistent disinvestment in the Public Promenade until its
final dismantling, in 1879, in order to give way to the Haussmann-like Avenida
18 J. Cascaes, “O Passeio da Estrella,” O Panorama, 7 (1853): 54–55.

19 Synopse 1850: 7.
20 Annaes 1856: 44.
21 Focus: Follow the Money: Networks, Peers, and Patronage in the History of Science, Isis 103 2
(2012): 310–355.
22 AML, Reports of Expenses, 1869, PT/AMLSB/CMLSB/OMUN-C/13.
da Liberdade (Avenue of Liberty): the most emblematic innovation of the lib-

eral city. Quantitative data only provides further corroboration.
In 1855 and 1856, the City Council spent 160$470 reis in salaries and other
expenses for the Public Promenade, and 377$310 reis in the Estrela Garden.23
In 1864, the City Council allocated 195$490 reis for the Public Promenade and,
by contrast, allocated 327$600 reis for the maintenance of the Estrela Garden.
In 1869, expenses for the Estrela Garden (82580$000 reis) almost doubled
the City Council’s expenditure for the Public Promenade (43000$000 reis).24
Concerning workers: of the 65 workers hired by the Department of Gardens
and Green Grounds, approximately half (i.e. 30 workers) were allocated to the
Estrela Garden – including a gardener, a tool keeper, three uniformed gate-
keepers, five uniformed guards, two uniformed night-guards, 16 workers, one
apprentice, and one greenhouse worker, – while only sixteen were reserved for
working on the Public Promenade.25
The responsibilities of the gardener of Estrela Garden were always entrusted
to a specialised artisan,26 who was the only permanent gardener hired by the
Department of Gardens and Green Grounds; hence the role’s title of “gardener-
in-chief.”27 At the time, the gardener-in-chief served various functions from
landscape architect to landscape manager, and from the garden’s horticultural-
ist to its botanist. Responsible for all urban green areas, the gardener-in-chief
directed all green public workers, while delegating responsibilities to the tool
keeper whenever the gardener-in-chief made supervision-visits to the other
gardens, square-gardens, and groves. Moreover, the gardener-in-chief designed
gardens and supervised the nurseries of the Estrela Garden, which, since 1859,
housed a seed bank and plant specimens to be acclimatised before circulating
in Lisbon’s green urban grid, and made deliveries to all other gardens in the
city upon request.28
Despite the few foreigners’ who were given the title of gardener-in-chief,
the gardener who made the longest lasting impact on the garden in the sec-
ond half of the nineteenth-century was João Francisco da Silva. In 1850, Silva
became assistant to Estrela’s first gardener-in-chief, the Frenchman Jean
23 Annaes 1856: 7. Reis is an Ancient Portuguese currency. Throughout this paper several
quantitative comparisons of salaries and expenses enable the reader to form an idea of
the relative amounts involved.
26 Maria Filomena Mónica, Artesãos e Operários: Indústria, Capitalismo e Classe Operária em
Portugal (1870–1934) (Lisboa: Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade, 1986).
28 Regulation 1859.
Bonard,29 with possible plans for his promotion to gardener-in-chief before

1865.30 Although we do not know much about his informal training, Silva was
an educated man, keeping abreast of foreign literature, especially French lit-
erature, on horticulture. By the early 1870s, Silva was drafting projects for new
square gardens, and was acknowledged by the Councillor of the Department
of Gardens and Green Grounds for his expertise, which even included the pos-
sibility of a raise in his salary.31
In the early 1880s, Silva was a member of an expert committee to decide
on the various species of plants to include in the project that would replace
the Public Promenade: the Haussmann-like Avenida da Liberdade.32 This com-
mittee was composed of the most renowned gardeners and agronomists and
included Jules Daveau, the gardener-in-chief of the botanical garden at the
Polytechnic School, and Francisco Margiochi, former city Councillor, responsi-
ble for the creation of the Department of Gardens and Green Grounds special-
ised library, and the founder of the Portuguese Royal Society of Horticulture.33
Therefore, and despite the differences in terms of his social status or educa-
tional background, João Francisco da Silva was acknowledged by his peers as a
professional expert. What is more, it was only a few months later that Silva was
sent on an important mission to the Potager du Roi, near the Palace of Versailles,
in France.34 Aside from his superiors’ recognition of himself as an expert gar-
dener, Silva treated the responsibility that came with his role as an expert civil
servant with equal seriousness, and whose duties of serving the common good,
the city, and the nation, were not to be alienated to any private entrepreneur-
cum-horticulturalist, irrespective of their professional importance.35
3 A Techno-Scientific Garden
The uniqueness of the Estrela Garden also extended to its naturalistic design,
its so-called “semi-exotic” vegetation, and techno-scientific constitution. It is
for these reasons that the Garden became a site wherein modern precepts of
horticulture – including greenhouses and nurseries – intermingled with the
accommodation of “exotic” specimens, their popularisation, modern works of
29 “O Passeio da Estrella,” 130.

30 AML, PT/AMLSB/AL/CMLSB/UROB-E/23, Cx. 49 do SGO, 1865, doc. 15.
32 AML, PT/AMLSB/AL/CMLSB/UROB-E/23, Cx. 49A do SGO, 1882, doc. 50.
33 Rodrigues, and Simões, “Horticulture,” 205–211; Rodrigues, “Greening the city.”
urban infrastructure, and the latest trends in urban garden furniture, and all
while complying with the new principles of hygiene and public health.
The Garden itself was designed by Portuguese architects from the Ministry
of Public Works, who were heavily influenced by the French picturesque style.
Despite having roots in the English picturesque style, an offspring of the English
landscape garden style, the picturesque style was appropriated and adapted to
differing degrees across the European continent.36 With respect to the French
context, the picturesque style modified the English garden’s lawns, trees, and
shrubs and clearly displayed a taste for sculptures, kiosks, pavilions, and flow-
erbeds. Following Gabriel Thouin’s Plans Raisonnés de toutes les espèces de
Jardins (1820) – a copy of which was housed in the specialised library of the
Department of Gardens and Green Grounds37 – the small scale of the Estrela
Garden was inspired by natural landscapes and Arcadian ideals, and therefore
integrated trees, shrubs, lawns, flowerbeds, several lakes, pavilions, statues,
and garden-furniture in its landscape design.
Although the Estrela Garden was directly inspired by the French adaptation
of the English use of the picturesque, the garden’s local and national character
predated Haussmann’s renovation of Paris. which became a direct model for
other areas of Lisbon, such as the Avenue of Liberty (1879–1886) influenced
by the Champs Elysées or the project for the Campo Grande inspired in the
Bois de Boulogne (1903). Furthering the French picturesque style stressed by
Picon38 and inaugurated one decade after the Estrela Garden, the Parc des
Buttes-Chaumont’s construction took inspiration from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
passion for wilderness, and thus incorporated various representations of the
aesthetic category of the sublime. By contrast, and inspired by Thouin’s pro-
posals, the Estrela Garden’s relatively small elevation was not intended to
inspire an experience like the feeling provoked by mountains of incalculable
height, or valleys of immeasurable depth, but aimed at the satisfaction gained
from the Garden’s pleasing views that overlooked the Tagus River.
In addition to the natural beauty afforded by its location relative to the rest
of Lisbon and the river, the Estrela Garden also served as a site for city planners
to experiment with the new forms of grey infrastructures. In 1852, a hydraulic
system was installed via the excavation of stone channels under public streets
for the purposes of carrying water to the Garden.39 However, as the economic
36 John Dixon Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape
Architecture (London and Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994).
37 Gabriel Thouin, Plans Raisonnés de Toutes les Espèces de Jardins (Paris: l’auteur, 1820),
n. 47; Rodrigues, “Greening the city.”
38 Picon, “Nature et ingénierie”.
39 Synopse 1852: 25, 34 and 44.
historian Álvaro Ferreira da Silva has demonstrated, negotiations between the

municipality and the privately owned Water Company were never easy.40 In
1870, and due to the drawback of relying on private water management – e.g.
irregular water flow – the Head of the City Council proposed that the Estrela
Garden come under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Public Works,41 and sug-
gested installing a water regulation box in the pipes at the front of the Garden’s
gates.42 Following this resolution, the Water Company directed another branch
of water into the Estrela Garden, reducing the supply typically reserved for the
irrigation of trees along its neighbouring streets. And to make matters worse, it
is no exaggeration to say that relationship between the Department of Gardens
and Green Grounds and the City Council was unreliably smooth, at best.43
Alongside grey infrastructures, and ever since the 1851 International
Exhibition in London, the architectural use of iron structures rose to
prominence.44 Horticulture particularly profited from the advantages offered
by the inclusion, and materiality of, iron and glass in the construction of
greenhouses,45 while the construction of lighter structures and the use of
cheaper glass facilitated the acclimatisation of exotic species – a process that
was more occasional than systematic46 – and aided in the hybridisation/inter-
breeding of new varieties of flora and the multiplication of young specimens.
This simple integration of iron and glass at the Estrela Garden led to its most
emblematic structure: the wide variety of greenhouses, which populated the
Garden ever since its inception and despite there being no record of the plans
for its first greenhouse. In any case, in the latter months of 1859, a new green-
house was being constructed based on the design of supernumerary gardeners
and supervised by the gardener-in-chief himself47 – an initial structure that
40 Álvaro Ferreira da Silva, “Thirsting for Efficiency: Technological and Transaction-cost

Explanations for the Municipalisation of Water Supply,” in Ana Duarte Rodrigues and
Carmen Toribio Marín, eds., The History of Water Management in the Iberian Peninsula
between the Sixteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Cham: Springer, 2020), 89–110.
41 AML, Session of the Lisbon City Council, 16 August 1870.
44 Hermione Hobhouse, The Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition. Art, Science and
Productive Industry (London and New York: Continuum, 2004); Saraiva, Ciencia y Ciudad.
45 Otter, “Making Liberalism Durable.”
46 Only in the colonial garden (see chapter 8 in this volume), set up at the turn to the twen-
tieth century, a program similar to the French and English empires was implemented.
Michael Osborne, “Acclimatizing the World: A History of the Paradigmatic Colonial
Science,” Osiris, 15 (2000): 135–151.
47 Annaes 1859: 458.
Figure 10.2 Project of the greenhouse by Burnay, 1877
would eventually be replaced by a greenhouse comprised of iron and glass, in

the late 1870s.
In April 1877, a contract was established between the City Council and
the capitalist civil engineer, João Burnay.48 Always under the supervision of
the Councillor, and in faithful accordance with the plans appended to the
contract – detailing the resistance and quality of the wrought and cast iron
and glass, the number of layers of paint, with the third and last in black
charcoal – the engineer was in charge of transporting all necessary construc-
tion materials to the garden and for anchoring the greenhouse onto the stoned
ground built by the City Council. To complete the process, all drawings and
documents pertaining to the project were to be presented to the City Council.
That said, changes to the project proposal could be accommodated pending
their approval considering technical and financial criteria. And yet, while
payment of the second provision for the greenhouse’s construction dated
from 21 November 1877,49 by 17 January 1878, Burnay ordered a suspension of
48 AML, 5 Contracts, fls. 33v.-36.

49 AML, Document nº 351, PT/AMLSB/CMLSB/UROB-PU/06/0133.
work until the City Council approved a cast and wrought iron chassis which
were not specified in the contract but were necessary for the stability of the
greenhouse.50
On 13 January 1880, the city council decided to install a heating system in
the greenhouse.51 One month later, Burnay submitted a budget that amounted
to 1,897$500 reis while the firm L. Dauphinet & V. Castay submitted another,
slightly costlier, budget that amounted to 1,940$000 reis. Both Burnay’s and
L. Dauphinet & V. Castay’s budgets were refused by the Department’s Councillor
on the grounds of their being too expensive.52 The Councillor additionally sug-
gested to use the same heating system in operation in the greenhouse of the
recently founded botanical garden of the Polytechnic School of Lisbon, which
was more than four times less expensive,53 as it did not depend on imported
expertise and was built under local technical supervision. Still, nine months
later, on 15 November 1880, the Councillor was still waiting for the decision
from the works department.54
Following international trends, infrastructures at the Estrela Garden also
included garden furniture and other facilities meant to provide modern ame-
nities to citizens in public spaces. As such, in 1859, the department’s Councillor
purchased twenty-four iron benches with wooden seating.55 Moreover, and in
line with international trends, garden benches were rented, while the number
of seats and its maximum rental price was subjected to regulatory measures.56
By distributing the exploration of the seat rental system among specific insti-
tutions supporting the underprivileged, a social service was offered by the
public garden.
Moreover, included among the architectural practices of a rentier system of
financing public seating in parks, were plans for the Estrela Garden to serve as
the site for musical events and balls, thereby establishing recreational struc-
tures in public gardens. Therefore, from 1873 to 1874, a total of 1,200$000 reis
was spent on the construction of the Garden’s bandstand.57 A Spanish travel-
ler highlighted the Estrela Garden with “a pond, greenhouses, beasts, arbors
[small pavilions], ducks, and roller coasters” and most especially its bandstand
50 AML, Lisbon City Council, Document nº 421, PT/AMLSB/CMLSB/UROB-PU/06–01/0117.

55 Archivo, February 80 (1860), 61.
56 Archivo, July 81 (1861), 642.
in which “a military band plays in the afternoon during wintertime, and on

Thursdays and Sundays evening during summertime.”58
Moreover, in order to satisfy the modernised criteria of hygiene and pub-
lic health, public urinals were introduced into the green spaces of the garden
by 1869; making the Estrela Garden one of the first green spaces to receive
such facilities for public hygiene.59 This was the result of a proposal submitted
by the department’s Councillor to set urinals in the city’s public squares and
gardens, according to a certain design and size, and with the collaboration of
entrepreneurs.60 The City Council was responsible for connecting the urinals
to the city’s sewage system, and for providing water for their maintenance; the
entrepreneurs were responsible for the construction and placement of the uri-
nals, which were to be built at their expense in return for their right to rent part
of the walls for permanent painted advertisements.
Besides the continuous irrigation, fertilization, and cleaning, the Estrela
Garden’s maintenance required the planting of new trees, perennial herba-
ceous plants, annual plants, and various types of shrubs, together with the
yearly renewal of lawns, and mixed-borders arrangements. Experts defined
Lisbon’s vegetation as “semi-exotic” as it intermingled plants typical of the
Mediterranean region with others such as palm trees, and plants from tropi-
cal regions and from cooler regions.61 One could find water bushes, various
species of fig tree and acacia – originally from Australia, Japanese Pittosporum
from Asia – as well as pepper tree and cockspur coral tree from South America,
and poplars and mulberry trees from China. Therefore, most trees cultivated
in Lisbon were adapted to the Mediterranean climate or were autochthonous
species. However, if botanical rarities were the most common source of sur-
prise for foreign visitors to the Garden – as seen in both their memoirs and
tourist guides,62 – the exoticism of Lisbon’s vegetation stood on a blanket of
Mediterranean vegetation.
That said, it was European nurseries, rather than Portugal’s colonies,
that assumed the role of acclimatising Lisbon’s exotic species. During the
nineteenth-century, the traffic of foreign species into the country took place
through the intermittent donations of various species of flora from Portuguese
58 De Madrid á Oporto pasando por Lisboa. Diario de un caminante por Modesto Fernandez Y
Gonzalez (Madrid: Imprenta y Fundicion de M. Tello, 1874), 243.
60 AML, Session of the Lisbon City Council, 3 August 1869 and AML, Drawings of several
urinals established in public squares and gardens, UROB-E/23–0001/5782.
61 Jules Daveau, “Les Jardins de Lisbonne,” Revue Horticole (1879): 226–228.
62 Charles de Franciosi, Lisbonne, souvenirs de Voyage (Lille: Impr. de L. Danel, 1884), 8–9; A
Handbook for Travellers in Portugal, 27–28.
Figure 10.3 Project of a urinal for Lisbon public gardens, 1869
entrepreneurs working overseas, not through the reliance on organised colo-

nial trading routes. While palm trees gained ground over time and came to
dominate the landscape of Lisbon’s green areas, a substantial number of
these plants were acquired and eventually housed in German and Belgium
nurseries.63 In 1890, the work of transplanting these palm trees into the Estrela
Garden exhausted the municipality’s budget for the rest of the year64 – by the
turn of the century the palm tree would become the favoured photographic
backdrop for the garden’s visitors.
What is more, due to the Estrela Garden’s dual function as horticultural sta-
tion – supplying public gardens with trees, plants, and flowers – and determin-
ing agent in the afforestation of Lisbon, transplant techniques and instruments
for plants’ transplantation were, here, brought to perfection. Transplantation
of large trees was made possible by the acquisition of a specialized vehicle in
France. Moreover, staircases, ladders, and several instruments for the cutting
of treetop branches were essential to create shapes and shadows, while turf
rollers facilitated the maintenance of lawns befitting of a modern garden.
As a horticultural site that experimented with new horticultural techniques
and instruments, the Garden was further enhanced by the newly assigned
functions to the gardener-in-chief, including his leadership role of a “school
of practitioners” that would train a new generation of Lisbon’s gardeners,
expected to apply their knowledge to other green spaces within the urban
landscape. As such, the status of the gardener in Portugal became, for the first
time in the country’s history, comparable to the status held by gardeners in
France or England.65
At the end of the nineteenth-century, recreational facilities were planned
for the Estrela Garden to create an atmosphere of leisure and entertainment
that would attract a greater portion of the Lisbon public. Following Gabriel
Thouin’s proposals66 for the carving of a circular path, the Estrela Garden’s
“Montanha” – a portion of green elevation that at times accommodated the
“Montanha Russa” roller coaster, from where one could get a great view over
the Tagus River.
On 17 August 1895, Lisbon’s City Council received a five-year plan for an
organised series of evening concerts, balls, various forms of children’s enter-
tainment, and other forms of public leisure from an entrepreneur backed by
63 Ana Duarte Rodrigues, “Between Usefulness and Ornamentation: Palm Trees in the
Portuguese Empire in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in Maria João Castro,
ed., Império e Arte Colonial/Empire and Colonial Art (Lisboa: CHAM, 2017), 209–232.
64 A.J. Simões de Almeida, A Situaçao dos Serviços Municipaes em 5 de Novembro de 1890 (…)
(Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1890), 20.
65 Regarding the ‘School of Practitioners’ see Archivo, February 80 (1860), 61. On the status of
gardeners in Portugal during the early modern period see Ana Duarte Rodrigues, “O que é
um jardineiro? Nomes, privilégios e funções de hortelãos e jardineiros na Idade Moderna
em Portugal,” Tritão, 1 (2012): 299–308.
66 Thouin, Plans Raisonnés.
the director of the Mercantile Bank of Lisbon.67 The municipality was willing
to hand over the exploration of the garden’s recreational facilities insofar as
the City Council retained the right to the Garden for three nights per month
in order to organize fundraising events for asylums. Aside from the allotted
time reserved for the City’s use, entrepreneurs could explore the garden as
long as twenty percent of their revenues were transferred to the City Council.
Moreover, entrepreneurs oversaw covering the costs of the Garden’s electric
lighting system, expenses for an accountant, the wages of four gatekeepers,
four guards, the police, fire fighters, and the expenses to cover both the public
toilet and its personnel.
The Garden’s private financiers were additionally responsible for cover-
ing the costs of any damage caused to flower beds and plants, or to any other
equipment, which included the mobile wooden enclosure located in the
Garden’s “Montanha” area. Tents, kiosks selling newspapers and refreshments,
as well as cafés and restaurants were only to be established with the consent
of both the City Council and entrepreneurs. And once this five-year contract
came to an end, all recreational structures were to be removed.68 These were
the terms of the official agreement between the City Council and the entrepre-
neurs however, on 13 May 1895, the Ministry of the Kingdom rejected the afore-
mentioned agreement.69 As a dynamic urban structure, the Estrela Garden
was under constant transformation, demonstrating the city’s concern with
modern infrastructures, botanical novelties, horticultural practices, and rec-
reational facilities.
4 A Garden qua Educational Institution
In the first three decades of its existence, the Estrela Garden’s development
proceeded under the aegis of the Liberal government’s infrastructure program
characteristic of the Regeneration period, creating the conditions for citizens
to profit from contact with a domesticated nature mediated by several tech-
nological amenities. During the 1880s, and with the completion of the mate-
rial realisation of the Estrela Garden, Portugal’s Liberal government began to
address another of its defining issues: children and their social and educational
needs who may frequent the garden from time to time. As the future of this
67 AML, Contracts, n.º 29, fl. 1v., PT/AMLSB/CMLSBAH/FNAJ/001/00039/001.

68 AML, Contracts, n.º 29, fls. 3–5, PT/AMLSB/CMLSBAH/FNAJ/001/00039/001.
69 AML, Session of the Lisbon City Council, 13 May 1895.
liberal nation, the wellbeing of children was addressed through recreational,

hygienic, and educational measures.
Children were envisioned as a substantial fraction of the garden’s public and,
as such, entertainment devices and toys were planned. During a City Council
meeting on 6 May 1881, the Councillor of the recently created Department of
Primary Education (1875) defended the acquisition of entertainment devices
and toys for children as privileged users of the garden.70 Not long after this
meeting, an entrepreneur asked for permission to establish recreational
amusements for children for modest prices, by means of mechanical cycles
in the ride of the Estrela Garden,71 which were authorized by the City Council
under the condition to cover any damages incurred in the garden.72
However, beyond these new and expected improvements, it was the estab-
lishment of the first kindergarten in Portugal following the precepts of the
Froebel school, which proved to be both unexpected and of great relevance.
This educational dimension is evidence of the Garden of Estrela’s standing for
the liberal regime, and of early education as a means of national regeneration.
The educational model conceived by the German pedagogue, philosopher and
psychologist Friedrich Froebel was inspired by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s
maternal educational theory, and the main ideas of Naturphilosophie.73 From
the former, Froebel appropriated the importance of women, not just mothers,
in educating youngsters and from the latter, the integrative role of nature for
social life, in general, and most specifically for children’s education. Believing
that the nature of children was not reducible to that of miniature adults, their
individuality and identity should, therefore, be fostered. Children should start
attending school before the age of six, their development should profit from
close contact with nature together with manual and playing activities, and
rewards should replace punishment. However, school should complement, not
substitute, the role of family, acting as a connecting link between the private
and the public realm, between the family and the emergent public sphere of
participating citizens.74
70 Teófilo Ferreira, AML, Session of the Lisbon City Council, 6 June 1881.
71 AML, Session of the Lisbon City Council, 12 December 1881.
72 AML, Session of the Lisbon City Council, 23 November 1881.
73 Ann Taylor Allen, “‘Let us Live with our Children’: Kindergarten Movements in Germany
and the United States, 1840–1914,” History of Education Quarterly, 28, 1 (1988): 23–48, 25.
74 The kindergarten did not aim to supplant the family: it was restricted to four hours a day.
In the Session of the Lisbon City Council, 26 July 1883 (AML), it was decided that children
should have holidays in August.
In 1839, Froebel opened his first kindergarten in Blankenburg, Germany,

whose model was welcome by other countries with greater or lesser appeal,75
but found great support in the United States of America with the arrival of
German immigrants. Alongside a growing German population, the recep-
tion of the Froebel school in the USA was heavily mediated by Pestalozzi’s
thought which influenced the school gardening movement, and the nature
study movement – both movements emphasised the importance of education
in environments close to nature, merging new pedagogical trends with nature
study, mostly horticulture and botany.76 In Portugal, the Froebel school owed
its momentum to the political agenda of Liberalism. Facing high illiteracy
rates, public education was a point of consensus for the regime, irrespective
of differences of opinion among successive leaders. Reforms succeeded with
varying degrees of success,77 and in 1878 and 1880, legislation was passed con-
cerning the need for the establishment of kindergartens.78
A key player in this movement was Teófilo Ferreira, physician, teacher, direc-
tor of Escola Normal de Lisboa (1873–1893), Councillor of the Department of
Primary Education of the City Council (1879–1883), and Member of Parliament
(1890–1894).79 Ferreira’s participation in the 1800 International Congress
of Pedagogy in Brussels – followed by visits to schools in Belgium, Holland,
Germany, Austria, Switzerland and France – convinced him that modern
educational trends in Europe should be appropriated in Portugal, and that
75 W.A. Baldwin, “Kindergartens and Kindergartners,” The Journal of Education, 55, 19 (1378)
(1902): 297; Roberta Wollons, ed., Kindergartens and Cultures: The Global Diffusion of an
Idea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); James C. Albissetti, “Froebel crosses the
Alps: Introducing the Kindergarten in Italy,” History of Education Quarterly 49, 2 (2009):
159–169; Allen, “Let us live with our Children’.”
76 Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, “‘A Better Crop of Boys and Girls’: The School Gardening
Movement, 1890–1920,” History of Education Quarterly 48, 1 (2008): 58–93; and Teaching
Children Science: Hands-On Nature Study in North America, 1890–1930 (University of
Chicago Press, 2010).
77 Rogério Fernandes, O Pensamento Pedagógico em Portugal (Lisboa: Ministério da
Educação, 1992); António Nóvoa, Do Mestre-escola ao Professor do Ensino Primário.
Subsídios para a História da Profissão Docente em Portugal (séculos XVI–XX) (Cruz
Quebrada: Fac. De Motricidade Humana, 1999); António Candeias, Ana Luísa Paz, and
Melânia Rocha, eds., Alfabetização e Escola em Portugal nos séculos XIX e XX: os Censos e
as Estatísticas (Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2007).
78 Maria João Mogarro, “Cultura Material e Modernização Pedagógica em Portugal (séculos
XIX–XX),” Educatio Siglo XXI, 28, 2 (2010): 89–114, 98.
79 Carlos Manique da Silva, and Sónia de Castro Lopes, “Pensamento e ação de Teófilo
Ferreira em defesa da Instrução Primária em Portugal no Final de Oitocentos,” VIII
Congresso Luso-Brasileiro de História de Educação,” accessed on 6 April 2019; Maria
de Lourdes Cró, “Educação de Infância em Portugal: perspetiva histórica,” Revista de
Educação – PUC Campinas (accessed at Linked in on 5 June 2018).
Froebelian institutions were of particular importance.80As Councillor, Ferreira

developed a remarkable set of initiatives together with a group of peda-
gogues, teachers and politicians. Among them stood the creation of the Estrela
kindergarten,81 for children under six years of age, for whom education had
been circumscribed either to the family private sphere or to religious and char-
itable institutions.82 It was announced by the City Council, not accidentally, as
part of the commemorations of the third centenary of the death of the great
Portuguese poet Luís de Camões, in 1880. The twelve resolutions approved
meant to endow the city with improvements contributing to an “intellectual
development to raise [Lisbon] on the scale of civilization.”83 Another initiative
was the publication of a primary education journal, named Froebel: Revista de
Instrucção Primária (Froebel: Primary Education Magazine) launched by the
Lisbon City Council in 1882 – the very same year in which the Estrela kinder-
garten opened.
In the journal’s opening article, Teófilo Ferreira recalled Froebel’s insistence
that children are like human plants and should be nurtured in natural and
healthy environments. They need “first and foremost sun and air to grow, to
develop, and to expand. This is not possible if enclosed in rooms of insufficient
capacity, in courtyards surrounded by high walls, or in dwellings preventing
air renovation.”84 That is, Ferreira had no qualms that within cities, gardens
were ideal places for kindergartens, and that the Estrela Garden was the best
possible choice. What is more, Ferreira discussed the guidelines followed in
the construction of the kindergarten, which started in early 1882, following the
design of the architect José Luís Monteiro, and reused materials from demol-
ished buildings in Alegria Square.85 Monteiro translated Froebel’s thinking
into architecture, stating that “buildings used by infants must include numer-
ous windows so that air is renewed several times a day,” and windows “should
be clear of any obstacles so that light comes in directly and air in the room
benefits from sun’s rays.”86 Furthermore, for Monteiro, buildings should be
bordered, first by glazed awnings, then expensive architectural structures, and
80 Teófilo Ferreira, Relatório do Pelouro da Instrucção da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa relativo

ao ano civil de 1882 (Lisboa: Tipografia de Eduardo Rosa, 1883).
81 On 5 January 1882, Ferreira ordered the construction of a chalet at the Estrela Garden to
establish the Froebel school. AML, Session of the Lisbon City Council, 5 January 1882.
82 Bonifácio, O século XIX português, 67.
84 Teófilo Ferreira, “Escolas Infantis ou Jardins de Froebel (apontamentos para a sua história
em Portugal),” Froebel: Revista de Instrucção Primária, 1 (1882): 2–3, 3.
86 Ferreira, “Escolas Infantis,” 3.
Figure 10.4 Froebel School at the Estrela Garden, 1883

In Occidente 1883, 146: 12
encircled by a garden plot whose awnings enabled children to work and play
outdoors irrespective of weather conditions.
On 21 April 1882, marking the centenary of Froebel’s birthday, a party orga-
nized by Ferreira inaugurated the Estrela kindergarten with pomp and circum-
stance. Many public figures were invited, including the prominent republican
intellectual Teófilo Braga,87 promoter of the 1880 Camões’ celebrations and
future president of the First Republic. The chalet, which housed the kinder-
garten, was an elegant but modest building with capacity for 200 children, and
whose construction costs came out to a total of 2,500$000 reis.88 Having in
mind that formal educational institutions for children from three-to-six-years
of age did not exist previously, this was a considerable level of investment,
while improvements in the building were already undertaken in the year fol-
lowing its inauguration.89 Moreover, in early 1891, protective grids, gates and
shrubs, designed by the chalet’s architect, were built to enclose the garden plot
encircling it.90
87 AML, Session of the Lisbon City Council, 18 April 1882; Letter from the head of the Lisbon
city council, Rosa Araújo, to Teófilo Braga, held at the Azores Regional Archives, BPARPD/
PSS/TB/188/026.
88 Value spent up until 1882. AML, Session of the Lisbon City Council, 16 March 1882.
90 AML, Cx. 113 DSU, PT/AMLSB/CMLSB/UROB-PU/09/01952.
The building’s organization followed Froebel’s instructions and met

requested hygienic and pedagogical conditions. It included four rooms where
children were grouped by age levels, and a playing room.91 Froebel specifically
assigned the teaching function to women rather than men as he privileged
women nurturing qualities, albeit transplanted from the private to the public
sphere, and this recommendation was strictly followed at the Estrela kinder-
garten.92 When it opened a teacher was hired.93 Of the 214 children enrolled
in the 1882–1883 academic year, only 142 actually attended the school, while
teaching was entrusted to two teachers, with the addition of a gymnastics
instructor, aided by gardeners.94 By 1883, an additional teacher was responsible
for taking care of the garden – earning 7$000 reis each month as a bonus for
the additional labour.95 At the end of 1885, the school functioned with a staff
consisting of a principal, two teachers,96 “gardener-monitors,” and a gymnas-
tics teacher.97
Hiring gardeners as education auxiliaries reinforced the importance of
pedagogical precepts anchored in the contact with nature as key component
for encouraging young children in the study, gardening, and life-long interest
in horticulture, as well as in the development of observation and reasoning
capabilities.98 For Simões Raposo, a well-known teacher and pedagogue, and
author of an article in the first issue of the journal Froebel, gardening was
listed among the educational activities implemented at Froebel kindergar-
tens, together with activities to develop children’s senses of sight, hearing,
smell, taste and touch, as well as notions of colour, quantity, scale, and num-
ber. Specific puzzle-like exercises involved assembling small objects or pieces
91 Simões Raposo, “Os Jardins d’Infancia de Froebel,” Froebel: Revista de Instrucção Primária 1
(1882): 4–6.
92 Ann Taylor Allen, “Spiritual Motherhood: German Feminists and the Kindergarten
Movement, 1848–1911,” History of Education Quarterly, Special Issue: Educational Policy
and Reform in Modern Germany, 22, 3 (1982): 319–339.
93 AML, AC, Livro 8º de Registo de Diplomas, fl. 21.
94 AHP, Parliamentary Debates, Kingdom Chamber of Peers, Session of 16 July 1890, 633;
Caetano Pinto, “Jardim d’Infancia em Lisboa,” O Occidente: revista illustrada de Portugal e
do estrangeiro 146 (1883): 11–14, 12.
96 AML, AC, Livro 8º de Registo de Diplomas, fls. 83, 56 and 60.
97 Caetano Pinto, “Jardim d’Infancia em Lisboa” (cit.n.111), on p. 12.
98 Maria José da Silva Canuto, “Froebel,” Froebel: Revista de Instrucção Primária, 1882, 1 (1882):
3–4, 3; Lucy Latter, School Gardening for Little Children (London: Swan Sonnenchein &
Co., 1906), xviii; W.E. Watkins and A. Sowman, School Gardening (London: George Philip
& Son, 1909).
together, or placing them in vacant places, as well as exercises of plaiting, pierc-

ing, embroidering, folding, cutting, pasting, nailing, drawing, and modelling.99
For the first time in Portugal, children learned by playing, not by memorizing
or by working.
In the early months of 1882, and in addition to educational requirements,
issues concerning public health ultimately informed the civil governor’s order
for the establishment of a vaccination post and a “lactarium” (milk depository)
at the Estrela kindergarten100 – reinforcing the relevance of the garden as a
role model according to modern hygienist urban principles. By 1890, the City
Council considered the Estrela kindergarten such a success that it proposed to
open another kindergarten to serve children who inhabited the east side of the
city.101 Following Froebel and the liberal democratic movement of the bour-
geoisie in Europe and Portugal, Ferreira viewed the kindergarten as an institute
of “education for the people,” and, as such, a “real source of public wealth […]
capable of raising the moral and intellectual level of the people, that is, of the
most important part of the social fabric.”102 For Simões Raposo, it was clear
that the kindergarten “should not be intended exclusively for the children of
rich or remediated families, but rather, more generally, for the education of the
children of the people, the working class, the poor.”103 These two statements
illustrate the ambivalent meaning of popular education in a country with a
high illiteracy rate and a population struggling to make ends meet.
At the Estrela Garden, a considerable distance separated ideological aims
from their concrete application, as well as in other gardens across Europe as
shown by Wise’s case study. While the kindergarten embodied a broad vision
of popular education, the children in attendance were more likely to belong
to the country’s (upper-) middle-class, and not its working-class citizens.
Thus, due to its privileged status within the liberal city, the Estrela Garden was
projected, surprisingly but understandably, as the forefront of the history of
primary education in Portugal. That said and building on the public service
provided by the Garden’s kindergarten, the following section engages with the
garden’s multiplicity of functions, which catered to a diversity of publics. This
will help us understand the various dimensions through which the Estrela
Garden can truly be said to be a public space.
99 Raposo, “Os Jardins d’Infancia,” 6.

103 Raposo, “Os Jardins d’Infancia,” 6.
5 The Meaning of Being Public
As the first public garden in Lisbon without entrance fee, the 1858 instructions
for the municipal police to secure public’s safety leaves no doubts concern-
ing the practical meaning of a garden “for all.” Any visitor should be properly
dressed, while admission was denied to drunkards, the mentally ill, men carry-
ing freights, and unsupervised children under the age of ten.104
Aside from the special events mentioned in previous sections, which gath-
ered a substantial number of occasional visitors, inhabitants of the nearby
neighbourhoods were probably the Garden’s most frequent visitors. The “reg-
ulars” of Estrela often belonged to Portugal’s elite and bourgeoisie, but also
included foreigners that were often from the English upper-class/aristocracy,
or of German and French background – these were usually women associ-
ated with the diplomatic personnel and ambassadors’ residences, which con-
centrated in the area.105 Thus, in addition to the large group of children who
regularly attended schooling at the newly founded kindergarten, the Estrela
Garden fashioned a spectacle of progress and modernity out of a heteroge-
neous crowd. It is no exaggeration to say that, daily, the Estrela Garden encour-
aged the taste for botany, horticulture, and gardening since a very early stage.
As a materialization of political urban ecology of science, the garden became
a symbolic international showpiece of the Liberal government, intended to
demonstrate, and foster (upper-) middle-class ideals, to shape a new more
civilised and educated elite relative to that of the ancien régime.
And yet, in the decades that followed its initial opening, the Estrela Garden
was a far cry from its supposed availability/accessibility for all of Lisbon’s
inhabitants. Gatekeepers and guards secured public order, the right of admis-
sion and ensured that the Garden did not suffer any damages, and that proper
behaviour was followed “with all civility.”106 The public’s safety was also secured
by security who enforced the law requiring all dogs to be accompanied by their
owners and to wear a leash.107 This was a reaction to the mounting number of
stray dogs populating the city (see chapter 11 in this volume), a problem that
worried the City Council and many of its councillors, to the extent that propos-
als for their extermination were put forward in the 1870s. Furthermore, and
except for military officers, no men on horseback were admitted.108
104 Annaes 1858: 102.

105 “O Passeio da Estrella,” 129 and Joaquim Bensaude “Aspectos de Lisboa: Uma Tarde no
Passeio da Estrela,” Illustração Portuguesa, 365 (1913): 213.
106 Annaes 1859: 260.
107 Annaes 1858: 102.
108 Annaes 1858: 102.
Since its inception, the Estrela Garden attracted experts, including horticul-
turists of international rank. For example, when Ernest Bergman, the secre-
tary of the International Congress of Horticulture visited Lisbon in 1889, Jules
Daveau, the French botanist, regular consultant to the municipality, and chief-
gardener of the recently founded botanical garden of the liberal Polytechnic
School of Lisbon, took Bergman on a guided-tour around the city’s gardens.
Bergman’s enthusiasm for the Estrela Garden left no doubts as to its standing
as a public green space in which horticultural practices and acclimatization
experiments took the lead, thereby adding to its exquisite appearance to be
enjoyed by everybody.109
The garden’s visibility ranged from the royal family and aristocracy to the
accidental tourist and public at large.110 At a time when tourism was being
reassessed at the international and national level, the Garden became a pres-
ence in various cultural representations of the city – from traveller’s memo-
ries, travel guides, illustrated magazines – to such an extent that foreign tourist
guides considered the Garden as one of the main attractions of Lisbon. To the
traveller, it was certainly “a source of no ordinary delight as it is to locals, who
enjoy it when the weather is fine, and where a band of music is frequently play-
ing in the evening.”111
The public character of the Garden was also reflected in monetary or mate-
rial donations – which included seeds and plants, by entrepreneurs, capitalists,
and regular citizens – and through its organization of major events, most of
which were parties held for humanitarian and/or charitable purposes. Estrela
Garden received financial and community support from Lisboners of a variety
of backgrounds, mostly Lisbon’s elite, politicians, bourgeoisie, but also from
foreigners, local institutions, and neighbours. On 4 August 1879, the substitute
councillor applied on behalf of a solicitor and the City Hall of the island of
Flores, Azores to operate amusements in the Estrela Garden, for fund raising
purposes for the island’s hospital.112 This request prompted a requirement to
the effect that no concession agreement should be granted except when ben-
efitting charitable institutions.113 The request was most probably approved.
Moreover, in 1904, the Press Association organized a party whose profit went
to the journalists’ widows and orphans on St. John’s Day. Various institutions
109 Ernest Bergman, Une Excursion en Portugal: Notes de Voyage (Meaux: impr. Destouches,
1890), 56; “Notes Horticoles sur le Portugal,” Journal de la Société Nacionale d’Horticulture
de France (1890), 76.
110 It was visited by King Fernando II (Fernando of Saxe-Coburg-Gota) and his second wife
Countess of Edla. AML, Session of the Lisbon City Council, 14 April 1873.
111 A Handbook for Travellers in Portugal, 27–28.
of the neighbourhood helped organize the event: the Oficinas de São José
(St. Joseph’s workshops), the charity commission of Lapa, and the Primary
Teachers’ Society all installed tents selling various products.
This practice of organizing social events, gathering huge crowds, would only
be further accentuated during the first years of the Republic.114 A rich iconog-
raphy proves that on special occasions hundreds of people visited the garden
for specific purposes. To these instances one should add the episodic visitors
mentioned above, and all the regular garden attendants, including garden
workers and experts, as well as teachers and children attending the kindergar-
ten daily. Together, they enable the historian to capture the elusive public, and
build for once a clear view of the different categories of people who made the
garden their own.
From experts to lay people, from royalty to elites and to the common
people – whether foreigner or local, man or woman, young or old – a great vari-
ety of citizens profited from the garden’s multifarious functions in their daily
routines. As the first liberal garden in Lisbon, it was used to mould a new sort
of citizenry, encompassing all social strata in principle, if not in practice. This
space that was both green and public was to be enjoyed by them while it incor-
porated scientific knowledge and technological amenities in everyday life. At
the same time, the Garden played the role of an educational site for children
under the age of six. As such, it provided the opportunity for experimenting
with the very meaning of being public, and thus contributed, indirectly, to
the emergence of what Jurgen Habermas understands by the concept of the
Figure 10.5 Views from the Party Flower organized in 1918

In Illustracção Portuguesa, 1918, 640: 401–406, on pages 402 and
405
114 José Joubert Chaves, “A Festa da Flor,” Illustração Portugueza 590 (11 June 1917): 462–468;
António Maria de Freitas, “A Festa da Flor,” Illustração Portugueza 640 (27 May 1918):
401–406.
“public sphere.” People who attended the garden were much more than passive
recipients of liberal ideology; they became active citizens who participated in
the life of the garden. Thus, the Garden afforded its visitors an active role in
their participation in urban life as well, sharing concerns and entertaining col-
lective actions geared towards specific aims. Originally founded as a garden for
the public, Estrela quickly became a garden of the public.
As the first public garden of the Liberal regime, the Estrela Garden invites
us to rethink how scientific and technological expertise matched new urban
structural and social demands in the second half of the nineteenth-century.
As one of the regime’s crowning achievements its privileged status was crystal-
lized in its location next to the Portuguese Parliament, in its ranking vis-à-vis
the Public Promenade, and in the concerted action of government and City
Council, which supported both its construction and development. The Estrela
Garden assumed primacy and became a chief concern within the hierarchy
of the Department of Gardens and Green Grounds of the City Council, and
in the decisions of urban experts, including councillors, architects, engineers,
gardeners, and entrepreneurs – which informed the appropriation of interna-
tional garden styles into a local materialization.
Moreover, techno-scientific knowledge and expertise were behind the
construction of the Estrela Garden. Examples include the construction and
development of infrastructures supporting greenhouses and nurseries, where
concrete horticultural practices were experimented and where plants to be
transplanted to other public gardens in Lisbon were acclimatized, providing
the ground for the public display and popularization of botanical novelties.
The relation of the garden to its publics was central to the ideological agenda
of the liberal regime. The Estrela Garden moulded not only the urban land-
scape, but also a liberal public by fostering the awareness of public duties and
rights, and the promotion of new forms of articulation of state with civic soci-
ety. Last but not the least, the Garden’s striking singularity in the European
context stemmed from its pioneering role in education at the kindergarten
level. The importance of children for the future of the liberal nation was
behind its choice for the establishment of the first kindergarten, which took
Froebel’s pedagogical ideas as a model for the education provided in Portugal’s
first liberal, public garden.
The conjunction of all these strands reveals how a relatively small green
space acted as a social laboratory that enabled one to grasp the arc of Lisbon’s
modernisation – both in comparison to other European cities and as con-

ceived and implemented by the liberal regime. Grounded on an ideology of
progress, it encompassed techno-scientific knowledge, followed by an empha-
sis on educational and moral values, and the belief that shaping new publics
was a structural/necessary condition for promoting a new kind of society, a
new organisation of urban space, and a new model citizen.
Acknowledgments
We thank Tiago Saraiva for comments on an earlier version of this chapter. This
work was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology
under research projects IF/00322/2014, VISLIS – PTDC/IVC-HFC/3122/2014,
and UID/HIS/UI0286/2013, UID/HIS/UI0286/2019 and UIDB/00286/2020
UIDB/00286/2020.
Chapter 11
Allies or Enemies? Dogs in the Streets of Lisbon

in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
Inês Gomes
Supreme derision!
[The dog] living in the domestic intimacy, being our loyal compan-
ion and not infrequently our true friend; he, who witnesses to us
in the silent language of his caresses and fondles, the purest affec-
tions, the noblest sentiments, which so often make him a hero and
meritorious; the same animal to which nature bestowed such gifts,
so docile, so good, so generous, becomes a vile murderer, when
rabies pervert his instincts, spreading terror in villages, dragging in
his miserable existence, a danger before which, even the animals
instinctively run away in terror.1
⸪
On 28 May 1887, at eight o’clock in the morning, shouts and barks were heard in
the streets of downtown Lisbon. Manuel Martins, an employee of the Abegoaria
da Limpeza (cleaning department of the City Council of Lisbon), was passing
by the Praça do Comércio (Commerce Square) and saw a dog lying down on
the western sidewalk of Rua do Ouro (Gold Street). Manuel Martins grabbed
him, waiting for the stray dog pickup carriage to approach. Upon witnessing
Manuel Martins grasping the dog, two soldiers of the Municipal Guard who
were standing guard at the Banco de Portugal (Bank of Portugal) grabbed and
punched Martins, eventually injuring him. The dog ran away. The civil police,
who regularly accompanied the municipal employees in the service of picking
up stray dogs, were forced to intervene.2
1 António Júlio Lobo da Costa, Diagnose da raiva nos carnívoros domésticos, dissertação inau-
gural (Lisboa: Instituto de Agronomia e Veterinária, 1904), 26–7.
2 Ofício da Superintendência de Limpeza dirigido ao vereador do Pelouro de Saúde e Higiene,
de 30 de maio de 1887 – Arquivo Histórico da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa (Lisbon City
Council Historical Archive), here after AHCML, SGO, caixa 74.
© Inês Gomes, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004513440_016

324 Gomes
Cities were often the scene of conflicts in which nonhuman animals3 were
one of the main actors. Despite the division commonly assumed between
humanity and nature, the ubiquity of animals in cities is undeniable.4 Human
and animal lives have always been entangled, such that animals can change,
influence, and shape people’s attitudes and practices, transforming societies
and their natural surroundings in the process.5
Recent historiography uncovered the animal-dimension of urban growth.6
The expansion of the nineteenth-century metropolis depended on intimate
linkages between nature and the city,7 integrating animals as both a valuable
food resource and as a labouring member of urban society.8 Animals served as
actors in spectacles, such as zoos or bullfights, while some wild animals were
publicly displayed in gardens.9 In addition to their social status as friends and
companions,10 animals were also viewed as undesirable pests who harboured
deadly diseases.11 Therefore, the truth of Almeroth-Williams’ reflections on
3 For simplicity, from now onwards, the term “animals” will be used to refer to “nonhuman
animals.”
4 Caroline Hodak. “Les animaux dans la cité: pour une histoire urbaine de la nature,”
Genèses: Sciences du politique 37, (1999):156–169.
5 Harriet Ritvo, “On the Animal Turn,” Daedalus 136, (2007): 118–122. See also, for example,
“Animals, Science and Technology: multispecies histories of scientific and sociotechnical
knowledge-practices,” Special Issue HoST. Journal of History of Science and Technology 13,
2 (2019).
6 Peter Atkins, ed., Animal Cities: Beastly Urban Histories (London and New York: Routledge,
2016); Frederick L. Brown, The City Is More Than Human: An Animal History of Seattle
(London: University of Washington Press, 2016); Thomas Almeroth-Williams, City of beasts:
How animals shaped Georgian London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019);
Juliana Adelman, Civilized by beasts: Animals and urban change in nineteenth-century
Dublin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020); Andrew A. Robichaud, Animal
City: The Domestication of America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
2019).
7 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton
& Company, 1991).
8 Paula Young Lee, ed., Meat, modernity, and the rise of the slaughterhouse (Hanover, NH:
University Press of New England, 2008); Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, The Horse in the
City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2007).
9 E. Robbins Louise, Elephant slaves and pampered parrots: Exotic animals in eighteenth-
century Paris (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
10 John K. Walton, “Mad Dogs and Englishmen: The Conflict over Rabies in Late Victorian
England,” Journal of Social History 13, 2 (1979): 219–239.
11 Dawn Biehler, Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Rats (Seattle and London;
University of Washington Press, 2013).
Allies or Enemies? 325
animals in London – “animals [were] as prevalent as people” – can, in fact, be

applied to any urban area.12
The clash of human and animal interests framed urban conflicts involving
residents, real estate developers or businesspeople, public health officials, vet-
erinarians, agronomists, journalists, and politicians.13 Animals, in fact, “under-
pinned [the cities’] physical, social, economic and cultural development in
diverse and fundamental ways.”14 Recognizing the latent conflict between
humans and animals does not mean denying the existence of opposing forces
and movements, which sought to counteract the process of using and abusing
animals. In fact, the expansion of cities in the nineteenth-century, at least in
Europe and North America, and the conflicts over animals were crucial for the
development of animal protection movements and coincide with the growing
awareness of the importance of animals and their welfare. Moreover, due to
the prominence of such societies for the protection of animals in cities around
the world, they also became a source of conflict in the streets.15
In Lisbon, incidents involving stray dogs were frequent. This chapter exam-
ines this topic by exploring how different actors dealt with these animals,
evoking different reasons to change the human-animal relation in the streets
of Lisbon. The core problem posed by the presence of dogs within urban
space was street management, which proved to be a crucial element in solving
attendant conflicts in public space. With respect to the urban improvement
of Lisbon between 1850 and 1910, Álvaro Ferreira da Silva and M. Luísa Sousa
rightly point out that “the street was simultaneously the epicenter of the
‘urban question’ and the key to its solution.”16 The relevance of the street as
both a problem and a solution is particularly clear when analysing the case of
dogs. However, the street appears in this context as an undetermined entity,
although some anecdotal stories reveal the precise location of conflicts.
12 Almeroth-Williams, City of beasts, 1.

13 Walton, “Mad Dogs”; Catherine McNeur, Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the
Antebellum City (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014); Olivier Faure, “Le
bétail dans la ville au XIXe siecle: exclusion ou enfermement?” Cahiers d’histoire 42, 3/4,
(1997), https://journals.openedition.org/ch/309.
14 Almeroth-Williams, City of beasts, 5.
15 Brian Harrison, “Animals and the State in Nineteenth-Century England,” The English
Historical Review 88, 349 (1973): 786–820; Hilda Kean, Animal Rights: Political and Social
Change in Britain Since 1800 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998); Janet M. Davis, The Gospel
of Kindness: Animal Welfare and the Making of Modern America (Oxford, England: Oxford
16 Álvaro Ferreira da Silva and M. Luísa Sousa, “The ‘Script’ of a New Urban Layout: Mobility,
Environment, and Embellishment in Lisbon’s Streets (1850–1910),” Technology and
Culture 60, 1 (2019): 65–97.
326 Gomes
1 The Lisbon Society for the Protection of Animals
Following other European and North American cities, the Society for the
Protection of Animals (SPA) was established in Lisbon in 1875, with offices
housed in the Civil Government building.17 Two years later, on 14 January, the
Society launched a journal, O Zoophilo (The Zoophile), which publicised the
importance of their activities, and spread the SPA’s ideals. Although animal
protection movements were a novelty in Portugal, to advocate for the virtue
of animal welfare societies remained “a banality among the most cultured
nations.”18 The SPA, however, often mentioned the laws enacted in France or
Great Britain, and viewed The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals (RSPCA) as a role model to be emulated.19 As the SPA put it, it was
“urgent” and “indispensable,” “to evangelize by all means the creation of such
institutes” in Portugal.20 Thus, the new Society advocated that Lisbon needed
to transform itself – a new sensitivity in the ways of dealing with animals – in
order to become a modern, cultivated, and enlightened European capital.
That said, the SPA did not intend to prevent the eating of meat from cows
and chickens or to prohibit the elimination of parasites and worms. The “util-
itarian” and “humanitarian” purposes of the SPA were “to diminish the use-
less pain against useful animals, to improve the conditions of their short and
precarious existence among us, their natural masters.”21 Moreover, “if animals
[were] not protected, one could not study the […] improvement of useful
beings, the domestication, […] the acclimatization, the influence of animals
on human’s work and food, their instincts, diseases, hereditary transmissions,
[…] hybridity, […] cattle’s hygienic or economic food.”22 Thus, the SPA argued
that societies dedicated to ensuring the welfare of animals were responsible
for “great advances in agricultural and livestock science.” For the Society, it was
clear that without the protection of animals there would be no oxen for farm-
ing, mules/workhorses for transport, dogs for hunting, recreational birds, and
no insectivorous birds to defend the fields.23
17 See, for example, Harrison, “Animals and the State”; Benjamin Brady, “The Politics of the
Pound: Controlling Loose Dogs in Nineteenth-Century New York City,” Jefferson Journal of
Science and Culture, 2 (2012): 9–25, http://journals.sfu.ca/jjsc/index.php/journal/article/
view/7.
18 “Duas palavras de introdução,” O Zoophilo, 1 (1877): 1.
19 The RSPCA was a model followed in different cities, for instance in New York: Brady, “The
Politics of …”
22 Edital, O Zoophilo, 4 (1887): 1–2.
Beyond emulation and practical – or even economic – reasons, morality was

another driving force for the creation of an institution for the protection of
animals in Lisbon. Indeed, animal protection entailed a fundamentally moral
argument that extended beyond the fact of their economic utility. For the SPA,
the key question was how to inculcate feelings of justice and create cultured
and gentle practices to elevate Portugal to the status of other nations. Moreover,
the SPA’s approach to such issues was predicated on the following conviction:
through the irrational animals, it would be possible to civilize man.24 In other
words, it was necessary “to imprint in the tender heart of childhood and youth
the respect which the works of God deserved, and which man has the duty to
perfect.”25 However, and in line with the commonly held perspective of the
time, the SPA did not oppose the exploitation of animals: humans had the right
of using “inferior beings” but not the right to their brutal abuse, “which lowered
us almost to the level of the irrational.”26 It was crucial to recognise the exis-
tence of sensibility in irrational animals; to spare pain for those who suffered;
to condemn the coward cruelty against harmless, helpless, beings unable to
react against their oppressors.27 Therefore, if cruelty towards animals could
influence the morality of human populations, then it was appropriate, if not
imperative, to enact laws to prevent such cruelty.28
Despite the rhetoric, which comprised many rural elements – i.e. the impor-
tance of such kind of societies for the improvement of agriculture and live-
stock – the SPA focused the majority of its activities on the human-animal
relation in the city of Lisbon. Regulating the daily life of Lisbon’s inhabitants
and managing the circulation of humans and animals through instructions
and guidelines was crucial. Included among the SPA’s guidelines were, for
example, instructions that animals should not be plucked while still alive; the
prohibition of the use of certain instruments to galvanize animals; the pro-
hibition of hitting someone else’s animal with a whip; prohibiting the use of
animals for carrying loads “greater than their strengths,” especially in slopes;
the emphasis on the animal’s need for rest and prohibition of work in cases of
injury, exhaustion, or hunger; and the prohibition of the use of pain or torture

25 Edital, O Zoophilo, 4 (1887): 1–2. About animal abuse and morality see, for instance:
McNeur, Taming Manhattan; Chien-hui Li, “A Union of Christianity, Humanity, and
Philanthropy: The Christian Tradition and the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in
Nineteenth-Century England,” Society & Animals 8, 3 (2000): 265–285.
27 “Rapidas considerações sobre a protecção devida aos animais,” O Zoophilo, 1 (1878): 2–3.
328 Gomes
for entertainment purposes with respect to dogs, cats, birds, and other harm-
less animals.29
Some of the SPA’s proposals were already outlined in municipal regulations,
even if they were not always properly enforced. One of the key factors behind
the difficulty of their enforcement was the fact that attempts at controlling
Lisboners – humans and animals – could lead to violent physical alterca-
tions. In 1877 and confronted by the municipal disinterestedness regarding
the enforcement of its own regulations, which depended on prepared men, the
SPA paid the Civil Government for three of its civil police guards to enforce the
articles of the Lisbon Municipal Ordinances that already protected animals.
These police officers were placed throughout the capital’s three main districts
and, from seven in the morning until ten at night every day, surveyed the areas
designated by the Society. SPA members and Lisboners who were not indiffer-
ent to the mistreatment of animals could resort to these policemen and inform
them of abuses they witnessed, so that offenders could be admonished, and
cruelty avoided. Moreover, it was the SPA’s position that intimations, which
were not heeded, should result in the prosecution of wrongdoers.30
To summarize, a new sensitivity towards animals, led by the SPA, provided
a novel perspective on the management of conflicts between the humans and
animals of Lisbon. Alongside ordinances, regulations, instructions, or guide-
lines to enforce a more humane relationship between humans and animals,
the Society, like the RSPCA of London, had a major role, not only in lobbying
for, but being an active agent in the legislation of new laws.
2 Stray Dogs
The protection of stray, and sometimes rabid, dogs in the streets of Lisbon,
was one of the main targets of the Society’s action.31 Dogs are illustrative of an
emerging sensitivity towards animals. The problem posed by stray dogs was
a problem long felt in the Portuguese capital. In 1822, José Pecchio, an Italian
traveller, noted, “if travellers wrote that Lisbon was inhabited at daytime by
men and at night by dogs, they would be telling the truth.” In Cais do Sodré
29 O Zoophilo, 2 (1877): 2; e.g. “Mappa do serviço desempenhado pelos polícias fiscaes da

sociedade no mez de fevereiro de 1877,” O Zoophilo, 5 (1877): 4.
30 “Amigos e Inimigos,” O Zoophilo, 1 (1877): 3; O Zoophilo, 2 (1877): 2.
31 Along with the fight against bullfighting. Rabies was a topic of great concern for Societies
for the prevention of cruelty in many cities: Philip Howell, “Between the Muzzle and the
Leash: Dog-walking, Discipline, and the Modern City,” in Animal Cities: Beastly Urban
Histories, ed. Peter Atkins (London: University of Washington Press, 2016), 221–241.
(Sodré Pier), throughout the night there usually gathered “a court of dogs that
by their continuous barks wakened Enoch and Elijah.”32 Moreover, during the
French invasions Junot ordered the killing of dogs that walked at night through
the streets of Lisbon, fighting, barking, and howling.33
The situation must have improved during the first half of the nineteenth-
century given Hans Christian Andersen’s 1866 account claiming to have not
seen any “vicious dogs” as he expected given the usual descriptions of the
city.34 Regardless, from 1875 onwards, the Society demanded that the City
Council end the practice of killing dogs in the streets of Lisbon, which it con-
sidered tantamount to (dog) murder.35 New ways of living the streets should be
encouraged, shaping Lisbon inhabitants’ quotidian. On this issue, the SPA was
categorical: “it was hard to believe that there was a city council, in a city that
was reputedly civilized, which adopted such means to exterminate animals.”36
Despite municipal ordinances condemning the mistreatment of animals,
the Lisbon City Council, which should ostensibly set an example and “hon-
our its regulations,” carried out “repugnant” acts wherein dogs “were poisoned
[with strychnine cakes], bending in horrible agony before passers-by who
witnessed the situation in dismay.”37 The methods used by the municipality
to control stray dogs were, thus, inefficient, and in many cases led to painful
suffering without the reprieve of death. Given such practices, Lisbon’s inhab-
itants “cursed and stigmatized the perpetrators of such cruel and disgusting
means of exterminating these poor animals, who, despite their brutality, are
eminent examples of sweetness, fidelity and loyalty to many beings of the
human race.”38 The SPA was not opposed to “purging the city of these packs of
stray dogs that at every step [were] found in the streets,” but protested “against
the barbaric and disgusting way in which this service was implemented, and
complained especially against the abuses that were committed, not respecting
the animals that had owners, carried a leash, and even wore a muzzle.”39 To
make matters worse, the municipality’s dog killers, ignoring Lisboner’s right of
32 Enoch and Elijah are Biblical figures who did not die but were taken by God.
33 José Pecchio, Cartas de Lisboa: 1822 (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 1990), 30.
34 Hans Christian Andersen, Uma visita a Portugal em 1866 (Sintra: Feitoria dos Livros,
2015), 49.
35 O Zoophilo, 17 (1877): 2.
36 O Zoophilo, 7 (1877): 2–3.
37 O Zoophilo, 7 (1877): 2–3.
38 O Zoophilo, 7 (1877): 2–3.
39 O Zoophilo, 7 (1877): 2–3.
330 Gomes
property, poisoned all dogs whether or not they had an owner. As the SPA put
it, this was an “undeniable crime.”40
The municipality recognised the danger that strychnine cakes posed to
humans and other animals, especially given the prominence of rejected or
partially uneaten cakes on the streets of Lisbon. Moreover, the municipality
understood the importance of precautionary measures against “unpleasant
scenes,” so often observed on the evening streets of Lisbon, of poisoned and
dying dogs that remained after the municipal cleaning department completed
its working hours. Despite the municipality’s concern, the sanitary question
posed by such “unpleasant scenes” was not properly addressed and became a
pressing problem.41 In response, the SPA pleaded for ending the municipality’s
use of strychnine cakes, a “barbaric” means for killing dogs and “only adopted
in Portugal and Spain, which were also bullfighting countries”42 – foreign
countries already adopted other methods, which “did not repel the passers-by
nor affect the morality of society.”43
According to the Society, a truly civilized city such as London should serve
as Lisbon’s model. Near Battersea Park station, a place easily accessible to all
London districts, there was a vast and well-placed establishment for collecting
stray dogs. The asylum had 16 huts, a wide, open-air, area where dogs could
freely run, a kitchen, and an infirmary. Stray dogs were fed twice a day, at seven
in the morning and at four in the afternoon, while police officers – hired by the
asylum – were responsible for bringing in additional strays. Usually, 30 to 40
dogs per day were admitted and stayed there for three days, unless they were
claimed by their proven owners and paid a fee for their release. The unclaimed
dogs were sold, thereby providing a source of revenue for the asylum. The insti-
tution was, therefore, visited by many people, and dogs that did not find an
owner were killed without suffering.44
In 1879, after observing London’s approach to stray dogs, the SPA petitioned
the City Council for the construction of a similar institution.45 Closely aligned
with the emerging sensibility of Europe’s urban centres, the SPA’s proposal
40 O Zoophilo, 11 (1879): 4.
41 Acta da 36.ª sessão da presidência da comissão executiva da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa,
de 17 Agosto de 1882, 459–60 – AHCML.
42 Edital 22 de Maio de 1879, O Zoophilo, 10 (1879): 1–3.
43 Edital de 27 de Junho de 1878, O Zoophilo, 12 (1878): 1–2; Edital 22 de Maio de 1879,
O Zoophilo, 10 (1879): 1–3.
44 Edital de 22 de Abril de 1877, O Zoophilo, 8 (1877): 1–2.
included drastic changes relative to Portuguese standards:46 dogs should be

collected with a net, between two and five o’clock in the morning, and driven
by a wagon to the appropriate municipal facilities; when collecting the dogs
and putting them in the wagon, a tape or a muzzle should be used to cover
their mouth, instead of twine cord which hurt the animals snout; alongside
nets, a tie could also be used at any time of day if an animal resists being caught
by hand and led to the wagon with a leash; those who delivered live dogs to the
municipal facilities should be monetarily rewarded; collecting dogs should be
done both in winter and in summer and dogs should remain in the municipal
facilities for forty-eight hours, in a proper place and fed accordingly; licensed
dog owners may claim their dogs for a fee; after forty-eight hours, dogs could be
killed by any quick and prompt means, such as asphyxiation by carbonic acid
or inoculation by prussic acid.47 Instructions were, thus, detailed. However,
if the relevance of such directives was undeniable, the municipality’s imple-
mentation of these measures required the SPA to commit to a campaign that
dissuaded citizens from providing shelter to strays and from meddling in the
municipality’s picking up of stray dogs off the streets, all while raising aware-
ness regarding the importance of such measures.48
The Society’s plan for the control and management of stray dogs and their
movements throughout the city was not met with enthusiastic support. The
City Council did not appear to have “accept[ed] and recognise[d] the just prin-
ciples propagated and supported by animal-protective societies, which in their
essence were a very powerful element for the civilization and enlightenment of
people, adopted in the major nations of Europe and protected by their respec-
tive public authorities.”49 Without the engagement of the government and the
City Council, the SPA had no alternative beyond sensitizing Lisbon inhabitants
solely on the basis of the Society’s relatively sparse means.50 In London, the
RSPCA also played an important role publicising the legislation against animal
cruelty, and, in 1836, printed 5,000 leaflets for public distribution.51 In Lisbon,
200 posters were printed and displayed in various parts of the city, inform-
ing citizens of the city ordinances regarding the mistreatment of animals.52
46 See, for instance, Chris Pearson, “Stray Dogs and the Making of Modern Paris,” Past &
Present 234, 1 (2017): 137–172.
49 Edital de 27 de Junho de 1878, O Zoophilo, 12 (1878): 1–2.
50 Edital de 27 de Junho de 1878, O Zoophilo, 12 (1878): 1–2.
51 Harrison, “Animals and the State”.
52 O Zoophilo, 19 (1878): 3.
332 Gomes
This public service campaign reflected the SPA’s belief that internalising more
humane behaviours would decrease the need for external coercion.
The SPA’s ambitions concerning solutions for the problem of stray dogs
compelled the Society to establish its own “as yet modest […] asylum for lost or
abandoned animals, victims of disasters and other accidents.”53 They eventu-
ally considered admitting dogs with owners for a fee, so that they may be treated
and/or kept under surveillance.54 The asylum’s life was ultimately ephemeral
due to financial problems. With its inaugural opening on 1 October 1877 at
Rua Formosa 47 (Formosa Street), the asylum had 3 employees – a guard and
2 veterinarians – and did not accept dogs with symptoms of a rabies infection.
Some dogs were sold or offered to those who could guarantee their humane
treatment.55 Moreover, to cope with financial constraints, the SPA opened a
subscription, for which it requested the cooperation of its members and all
those who sympathized with the Society’s aims.56
Regulations proposed by the SPA turned out to become compulsory after
more than ten years.57 However, from 1889 onwards, the Society remained criti-
cal of the municipality due to conflicts stemming from the presence of stray
dogs in public. Moreover, dogs continued to be cruelly and brutally collected
in the streets at an inconvenient hour, with collections sometimes taking place
until two in the afternoon; those with a leash, and thus, a possible owner, were
separated from the presumably stray dogs. And to add insult to injury, while
the former were given a light meal and water, the latter were offered neither
food nor drink. After forty-eight hours, instead of being killed in accordance
with the means suggested by the SPA, strychnine cakes were given to the dogs.
Death was, therefore, painful, and the strays that did not die from poisoning
were summarily beaten to death.58
Municipal employees in charge of picking up the dogs also outraged Lisbon’s
population. On 17 March 1889, for instance, in the neighbourhood of Alcântara,
municipal staff “grabbed a dog by the legs, leading him to the wagon, and as the
animal stumbled and yelped they made a tie with the whip and threw it at his
53 “Asylo para animaes perdidos e abandonados,” O Zoophilo, 9 (1877): 3–4.

54 “Hospicio para animaes,” O Zoophilo, 18 (1877): 3–4.
55 “Hospicio para animaes,” O Zoophilo, 18 (1877): 3–4.
56 “Asylo para animaes perdidos e abandonados,” O Zoophilo, 9 (1877): 3–4.
57 Instruções para o serviço de apanha dos cães, a 26 de Março de 1889 – AHCML, SGO,
caixa 75.
58 “A apanha dos cães nas ruas da cidade,” O Zoophilo, 2 (1889): 6–7. Critics to the municipal
pound was also frequent in New York: Brady, “The Politics.”
neck, [a method that risked] … killing the poor animal.”59 In fact, witnessing
any dog being caught led invariably to quarrels and fights,60 at times entailing
the interruption of the municipal dogs’ pick up service.61
In the press, the conflict between humans and dogs was a relevant topic.62
Descriptions, followed by critics and concrete suggestions, both in O Zoophilo
and in other outlets, point to the construction of a new urban identity, based
on a modern sensitivity commonly found in other European countries. On the
other hand, in Frédéric Vidal words, “descriptions contribute[d] to the [man-
agement of] urban space … identifying and valuing [as well as reproaching]
specific habits,” and allowing for the emergence of new civilized practices and
habits.63 Thus, what emerged from the descriptions of Lisbon’s newspapers
was an attempt to influence and shape urban ways of life. Such narratives,
which abhorred animal abuse for its cruelty, were used to support claims that
sought to justify the intervention of public authorities, at the same time cre-
ating a system of self-policing in which the moral condemnation of animal
mistreatment justified new practices, not only from authorities but also from
Lisbon inhabitants. Moreover, descriptions of animals’ abuse that revealed the
location of the offenses and the name of the perpetrators to “public abomi-
nation” were common, “so that the ferocious instincts of such souls may be
known to all, and clarify what mankind can expect from them, when they do
so to helpless and unconscious beings.”64
Just as news reporting on the social problem posed by criminality contrib-
uted to the construction of a shared morality, newspapers reporting instances
of animal cruelty played a fundamental role in the construction of a social
morality, and opened the doors for the legitimation of a new set of behaviours
on the part of authorities and the population as a whole.65 As Rita Garnel puts
it, in Lisbon “the streets, far from being exclusively routes of circulation, were,
59 Ofício do Governador Civil de Lisboa ao Presidente da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, a 22

de Março de 1889 – AHCML, SGO, caixa 75.
60 Ofício da Superintendência de Limpeza e Regas da Cidade dirigido ao Vereador do
Pelouro de Saúde e Higiene, a 12 de Março de 1888 – AHCML, SGO, caixa 75.
61 Ofício da Superintendência de Limpeza e Regas da Cidade dirigido ao Vereador do
Pelouro de Saúde e Higiene, a 27 de Outubro de 1890 – AHCML, SGO, caixa 75.
62 Conflicts between animals and humans are frequently described in the historiography
McNeur, Taming Manhattan; Brady, “The Politics”; Catherine McNeur, “The ‘Swinish
Multitude’: Controversies over Hogs in Antebellum New York City,” Journal of urban his-
tory 37, 5 (2011): 639–60.
63 Frédéric Vidal, “Descrever a Cidade,” Ler História 52 (2007): 7.
64 O Zoophilo, 23 (1877): 4.
65 Maria Rita Lino Garnel, “Os Espaços da violência na Lisboa da I República,” Ler História 53,
(2007): 47–70.
334 Gomes
Figure 11.1 Cart for driving dogs and cats (Model 1887)
Gomes de Mello, Phot. Amateur. PT/AMLSB/CMLSB/AURB/67/0001/
000018. Courtesy CML
in the first place, an extension of the house, places for playing, chatting and
gossiping, spaces for fighting and aggressing.”66 Violence in Lisbon in the early
decades of the nineteenth century was, to a large extent, the result of sociabil-
ity: “the result of the tensions of coexistence.”67 Both the tavern and the street
were at the centre of popular sociability: “the street [was] a living channel of
social interaction […] an integral and essential part of the pedestrian city, with
its dramas, daily rhythms, noises and buildings.”68 Dogs were inhabitants of
Lisbon, and as such an “integral and essential part” of its streets; so familiar
that they had to be protected from the cruelty of municipal authorities, like
any other member of the urban family. Situations involving Lisboners insulting
the police while refusing to obey their orders, often involved the management
of dogs in public.69
66 Garnel, “Os Espaços,” 48. See also Maria Alexandra Lousada, “Public space and popular
sociability in Lisbon in the early nineteenth century,” Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies IV,
(1997): 220–232.
67 Garnel, “Os Espaços,” 59.
68 Lousada, “Public space,” 227.
69 Lousada, “Public space,” 223.
In short, dogs in Lisbon illustrate70 the entangled relations between dif-

ferent actors responsible for managing the streets,71 such that administrative
regulations were influenced and shaped by the will and habits of its citizens.
Dogs undoubtedly had “a significant influence on [the] ways [Lisboners]
behaved, used urban space, and interacted with one another and with [dogs
themselves].”72
3 Rabies
The problem of stray dogs was not only a humanitarian issue, but a question
of health and sanitation as well. The intimate relationship between stray dogs,
public streets, and sanitary problems, i.e. rabies, was itself a source of tension
and led to divergent opinions regarding the necessity of following interna-
tional trends.
José G. Allen, an aspiring military officer and a twenty-eight-year-old healthy
man, died on 18 October 1888. The case was widely discussed; both in Lisbon’s
daily press and in the Sociedade de Ciências Médicas (Medical Sciences
Society); and generated fierce debate among health professionals due to the
lack of consensus regarding the cause of death. Allen’s case, however, was not
unique. In the 1880s, rabies (i.e. hydrophobia) was slowly becoming the order
of the day as an increasing number of cases were being reported. In addition to
stories such as Allen’s death, newspapers reported on the most recent, and at
times alleged, medical treatments. Louis Pasteur’s work on rabies, as well as his
communications to the Academy of Medical Sciences of Paris, was explained
and given detailed description in both newspapers and medical journals.73
70 Ferreira da Silva and Sousa argue that “Lisbon’s transformation was the result of tensions
and compromises between different actors”: Silva and Sousa, “The ‘Script’,” 65.
71 McNeur, Taming Manhattan; Brady, “The Politics;” Neil Pemberton and Michael Worboys,
Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 1830–2000 (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan,
2007).
72 Almeroth-Williams refers to watchdogs in London, but the same can be said to stray dogs
in Lisbon: Almeroth-Williams, City of beasts, 211.
73 Rabies is an infectious disease caused by a virus that affects the nervous system of mam-
mals. Transmission occurs from the infected animal to the healthy ones through saliva
contact, usually by biting. This is how humans are infected by dogs. The first symptoms
are anxiety, depression, headaches and hallucinations. Later, despite the desire to drink,
the individual feels a phobia about water – hence the disease is also known as hydro-
phobia. After a state of extreme excitement, the patient goes on to the paralytic phase
where he may perish by suffocation. In 1885 Pasteur wrote his first detailed report on
rabies to the Academy of Science describing his discoveries on a method for attenuate
the rabies pathological agent, which allowed him to try a preventive treatment (vac-
cine), that would be exported worldwide. About rabies and Pasteur’s works see for
336 Gomes
In short, the subject was making headlines considering the severity of the
threat posed by rabies to Lisbon’s general population. What is more, this case
of a human being contracting rabies, as confirmed by the Pasteur Institute
in Paris, was both an etiological argument and a reflection of the discourse
around the methods of its treatment and prevention in the Portuguese capi-
tal. Should an anti-rabies institute be built according to Pasteur’s method, or
should measures be taken on stray dogs and on the hygiene of wounds in cases
of bites?
At the epicentre of the controversy was Eduardo Abreu: a physician who
studied newly developed methodologies and medical practices, and special-
ised in practices devised in response to epidemics, and eventually worked
with Pasteur during his time abroad. According to Abreu, “the best prophy-
laxis to avoid rabies in men would be to prevent rabies in dogs.” Thus, wrote
Abreu, it seemed “illogical to establish anti-rabies institutes for man alone.”74
Abreu, moreover, was reluctant about Pasteur’s methods for treating rabies,75
and urged the Portuguese Medical Sciences Society to implement restrictions
for the control of the circulation of stray dogs in the streets, and incorporate
washing, cleaning and cauterising of their injuries as standard practice.76 Thus,
for Abreu, regulating the modus vivendi of stray dogs assumed primacy over
the founding of a bacteriological institute.77 The fight against rabies finds its
proper setting in the streets of the city, precisely because it is, above all, a fight
against the stray dogs that wander the streets of Lisbon. Hence, Abreu’s pro-
posal for enacting control measures in public, which restricted the circulation
of potentially dangerous animals. By contrast, in Germany, the extermination
of stray dogs had led to the extinction of rabies.78 This led some veterinary
instance: James H. Steele, “History of rabies,” in The natural history of rabies, volume I,
ed. George M. Baer (London: Academic Press, 1975), 1–32; Bruno Latour, The pasteuriza-
tion of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1988); Gerald L. Geison, The private science of Louis Pasteur (Princeton: Princeton
74 “Acta da Sessão de 25 de Junho de 1887,” Jornal da Sociedade de Ciências Médicas, LI, Ano
LII, 11 (1887): 335–342.
75 Eduardo Abreu went to Paris in 1886 to study the Pasteur’s anti-rabies vaccine, conclud-
ing that there was no certainty about the efficacy of the vaccine: Eduardo Abreu, A Raiva
(Imprensa Nacional, 1886); Alexandra Marques, O tratamento anti-rábico e a criação
do Instituto Bacteriológico em Lisboa, unpublished master thesis (Lisboa: Faculdade de
Farmácia da Universidade de Lisboa, 2010), 15–29.
76 “Acta da Sessão de 16 de Julho de 1887,” Jornal da Sociedade de Ciências Médicas, LII, Ano
LIII, 1 (1888): 20.
77 “Acta da Sessão de 14 de Maio de 1887,” Jornal da Sociedade de Ciências Médicas, LI, Ano
LII, 10 (1887): 286.
78 “Acta da Sessão de 14 de Maio de 1887,” 286.
theses to support this policy and considered that Abreu’s “prophylaxis” was the
most “energetic and effective” treatment. Moreover, the immediate and deep
cauterization with iron was essential.79
What was at stake, however, was not the relevance of municipal ordi-
nances regarding prophylactic measures; even Pasteur’s supporters, such as
the famous physician Miguel Bombarda – Abreu’s main rival in the on-going
debate – acknowledged the importance of sanitary measures, thus recognising
Lisbon’s obviously inadequate sanitary conditions,80 and viewing the practice
of cauterisation of wounds as entirely appropriate.81 Rather, what was at issue
was the effectiveness of Pasteur’s method. Unconvinced by the prestige and
novelty of the new aseptic laboratory in the medical sciences, Abreu focused
his attention on the need for improving public hygiene considering Lisbon’s
dirty streets. In turn, Pasteur’s supporters praised him for applying “positive
and certain methods,” applauded the “mathematical certainty” of his deduc-
tions and the “precision of [his] predictions.” Pasteur’s discovery of the chol-
era bacillus was “not [regarded as] useless;”82 rather, a revolution in medical
practice was under way. Vaccination, a therapeutic prophylaxis, was being
converted into a curative method, able to suppress the development of rabies
after being bitten by a rabid dog. For Pasteur’s supporters, the value of such a
discovery was something that “the spirit of man has never dared to dream of.”83
Aside from these medical arguments, was a set of economic reasons: the
large sums spent on sending patients to Paris seemed sufficient to justify the
creation of an anti-rabies institute in Lisbon. A new rationale focused not only
on intervening in the urban environment, via regulation and the restriction of
circulation, but also on prioritizing the treatment, protection, and well-being
of Lisbon’s human inhabitants. Thus, and despite the acknowledged impor-
tance of prophylactic measures, and considering inadequate sanitary policy,
those procedures no longer served as the grounds for justifiable approaches
toward mitigating the effects of rabies among the human population.
From 1870 to 1950, laboratory-based medical sciences in the United
Kingdom were adopted and promoted as part of a broader process of social
79 António Maria Mendes Abreu, A Raiva Canina. Tese de Veterinária (Lisboa: Instituto Geral
d’Agricultura, 1883).
80 “Relatório apresentado a 7 de março de 1889 por Alfredo da Costa à Sociedade de Ciências
Médicas sobre a fundação em Lisboa de um instituto anti-rábico,” Jornal da Sociedade de
Ciências Médicas, LIII, Ano LIV, 4 (1889): 100.
81 “Acta da Sessão de 16 de Abril de 1887,” Jornal da Sociedade de Ciências Médicas, LI, Ano
LII, 9 (1887): 267.
82 Edital de 30 de Agosto de 1884, A Medicina contemporânea, II, 35 (1884): 277–278.
83 Edital de 30 de Agosto de 1884, 277–278.
338 Gomes
transformation with respect to the status, organisation, and social relations

particular to the practice of medicine. The laboratories entered medical prac-
tice through the door of public health, not having the support of hospital
clinicians.84 In the case of Portugal, however, extant literature does not indi-
cate the presence of these differences regarding the reception of laboratory-
based knowledge and techniques by public health authorities and clinicians
during the nineteenth-century. This fact alone raises questions regarding the
interest and commitment of Portuguese doctors in this process of the inter-
nationalisation of medical knowledge practices vis-à-vis preventive medicine
and public health. Were doctors interested in adopting international models,
seeking to capitalise on their perceived popularity in favour of their profes-
sional projects, scientific and humanistic convictions, and social recognition?
Or were they compelled to appropriate them due to state involvement? It is
outside the scope of this work to analyse the debates surrounding the opening
of a bacteriological institute, along with its objectives and organisational func-
tion.85 What is important to emphasise here is the direct relation between the
creation of the Bacteriological Institute and the creation of a new order on the
streets of Lisbon, which involved the management of stray dogs.
Despite the Bacteriological Institute’s founding in 1892 and the SPA’s tenta-
tive approval of the implementation of some of its proposals, the controversy
around the dogs in the streets of Lisbon remained, both within the medical
elite and the animal protection movements: muzzles were the latest subject
to elicit fierce disagreement.86 Pasteurism and muzzles went hand in hand.87
That said, a key aspect of the debate surrounding muzzles was the develop-
ment of public health measures by treating other European capitals as mod-
els to be replicated. In Paris, for instance, the increasing cases of rabies in
dogs had led to the “resurrection” of urban regulations, making the use of
leash and muzzle compulsory once again.88 The medical journal, A Medicina
Contemporanea (Contemporary Medicine), which supported both Pasteur and
muzzles, concluded that “at least Parisians [did] not just trust their Pasteur,
they also believe[d] in the administrative prophylaxis.”89 That said, Paris
84 Steve Sturdy, and Roger Cooter, “Science, Scientific Management, and the Transformation
of Medicine in Britain c. 1870–1950,” History of Science 36, 4 (1998): 421–466.
85 The establishment of a Bacteriologic Institute in Lisbon, and the choice of its head, was
a complex and troubled process which opposed diverse important Portuguese doctors:
Marques, O tratamento, 19–33.
86 Howell, “Between the Muzzle;” Walton, “Mad Dogs;” Pemberton and Worboys, Mad Dogs.
87 “Polícia e outras precauções,” O Zoophilo, 7 (1892) 2–3.
88 “Raiva e cães vadios,” A Medicina contemporanea X, 17 (1892): 135–6.
89 “Raiva e cães vadios,” 135–6.
Figure 11.2 “Muzzle the dog and let your child drown”, O Zoophilo, no. 4, 1892, p. 5
did not see a significant decrease in public conflicts regarding the threat of
canines, both rabid and stray.90
Portuguese society, however, was not convinced of the muzzle’s efficiency,
which could put Lisbon’s human inhabitants at risk insofar as muzzles pre-
vented faithful dogs from helping their owners. Stories about the dangers of
muzzles were regularly published in O Zoophilo:
A man, wishing to bath his dog in the Tagus River, near the train station
of St. Apolonia, commissioned a minor to accomplish the task. The child
was so careless that the dog dragged him, falling in the water. Fortunately,
another dog, seized the little child by the shirt, bringing him back to land.
A muzzle would never have allowed the happy ending of this story!91
90 Pearson, “Stray Dogs.”

91 “Creança salva por um cão,” O Zoophilo, 11 (1892): 3. “The removal of stray dogs from the
streets of London was even advanced as a reason for Jack the Ripper being able to commit
his crimes without raising suspicion”: Kean, Animal Rights, 94.
340 Gomes
Even among veterinarian’s muzzles were not an object of consensus.92 For

the SPA, as for other societies for the prevention of animal cruelty,93 “beyond a
shadow of doubt the muzzle [was] often a useless torture inflicted on dogs.”94
Muzzles were not considered as a prophylactic that prevented rabies since
the disease is not a sudden occurrence, although in specific epochs – when it
repeatedly appears in a locality – it could be useful. If the disease seemed to
spread, or if there was reason to believe that an affected dog had bitten oth-
ers, the use of muzzles should be required, and all dogs without it should be
caught by the police as suspected animals. But the Society considered that a
badly built muzzle was worthless, insofar as it gave the public a false sense of
security. On the other hand, canine nostrils are generally very narrow and even
under ordinary circumstances dogs cannot breathe any easier if compared to
other animals when their mouth is closed.
In addition, warm weather induces sweating through the oral cavity and
helps regulate bodily temperature, compensating for the skin’s lack of homeo-
static functioning. Thus, the front part of the muzzle must be wide enough to
allow dogs to freely open their mouths in order to prevent suffering, dimin-
ish the number of potential source of irritability, and ultimately decrease the
chances for dogs to pose a threat to their human counterparts while in public.95
Moreover, some veterinarians considered the use of a specific model of muzzle
as equally necessary in order to guarantee both welfare and public safety.96
Another alternative solution considered was the resection, or thinning, of their
incisive and canine teeth. Advised by M.J. Bourrel, resection ensured that bites
from dogs did not tear the skin of the victim, thereby preventing the need for
inoculation against the virus.97
Solutions could be attained by inculcating (and, thus, controlling) new hab-
its and practices on dog owners, such that owners were the party responsible
for any damages caused by their dogs. In this regard, authorities – as well as
92 “Açamo para cães,” O Zoophilo, 3 (1883): 7–8.

93 Jessica Wang, “Dogs and the Making of the American State: Voluntary Association,
State Power, and the Politics of Animal Control in New York City, 1850–1920,” Journal of
American History, 98, 4 (2012): 998–1024; Kean, Animal Rights, 95.
96 Mendes Abreu, A Raiva Canina. This subject was debated by the Civil Police Commander
and the President of the Municipality: Ofício do Comandante da Polícia Civil de Lisboa
dirigido ao Presidente da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, de 13 de Junho de 1895 – AHCML,
SGO, caixa 77; Ofício do Chefe da Repartição de Obras Públicas dirigido ao Comandante
da Polícia Civil de Lisboa, de 22 julho 1895 – AHCML, SGO, caixa 77.
97 Mendes Abreu, A Raiva Canina.
almanacs, newspapers, and primary school teachers98 – should give dog own-
ers full knowledge of the police provisions, facilitating the means for compli-
ance as well as inform them of the first symptoms of rabies and the means to
avoid the most dangerous of its side-effects. This would be preferable to the
policy of forcing dogs to always wear a muzzle, which bothered them without
any the same advantages. For the SPA, rabies could effectively be circumvented
through this principle of liability intended to compel dog owners to pay par-
ticular attention to the health of their animals.99 In this context, the Lisbon
health sub-delegate, physician, and proponent of prophylactic measures, Silva
Carvalho, argued for the elaboration of popular instructions, by municipal vet-
erinarian, or herdsman,100 with a clear set of guidelines regarding symptoms
of rabies (especially for dogs and cats); how to proceed with suspect animals;
instructions on cleaning any object to previously come in contact with rabid
animals in order to limit contagion; as well as instructions on the adminis-
tration of first aid to individuals bitten by sick or suspicious animals.101 Once
more, inculcating new behaviours was considered central to decrease the city’s
dependence on police enforcement alone.
In addition to the circulation of publicly accessible health guides and the
implementation of controls regarding every day, the municipality advocated for
the creation of an information gathering process that would inform the advice
issued by medical and governmental authorities. Thus, to guarantee accuracy
regarding the general development and severity of the “terrible [rabies] dis-
ease,” and to “deduce from the results the nature and intensity of the measures
of administrative prophylaxis to be employed,”102 the civil governor adopted
several provisions to organise a “rabies statistics” in the district of Lisbon.103
When a case of rabies is reported in any of Lisbon’s districts, whether the vic-
tim is human or animal, the head of the respective district should inform the
county administrator and, if necessary, the districts sub-delegate of public
health in order to organise a detailed report for the Civil Governor.104
98 Mendes Abreu, A Raiva Canina; Lobo da Costa, Diagnose da raiva.

99 “Açamo para cães,” O Zoophilo, 3 (1883): 7–8. The same was advocated in London: Howell,
“Between the Muzzle.”
100 In Portuguese: intendente de pecuária.
101 Augusto da Silva Carvalho, “Espectaculos de hypnotismo – Prophylaxia da raiva,” A
Medicina contemporanea VI, 47 (1888): 381–2; Pearson, “Stray Dogs.”
102 “Contribuição para o estudo da raiva em Portugal,” Jornal da Sociedade de Ciências medi-
cas LIII, Ano LIV, 1 (1889): 3–10.
103 “estatística da raiva”: Silva Carvalho, “Espectaculos de hypnotismo,” 381–2.
104 “Contribuição para o estudo da raiva,” 3–10.
342 Gomes
Nevertheless, the problem was not a lack of regulations, but their enforce-
ment.105 Municipal ordinances were at odds with popular sentiment: in
Lisbon, “it [was] rare for anyone to dislike having a dog,” and owners often let
them wander freely in the streets, and even near police stations. The fear of
rabies did not modify these habits. As the journal Contemporary Medicine puts
it, “mankind is generally cynophile, and so the old, sentimental theory that ele-
vates dogs to men’s best friends has so strong roots that the ephemeral fear of
the danger of rabies [can] not be snatched away.”106 Sporadically, clamours for
public safety recalled the truism that “a man’s life is worth that of all dogs,”107
but these protests were never successful to expel stray dogs from the Lisbon
streets.108 “Humanitarians” prevented the death of stray dogs while influential
citizens did not consider police reprimands. Moreover, given the possibility
of being fined, they usually complained of the behaviour of the civil guards,
who were often admonished by their superiors.109 “Above laws and municipal
regulations [were] the national customs that nullified them all.”110 Thus, “dogs
[won].”111
In sum, the various conflicts surrounding the threat of rabies in Lisbon
reveal the ambiguities generated by the circulation of ideas, techniques, indi-
viduals, and institutional models, which link contexts that span the interna-
tional, national, and local, wherein the realisation of a specific idea or practice
remained entirely conditioned by its local context. That is to say, the contours
of local appropriation are deeply entangled with people’s interests and expec-
tations. Municipal ordinances and the establishment of an anti-rabies institute
not only depended on, and was influenced by, municipal and governmental
ambitions: urban life – an intricate net reflecting conflicts over different ways
of living in Lisbon – was also central.
105 Obstruction of dogcatchers’ work is common to many cities. The application of fines to
those who prevented this public service was not always enough to avoid conflicts: Howell,
“Between the Muzzle;” McNeur, Taming Manhattan.
107 Comparisons were frequent. See, for instance, Wang, “Dogs ” or McNeur, Taming
Manhattan.
109 “Raiva nas ruas,” A Medicina contemporanea, X, 33 (1892): 264–5.
110 “Raiva nas ruas,” 264–5.
4 Final Remarks
The history of dogs in Lisbon spans numerous political, cultural, medical,

and social upheavals particular to a growing European capital in the late
nineteenth-century, such that conflicts and tensions shaped the daily life of
Lisbon’s inhabitants. Dogs, and stray dogs, were at the centre of a discussion
between Lisbon’s inhabitants, municipal authorities, public hygienists, medi-
cal doctors, and animal protectionists, whose interactions reconfigured the
city and led to the emergence of new practices and habits. Implied by this
new form of urban life was an equally new relation between humans and ani-
mals. While regulations were intended to dictate how the population should
behave, the urban landscape was instrumental to attain the different ideals
espoused by each set of actors, who advocated for their ideal for urban life in
the Portuguese capital.112 One of several key factors that shaped these com-
peting urban ideals was the difference in profession and its aims. Ultimately,
it was the negotiation and the partial realisation of each respective vision
that contributed to the reconfiguration of urban life in Lisbon, a debate that
transformed public streets into spaces of surveillance. Even the meaning of
key notions such as “modern” and “civilised” were themselves sites of contesta-
tion, despite their ubiquity among the discourse of rival factions, uncovering
the global circulation of people, and material/immaterial culture. This con-
text, which defines Portugal in the latter half of the nineteenth-century, was a
key moment with respect to the management of the city’s canine inhabitants.
New urban sensitivities, both nationally and internationally, and the discovery
of the rabies vaccine, led to a reconceptualization of human-animal relations
in the city of Lisbon, and led to the fundamental reorganisation of everyday
urban life for both humans and dogs alike.
Aknowledgments
I thank the support of projects PDC/IVC-HFC/3122/2014 and UIDB/00286/2020

and UIDP/00286/2020.
112 Vidal, “Descrever …”
Chapter 12
Intellectuals and the City. Private Matters

in the Public Space
In one of the streets that led to the Royal São Carlos Theatre, Lisbon’s fashion-
able opera house, and facing the building where the city’s Civil Administration
was housed, the informed Lisboner could find the head office of the nineteenth-
century literary periodical Portugal’s Gazette (Gazeta de Portugal). It was there
that the agronomy senior Jaime Batalha Reis met one of the gazette’s collabo-
rators, a relatively unknown lawyer named Eça de Queirós, who would decades
later become famous for his novels. The year was 1866, and the young Eça
was by then regarded an eccentric writer, authoring short stories and essays
composed in an unusual style and filled with Romantic scenes. The attrac-
tion between Reis and Eça led to a dinner, which developed into a late-night
conversation, and soon they had become best friends.1 The encounter marked
their personal and intellectual paths. Initially drawn together by their literary
interests, they later created an informal group of intellectuals that vied for the
opening of Portuguese society to the new ideas of their century. This group,
later known as the Cenáculo (Cenacle) developed a particular relationship
with Lisbon, frequenting spaces in and around the city in which any idea or
theoretical system could be safely dissected away from the public bourgeois
gaze.2 These private discussions served as a training ground for both Reis and
Eça to refine their socialist politics and ultimately confront their contempo-
raries in full view of the public eye.
1 Jaime Batalha Reis, “Introdução,” in Eça de Queirós, Prosas Bárbaras (Porto: Lello & Irmãos
Editores, 1912), 9–10.
2 The Cenacle’s members belonged to what has been termed the “Generation of 1870,” or a
generation of new Portuguese intellectuals that had a profound cultural influence in the
country since the 1870s. There are numerous studies on the Generation of 1870. For example,
see Álvaro Manuel Machado, A Geração de 70 – uma revolução cultural e literária (Lisboa:
Instituto de Cultura e Língua Portuguesa, 1981); João Medina, Eça de Queiroz e a geração de
70 (Lisboa: Moraes Editores, 1980); António José Saraiva, A Tertúlia Ocidental. Estudos sobre
Antero de Quental, Oliveira Martins, Eça de Queiroz e outros (Lisboa: Gradiva, 1995); Amadeu
Carvalho Homem, Teófilo Braga, Ramalho Ortigão, Antero de Quental. Diálogos difíceis
(Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2009).
© Daniel Gamito-Marques, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004513440_017

Intellectuals and the City 345
In this chapter, I will show that frequenting spaces in and around Lisbon
that escaped the bourgeois gaze was essential for the maturation of the
Cenacle’s radical views and allowed its members to have a greater impact
when they decided to disseminate these views to the educated public. I will
also show that these conceptions stemmed from a notion of progress that was
simultaneously cultural, social, and material. Although the Cenacle’s mem-
bers were more interested in discussing the philosophical and artistic mean-
ings of new scientific developments, they were not dismissive of science and
understood that social progress could only be achieved by embracing the new
scientific ideas of the century and by relying on the participation of technosci-
entific experts.
1 Hiding from the Bourgeois Gaze. The Need for Privacy
Mid-nineteenth century Lisbon was a city under a slow, but seemingly irrevers-
ible transformation. Since 1834, when the Liberals took power and expelled all
male religious orders from the kingdom, the government had been convert-
ing most of the buildings of former convents that spread throughout Lisbon
for practical military, healthcare, cultural, or administrative needs.3 Although
there was no integrated plan of urban modernization in place, some central
areas underwent substantial intervention. Exemplary of the kinds of modern-
ization projects of this period is Rossio – one of Lisbon’s biggest and busiest
squares. By 1866, and after the demolition of its last shacks and the installa-
tion of a cobbled pavement (known as Portuguese pavement), it had become
a pleasant space for the Portuguese bourgeoisie with trees and benches along
its perimeter (see chapters 1 and 2 in this volume). In fact, this renovated urban
space now stood as a monument to the new regime: it had been renamed
King Pedro IV Square, after the Liberal monarch who had granted the current
Constitution. The new square had a statue of its namesake, which was tempo-
rarily removed for the construction of a higher pedestal, and led to the new
Queen Maria II National Theatre, a remodelled palace that had belonged to
the extinct Portuguese Inquisition and a symbol of national culture that occu-
pied the majestic and most conspicuous building facing the square.4 A few
3 Unknown author, “A cultura literária, artística e musical. Os meios e os agentes da cultura,”

in Nova História de Portugal. Volume IX: Portugal e a Instauração do Liberalismo, ed. A.H. de
Oliveira Marques (Lisboa: Presença, 2002), 449.
4 Raquel Henriques da Silva, “Lisboa Romântica. Urbanismo e Arquitectura, 1777–1874. Volume
1.” (PhD diss., NOVA University of Lisbon, 1997), 302–20, 486–8.
346 Gamito-Marques
Figure 12.1 Map with the indication of places where the Cenacle’s group stopped, including their
residences
1. Praça D. Pedro IV (Rossio); 2. Teatro Nacional D. Maria II; 3. Casa da família Eça de
Queirós, c.1866; 4. Entrada do Passeio Público; 5. Real Associação Central de Agricultura
Portuguesa, c.1868–80; 6. Real Teatro de S. Carlos; 7. Redacção da Gazeta de Portugal;
8. Livraria Bertrand; 9. Grémio Literário, c.1854–69; 10. Grémio Literário, c.1869–75; 11.
Teatro Ginásio; 12. Teatro da Trindade; 13. Casino Lisbonense; 14. Jardim de São Pedro de
Alcântara; 15. Rua com várias redacções de jornais; 16. Loja maçónica do Grande Oriente
Lusitano; 17. Casa de Jaime Batalha Reis, c.1866–69; 18. Rua com sedes de clubes políticos
de esquerda; 19. Conservatório Real de Lisboa
meters past the theatre, there began the Public Promenade (Passeio Público), a
large enclosed garden where the educated classes enjoyed taking a stroll, espe-
cially on warm nights, replete with music concerts lit by the newly introduced
technology of gas lighting.5
It was in this amenable bourgeois neighbourhood that the Queirós family
had been living for some years, in an apartment in one of the buildings that
surrounded the square, and it was there that the young Eça arrived in the sum-
mer of 1866.
As a recent law graduate from the country’s secular and sole university,
which was in the northern city of Coimbra, Eça was now forced to turn his
5 On the Public Promenade, see Françoise Le Cunff, “Parques e Jardins de Lisboa 1764–1932. Do
Passeio Público ao Parque Eduardo VII” (MA diss., NOVA University of Lisbon, 2000).
back to the comforts of student life and find a respectable job. Lisbon stood
as an attractive option, since it was Portugal’s capital, a city with better and
more numerous career opportunities, and where his family had contacts. Eça’s
father had relocated with the rest of the family from northern Portugal four
years before and was doing well as a magistrate. Now, it was time for his son to
follow in his footsteps.6
Moving to Lisbon meant abdicating much of the privacy Eça enjoyed while
living in Coimbra with other students. He now had to share his living space with
his two parents and three brothers, and he had to deal with familial pressures
to make a living and acquire an appropriate position in the social hierarchy of
his time. Middle-class expectations weighed on Eça’s mind, and the most cher-
ished spaces of his new neighbourhood served as a constant reminder. The
Queen Maria II National Theatre was more than just a place to see comedies
or social and historical dramas, as much as the Public Promenade’s attraction
hardly resided on its botanical specimens.7 These were spaces of sociability that
the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie used to make themselves noticed amongst
their peers and judge the social prestige of others. Eça was, therefore, living in
an intensely exposed Lisbon, where he was constantly submitted to the bour-
geois gaze, even at night under the light of modern gas lamps or enjoying the
electrical lighting and special effects at the opera house.8 Meeting Reis, how-
ever, provided him an escape route from educated society’s inquisitive eyes.
Born in Lisbon in 1847, Jaime Batalha Reis was finishing his studies by 1866
in Agronomy at the Lisbon Agrarian Institute, which, at the time, was the
only technoscientific institution of higher education devoted to such matters
in Portugal. However, it is around this time that Reis’ parents relocated to a
rural province several miles north of Lisbon, where they had some land and
vineyards.9 Reis lived with his Galician butler in a modest flat in Bairro Alto, a
neighbourhood quite different from Rossio (Figure 12.2).
6 Maria Filomena Mónica, Eça de Queirós (Lisboa: Quetzal, 2009), 49–50.

7 On the Queen Maria II National Theatre, see Gustavo de Matos Sequeira, História do Teatro
Nacional D. Maria II, 2 vol. (Lisboa: Oficinas Gráficas de Ramos, Afonso & Moita, 1955).
8 It was in this period that the “natural night” was progressively overtaken by lighting tech-
nologies in Lisbon, thus creating a “technical night,” to use the expression of the Portuguese
historian Joel Serrão. On public lighting in Lisbon, see Bruno Cordeiro, “Technological
modernization and disuse in the making of comtemporary Portugal’s capital: street light-
ing from the 1840s to the 1960s,” in The Making of Modern Portugal, edited by Luís Trindade
(Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 102–12; Tiago Saraiva and Ana Cardoso Matos,
“Technological Nocturne: The Lisbon Industrial Institute and Romantic Engineering (1849–
1888),” Technology & Culture 58, no. 2 (April 2017): 434–5, 442–6.
9 On Reis’s education and family, see Maria José Marinho, O essencial sobre Jaime Batalha Reis
(Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda, 1996), 3–5.
348 Gamito-Marques
Figure 12.2 Photograph of Atalaia Street in Bairro Alto, between 1898 and 1907. This was
one of the largest streets of the neighbourhood
Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa, PT/AMLSB/CMLSBAH/PCSP/003/
FAN/001641
Bairro Alto spread across the slope of one of Lisbon’s various hills and was
the opposite of Rossio. Old and dirty, filled with narrow streets and dark alleys,
mostly inhabited by lower-class families crammed into small apartments, the
atmosphere of Barrio Alto effectively drove away the city’s upper classes.10 And
in some of its houses, one could drink cheap wine and listen to fado, a melan-
cholic musical genre played with guitar and mostly sung by female sex-workers
and other people engaged in activities outside the law. This was a neighbour-
hood where the worlds of bohemia, prostitution, and crime intersected at these
dubious taverns, which also attracted a variety of middle-class people and even
some aristocrats enchanted by these musical laments.11 And yet, Bairro Alto
also served as a place of intellectual activity, housing the offices of some of the
city’s most dynamic newspapers, including the Daily News (Diário de Notícias),
the Lisbon Royal Conservatory, and the secretive and most prominent Masonic
lodge of the Grand Orient of Portugal (Grande Oriente Lusitano).12 In this way,
Bairro Alto enjoyed a dual reputation and was a neighbourhood where differ-
ent social types crossed ways, creating a peculiar atmosphere.
It is against this novel background of Bairro Alto’s diversity that Eça and
Reis built an alternative lifestyle by carefully selecting the urban spaces they
frequented to avoid as much as possible the inquisitive eyes of bourgeois soci-
ety. They usually had dinner together in less frequented restaurants and then
indulged in several cups of coffee that left them energized to discuss every sub-
ject in the privacy of Reis’s home during the evening; conversations that would,
at times, continue until the morning. On other occasions, they would walk all
night across Bairro Alto’s labyrinth of narrow streets or extend their wanderings
to other lower-class neighbourhoods, such as Mouraria, Alfama, Sé, and Castelo,
10 There are vivid descriptions of the neighbourhood in Júlio de Vilhena, Lisboa Antiga –
Bairro Alto. Volume 5 (Lisboa: Antiga Casa Bertrand – José Bastos, 1904).
11 On the evolution of fado, see Rui Vieira Nery, Para uma História do Fado (Lisboa: Público,
2004). On the links between fado and prostitution, see José Machado Pais, A prostituição
e a Lisboa boémia do séc. XIX aos inícios do séc. XX (Lisboa: Querco, 1985). For a descrip-
tion of a night in a fado house in Bairro Alto, see João do Rio, Fados, Canções e Dansas de
Portugal (Rio de Janeiro: H. Garnier, 1909), 6–12.
12 On the presence of the press in Bairro Alto, see Paulo Martins, O Bairro dos Jornais (Lisboa:
Quetzal, 2018). On the spaces of the Royal Conservatory of Lisbon, see Carlos Alberto
Faísca Fernandes Gomes, “Discursos sobre a «especificidade» do Ensino Artístico: a sua
Representação Histórica nos Séculos XIX e XX” (MA disser., University of Lisbon, 2002),
53–8. On the Grand Orient of Portugal, see A.H. de Oliveira Marques, “Organização admin-
istrativa e política,” in Nova História de Portugal. Volume X: A Regeneração, ed. Fernando
de Sousa, A.H. de Oliveira Marques (Lisboa: Presença, 2004), 245–7.
350 Gamito-Marques
stopping by a tavern when they felt hungry. During summer, when Bairro Alto’s
poorly isolated buildings became uncomfortably warm, and especially under
a full moon, Eça and Reis would take long walks across the sparsely inhabited
periphery of Lisbon or along the Tagus River, going as far as Belém. They wanted
to feel free to discuss any topic that might be considered inappropriate to the
members of their class. Occasionally, they would invite like-minded individuals,
but their only recurrent partner was Salomão Sáraga, a young man from a rich
Jewish family. It was a small bohemia, like those that had germinated in Paris in
the 1830s. And since Eça’s lifestyle would hardly fit his family’s routines, he would
sleepover in Reis’s house when they returned to Lisbon in the morning.13
Despite their attraction towards the bohemian lifestyle, Eça and Reis did not
live on the margins of bourgeois society, and they did much to avoid margin-
alization. Based on Reis’s personal correspondence with Celeste Cinatti, the
young middle-class lady he was courting, he and his closest friends frequented
the spaces of sociability of nineteenth-century bourgeois Lisbon in Rossio and
nearby Chiado, the neighbourhood where most of the fashionable shops, coffee
houses, and theatres were located (see Figure 13.3a).14 For example, Reis used
his family’s reserved opera box at the São Carlos National Theatre whenever he
pleased, as all the upper-class bourgeois and aristocrats did; he strolled in the
Public Promenade, one of the few spaces where he could be physically near his
beloved Celeste; he had long conversations with other intellectuals in the cof-
fee houses around the area, including the Central Coffee House (Café Central);
and he sometimes went to balls and concerts organized at the Portuguese
Assembly (Assembleia Portuguesa). Walking up and down Chiado’s streets was
also a necessity: it was in its shops that he could find the books he wanted (if
he still had money to buy them) or go to the Literary Club (Grémio Literário)
to use its reading room, which had various literary and scientific journals that
were accessible to the public. Moreover, Reis also frequented the houses of the
respectable Castelo Branco and Enes families and paid periodic visits to his
sister and his uncle, who also lived in Lisbon.15
How could Reis, Eça, and their friends balance their bohemian inclina-
tions with bourgeois sociability? Part of the answer lies within Lisbon’s urban
geography. The city centre was quite small and most of its spaces were within
13 Reis, “Introdução,” in Queirós, Prosas Bárbaras, 11–6, 42–7. On the French bohemians, see
Jerrod Seigel, Bohemian Paris (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
14 On Chiado neighbourhood, see Júlio de Castilho, Lisboa Antiga – Bairro Alto. Volume 2
(Lisboa: Antiga Casa Bertrand – José Bastos, 1903), 214–7.
15 Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal (BNP). Espólio E4. On the São Carlos opera house, see
Augusto M. Seabra, Ir a S. Carlos (Lisboa: Correios de Portugal, 1993). On the Literary Club,
see José-Augusto França, O Grémio Literário e a sua História (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte,
2004).
walking distance of each other. At the city’s centre was Chiado, which was situ-
ated between the neighbourhoods of Rossio and Bairro Alto, and thus, Lisbon’s
intellectuals circulated among these three. For them, it was as easy to enter
the intensively exposed opera as it was to reach Reis’s secluded house. Equally
important was their wealth of free time. When Eça started to meet regularly
with Reis, they were both recent graduates. Freed from their educational
responsibilities and not yet trapped in a job with a fixed schedule, they had
plenty of available time. Eça wrote short stories for the Portugal’s Gazette, but
he only published one per week, which left much room for dilettantism.
From 1866 to the late 1868, when the Cenacle was a relatively small group,
bohemia was given primacy over bourgeois sentiment, and not without exter-
nal resistance. Eça’s father did not want an idle lifestyle for his son and tried
to find him a respectable position. First, his father arranged a job for him in
a friend’s office and afterwards, placed a newspaper advertisement offering
Eça’s services as a lawyer, to which no one replied. This is not surprising, how-
ever, since at this point in his life Eça had no professional reputation in Lisbon.
Given his interest in writing, Eça’s father secured him a position as the head
editor of a newspaper run by his friend José Maria Eugénio de Almeida, one of
the wealthiest Portuguese landowners. For this reason, early in 1867 Eça was
forced to move to the Southern city of Évora, which he disliked, since it was a
rural region devoid of any of his acquaintances and miles away from the capi-
tal and its cultural scene. However, Eça returned to Lisbon by August of the
same year and against his father’s wishes, ready to resume his bohemian incur-
sions.16 During this period, Eça and his close friends essentially lived from their
families’ earnings and surely made the most of them. Yet, they knew that such
a situation could not last forever.
2 Engaging with Spaces of Political Action
The dilettante duo formed by Eça and Reis mostly engaged in artistic discus-
sions: Eça was strongly interested in literature, while Reis preferred music and
opera. The Cenacle would have limited itself to artistic conversations were it
not for an important change that took place at the end of 1868: the introduc-
tion of Eça’s friend Antero de Quental to the group.
Born in 1842, Antero de Quental was raised by a wealthy, aristocratic fam-
ily. Like Eça, he had studied law at the University of Coimbra and had liter-
ary interests. When Eça, who was three years younger than Antero, had met
him at Coimbra, he had been captivated by Antero’s entrancing presence,
16 Mónica, Eça de Queirós, 55–6.

352 Gamito-Marques
which had already earned him a reputation among other students.17 Antero
was an eccentric person, well known for his natural kindness and desire to
help others, as well as his sharp and inquisitive mind that easily slid into
obsession and occasional fits of rage. He had probably a bipolar disorder and
struggled all his life with his mental condition. When he was introduced to
the Cenacle, he was already a published poet, and he aspired to systematize
his philosophical ideas. Antero, therefore, had all of the appeal of a romantic
hero. In his college years, he was struck by the works of the French anarchist
(utopian socialist using Marx’s terms) Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, which shaped
his strong socialist inclinations throughout all his life. He repeatedly tried to
find an occupation that suited his peculiar temperament but to no avail. When
he was introduced to the bohemian group in Lisbon, he had already engaged in
a literary controversy that ended in a duel (which he won), considered joining
Garibaldi’s armies, fancied leaving bourgeois Europe for Portugal’s colonies in
Asia, considered becoming a full-time philosopher, worked as a typographical
officer in both Lisbon and Paris, and spent a few months living as a hermit in
the Azores. With a character such as Antero’s, adjusting his high aspirations to
a fulfilling way of living seemed all but impossible.18
From the very beginning, the arrival of Antero changed the Cenacle’s dis-
cussions. According to Reis, when Eça and other friends introduced him to
Antero, they immediately jumped to a political discussion on the advantages
of an “Iberian revolution;” that is, of unifying the kingdoms of Portugal and
Spain.19 Less than two months before, Queen Isabel II had been overthrown
in Spain and the provisional government was considering different options
regarding the establishment of a new regime. Some within the Cenacle group
argued for the unification of Portugal and Spain, following what had happened
within the Italian peninsula and in the annexation of German-speaking ter-
ritories by Prussia.20 Public opinion in Portugal, however, was largely opposed
17 Eça has a beautiful description of the night he discovered Antero. See Eça de Queirós,
“Um genio que era um santo,” in Anthero de Quental in memoriam (Porto: Mathieu Lugan,
1896), 481–3.
18 On Antero’s life, see José Calvet de Magalhães, Antero – a vida angustiada de um poeta
(Lisboa: Bizâncio, 1998); Ana Maria A. Martins, O essencial sobre Antero de Quental (Lisboa:
Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda, 2001). On the evolution of Antero’s thought, see
Ana Maria A. Martins, ed., Antero de Quental. Cartas I – 1852 a 1876 (Lisboa: Imprensa
Nacional – Casa da Moeda, 2009).
19 Jaime Batalha Reis, “Annos de Lisboa (algumas lembranças),” in Anthero de Quental,
441–3.
20 On the geopolitical transformations in Europe during the nineteenth century, see
Paul W. Schroeder, “International Politics, Peace, and War, 1815–1914,” in The Nineteenth
Century. Europe 1789–1914, ed. T.C. Blanning (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003),
158–209.
to an Iberian union, fearing for the likely loss of the country’s autonomy, as it
had already happened in the late sixteenth century.21 Contra public opinion,
Antero argued for Portuguese-Spanish unification on the basis of his socialist-
anarchist beliefs, for he dreamed of the formation of a federal republic formed
by the two nations. Although these discussions were subsumed under larger
philosophic debate on the advantages of metaphysics versus positivism,
Antero remained committed to the idea of an Iberian federal republic, very
much in line with Proudhon’s ideas of federalism. Before the end of 1868, he
published a booklet expounding his views and was even in contact with the
republican supporters of the Spanish politician Emilio Castelar, who also
called for Iberian unification. The plan to join a periodical founded by Spanish
republicans ultimately failed, but Antero’s dream persisted.22
Antero’s strong personality, sharp intelligence, and deep political engage-
ment transformed the Cenacle. He was responsible for converting the group
to Proudhon’s ideas, effectively ending the predominance of purely artistic
discussions within the group. Antero gave them a higher purpose to their
bohemian reunions, which the group accepted, seeing the figure of a leader in
Antero (Figure 12.3).23
Figure 12.3 Some of the Cenacle’s members in 1889. From left to right: Eça de Queirós,
Oliveira Martins, Antero de Quental, Ramalho Ortigão, and Guerra Junqueiro
Augusto Bobone, “Vencidos da Vida,” DG/A01/G04, PT/CPF/
CNF/001557. Reproduced by permission of Centro Português de
Fotografia
21 On the Iberian unification, also known as “the Iberian question”, see A.H. de Oliveira
Marques, “A conjuntura,” in Nova História de Portugal. Volume X, 487–88.
22 Letter from Antero to Alberto Sampaio, late 1868 apud Martins, Antero de Quental.
Cartas I, 171–2.
23 Eça, “Um genio que era um santo,” in Anthero de Quental, 499–501.
354 Gamito-Marques
The timing for such a turn could not be sharper since important politi-
cal changes had been occurring in Portugal in previous years. Lisbon in the
late 1860s was teeming with political unrest. The municipal elections of
1 January 1868 resulted in disturbances across the kingdom, culminating in
uprisings in both Lisbon and Porto, the country’s second biggest city. The direct
cause of the uprisings had been the imminent implementation of a new and
controversial consumption tax, which would require additional declarations
of goods from traders. It was one among several unpopular measures that the
current executive had enacted to respond to the joint effect of a financial crisis
of international dimensions (1866) and a sharp decrease in the remittances
from emigrants in Brazil due to the Paraguayan War (1864–70). The election’s
unfavourable outcome for the governmental forces and the mobilization of the
masses in what was probably one of the first examples of effective mass poli-
tics during the Portuguese constitutional monarchy, led to the executive’s res-
ignation in early 1868, and the abandonment of the most controversial reforms
by its successor.24
The political changes in Portugal in this period had been the result of a
peculiar set of circumstances. In contrast to what had been common practice
since 1851, neither of the two main parties had been ruling the country in isola-
tion in the years leading to 1868. Three years prior, the centre-Left Historical
Party (Partido Histórico) and the centre-Right Regenerator Party (Partido
Regenerador) reached an agreement and governed in coalition, even though
politicians linked to the latter ultimately gained power over their coalition part-
ners. Leftists who opposed what they saw as a diffuse centrist alliance, includ-
ing renowned dissidents from the Historical Party, founded the Reformist Party
(Partido Reformista) to present a clear Leftist alternative. Its organization,
however, was only one of the responses to the so-called “fusion.” Other Leftist
dissidents formed new political centres in Lisbon, mobilizing the middle class,
the petty bourgeoisie, and even the proletariat, to the horror of traditional
Liberal politicians, who despised what they regarded as untrustworthy and
potentially violent masses. These new Leftist political clubs were more pre-
cisely defined by their meeting places rather than by their ideological differ-
ences, and they blossomed in working-class neighbourhoods (see chapter 3
in this volume), such as the Salema Patio (Pátio do Salema) near Rossio, or
in Bairro Alto, especially on Queimada Cross Street (Travessa da Queimada).
Although the masses drawn to these political clubs had not gathered in suf-
ficient numbers to make Lisbon’s inhabitants fear a major upheaval, their
mobilization in the capital, as well as in Porto and other cities, was sufficient
24 A.H. de Oliveira Marques, “A conjuntura,” in Sousa and Marques, Nova História, 484–5.
to ultimately bring the executive’s demise in early 1868. The fragmentation of

the Portuguese Left, the difficult financial situation of the kingdom, as well
as the threat of Iberian unification, prolonged the climate of political unrest,
opening an era of instability. Until 1871, Portugal went through five elections,
eight executives, and a coup d’état. Witnessing this period of upheaval, Antero
knew that the reconfiguration of Portuguese politics provided an opportunity
to fight for socialist reforms.25
Despite Antero’s strong political interests and the Cenacle’s clear embrace
of “anarchist socialism,”26 there is no evidence that its members actively par-
ticipated in the new Leftist political clubs of the late 1860s. The case is quite
striking, considering that one of these new clubs was located just around the
corner from Reis’s house. The Cenacle’s members were neither interested in
organizing armed revolutions nor in becoming demagogues. They remained
sceptical of such strategies to transform society and discussed for hours the
pros and cons of every conceivable political system, ultimately concluding that
even the existing monarchy could be an appropriate regime under certain cir-
cumstances.27 In fact, it was of secondary interest to Antero and the others if
the country was governed by a hereditary king or an elected president. Of pri-
mary importance was that Portugal’s political configuration had to result from
the mobilization of its citizens, who should be linked by a common patriotic
ideal, a new laic and virtuous devotion that sat as the foundation for a more
fraternal type of nation.28
Antero became a recurrent presence in the Cenacle and developed a close
friendship with Reis such that the two became inseparable, just as it had hap-
pened before between Reis and Eça. It is possible that Antero occupied the
place that Eça initially had in Reis’s life, although all of them remained quite
25 On politics during this period, see Manuel Maria Cardoso Leal, “A Rotação Partidária em
Portugal. A Aprendizagem da Alternância Política (c. 1860–1890)” (PhD diss., University
of Lisbon, 2016); Rui Ramos, “A Regeneração e o Fontismo (1851–1890),” in História de
Portugal, ed. Rui Ramos (Lisboa: A Esfera dos Livros, 2010), 521–48. On social mobilization
in the January 1868 revolt, see Diego Palacios Cerezales, Portugal à Coronhada: Protesto
popular e ordem pública nos séculos XIX e XX (Lisboa: Tinta da China, 2011), 95–114. On the
Portuguese political parties, see A.H. de Oliveira Marques, “Organização administrativa e
política,” in Sousa and Marques, Nova História, 229–45.
26 The term “anarchist socialism” (“socialismo anarquista”) was used by António Sérgio, a
major figure in Portuguese culture and himself a disciple of Antero, to encompass the
complexity of Quental’s political stands. Joel Serrão, “Do pensamento político-social de
Antero de Quental (1868–1873)”, Análise Social, vol. XVI (61–62) (1980): 343–361, 349.
27 Reis, “Annos de Lisboa,” in Anthero de Quental, 443–53.
28 Rui Ramos, História de Portugal. Volume VI: A Segunda Fundação (1890–1926) (Lisboa:
Estampa, 2001), 64–6.
356 Gamito-Marques
close. Since his arrival in Lisbon, Antero was living in the Baixa neighbour-
hood (Lisbon’s downtown); but as he spent almost all his time with Reis, they
decided to find a larger apartment in which they could live together. In 1869,
Antero and Reis moved just a few meters north of Reis’s initial house, transfer-
ring to one of the entrances to Bairro Alto that faced the new São Pedro de
Alcântara public garden.29
In a certain sense, Antero’s arrival did not significantly change the relation-
ship the Cenacle’s members had with Lisbon. Now expanded to include Antero
and other men, the group continued to prefer secluded spaces in which they
could discuss their radical opinions while shielded from bourgeois judgment.
They continued to take long walks at night by the river and in the peripheral
Monsanto fields, and when they wanted to remain closer to city centre, they
could jump the wall of the Prazeres Cemetery (Cemitério dos Prazeres) and
have their talks in the company of the dead, certain that no one would dare to
frequent such place at night. On other occasions, they crossed the road from
Reis’s and Antero’s new house and reached the small São Pedro de Alcântara
public garden (see chapter 10 in this volume), which could be easily accessed
since it was not fenced. This was a quite suitable space in their opinion, since
it was frequented by few people, even during the day, and had a special charm,
with its beautiful panoramic view of Lisbon that included most of the Public
Promenade.30
From another perspective, Antero’s arrival did change some routines. His
personal connections with working-class socialist militants in Lisbon made it
possible for some of the members of Cenacle to engage with Lisbon’s prole-
tariat, such as the elusive Giuseppe Fontana. Fontana was born in the Italian
canton of Ticino in Switzerland, in 1840, to an Italian father and a Portuguese
mother. Following his father’s death, his mother sold all the family’s goods
and left Switzerland, and eventually returned to Portugal with her children.
Fontana ended up working at the Bertrand bookshop in the Chiado neighbour-
hood, an opportunity that was surely facilitated by his mother’s hereditary
ties to the Bertrand family.31 Fontana had connections with other politically
engaged workers across Europe and became one of the fiercest militant social-
ists in Lisbon. Given Fontana’s political connections, it is likely Antero met him
during his stint as a writer who published articles in praise of socialism for
29 Reis, “Annos de Lisboa,” in Anthero de Quental, 443, 445–6.

30 Ibidem. On the São Pedro de Alcântara garden, see Silva, “Lisboa Romântica,” 410–2. For a
picturesque account of the evolution of this garden, see Júlio de Castilho, Lisboa Antiga.
O Bairro Alto de Lisboa. Volume 3 (Lisboa: Antiga Casa Bertrand – José Bastos, 1903).
31 For a biographical sketch of Fontana’s life and action, see Maria Manuela Cruzeiro, Um
Republicano chamado José Fontana (Lisboa: Fonte da Palavra e Associação Cedro, 2011).
A República Federal (The Federal Republic), a periodical to which Fontana also

contributed. Reis, by contrast, would have met Fontana from his many visits to
the Bertrand bookshop.
Once introduced, Fontana would attend their meetings after work, late in
the evenings, or on Sunday mornings. Always secretive, Fontana would wait
for occasional guests to leave and spoke only with Antero, Reis, and a few other
members. It was only after he confirmed that he had not been followed by the
police that he would talk openly about the revolutionary movements that were
spreading across Europe and proceeded to introduce the Cenacle’s members
to various underground political institutions. These proto-conspiracy sessions
further reinforced the Cenacle’s scepticism towards the efficacy of revolution-
ary means, but the interest of their partisans was not inconsequential. Antero
and Reis maintained contact with Fontana and continued to meet with other
socialists in the following years, penetrating a secretive underground Lisbon.32
While the Cenacle’s activity was not without consequence and the involve-
ment of some of the Cenacle’s members in the mobilization of Portuguese
workers is certainly undeniable, it would be misleading to think that general-
ized class struggle was their main priority. Eça, who was by now fully converted
to the aesthetic tenets of Realism, remained more interested in literature, and
paid little attention to such politically charged incursions.33 Except for Antero,
whose income derived from his family’s properties and freed him from finan-
cial worries, the Cenacle’s members were generally conscious of the need to
find a stable job that could provide a livelihood, and allocated an increas-
ing amount of time to such an end. For example, Eça accepted a position as
administrator of the Leiria County in 1870, which was likely due to another
of his father’s interventions, despite his hatred for leaving Lisbon. As Reis’s
relationship became more serious, he too was feeling the necessity of finding
a stable job that would allow him to marry his girlfriend and provide for his
future family, thus meeting the social expectations of his time. For this reason,
Reis also frequented spaces in which he networked with people who could give
him access to a paid position as an agronomist.
Reis was the only main member of the Cenacle that had a scientific back-
ground. During his time as a student at the Lisbon Agrarian Institute, Reis built
32 For a discussion over the Cenacle members’ political allegiances, see Rui Ramos, “A for-
mação da intelligentsia portuguesa (1860–1880),” Análise Social 27 (1992): 483–528. For a
personal account of their incursions in working-class underground movements, see Reis,
“Annos de Lisboa,” in Anthero de Quental, 449–53.
358 Gamito-Marques
up a reputation for himself and used it to access circles of technoscientific

experts that vied for the modernization of agriculture, which was, at the time,
Portugal’s main source of economic activity.34 Reis joined one of the most
important institutions, the Royal Central Association of Portuguese Agriculture
(Real Associação Central da Agricultura Portuguesa), most likely with the help
of his older brother António, who was himself an agronomist that took part
in its meetings. Reis’s intelligence and dynamism earned him the trust of his
peers: they invited him to take part in commissions on agricultural matters, to
write its reports, while paying him for his articles published in the Association’s
official publication, The Journal of Agriculture (A Revista Agrícola), and allow-
ing him to host an agricultural course proposed by Reis himself. By the end of
1870, much of Reis’s energy had already been diverted from bohemia to work,
and he had even spent around two months in the northern Viseu district on an
official mission to study its agricultural practices and give lectures.35
Reis’s agronomical work and the Cenacle’s debates essentially remained two
separate worlds. In some cases, the separation was understandable, since some
technoscientific spaces, such as the Agrarian Institute, were located away from
the city centre (in Picoas, a region then in the outskirts of Lisbon), being only
an appealing stop for people directly involved in agronomy. However, the sepa-
ration was also a reality even if the space was within walking distance. From
1868, The Association of Portuguese Agriculture was in Rossio, near the Queen
Maria II National Theatre, but remained an institution made by and for its
members.36 Reis’s fellows in the Cenacle were not hostile to science and tech-
nology but were more interested in its philosophical and artistic significance.
Eça embraced Realism and its scientifically imbued attention to things that
could be directly observed, such as natural landscapes, urban environments,
private rooms, and even the behaviour of specific social types.37 However,
when the Cenacle’s members debated positivism, for example, they were
more interested in its potential to replace the Catholic culture that perme-
ated Portuguese society and in which they had been raised. Science had thus
a specific meaning for the Cenacle as a whole. The attention to positivism also
signalled openness to the scientific ideas of their century and as will become
34 Agriculture was an activity common to around three-quarters of the Portuguese popula-

tion. See Pedro Lains, Os Progressos do atraso: uma nova história económica de Portugal
(Viseu: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2003), 126–7.
35 BNP. Espólio E4. Caixa 59, 6(15). Letter from Reis to Celeste Cinatti, October 1870.
36 Fastos da Real Associação Central de Agricultura Portugueza (Lisboa: Tipografia Castro
Irmão, 1882), 9.
37 On the connections between science and Realism, see Roland Stromberg, ed., Realism,
Naturalism, and Symbolism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1968), xx–xiii.
clear in the case of Antero, the Cenacle’s members considered that science and
technology were important tools for the moral and material progress of their
nation. At the same time, even Reis’s efforts to find a career were not entirely
directed to a scientific field. He also moved influences to become a member
of parliament, although his outspoken socialist sympathies probably compro-
mised the plan, and he applied for a diplomatic position abroad, as his friend
Eça also did.38
3 Turning Private Discussions into Public Matters
The Cenacle’s members continued to hold their discussions in private, but in

1871 an important event led them to engage with Lisbon’s public spaces head-
on: the founding of the Paris Commune, a source of optimism and expectations
of socialist movements across Europe. Antero, Reis, and Eça closely followed
the reports of the Franco-Prussian War, which opposed two of the main pow-
ers of Continental Europe and were astonished by the swiftness of the Prussian
troops in winning the war.39 Months later, upon their excitement of learning
about the revolt that gave rise to the Paris Commune, Reis was unequivocal on
the matter. For Reis, although “war itself is terrible,” in “humanity’s actual state
it is inevitable,” and “the Commune represented the miseries of the workless
proletariat, […] the unfortunate ones that had never [received] a reward for
their work.” Therefore, “the ones who do it [the war] to [have something to]
eat are more just than the ones who do it to starve others to death.”40 The Paris
Commune constituted an opportunity that the Cenacle could not miss.
For Antero, the Commune signalled the time to insert the Cenacle’s dis-
cussions into the public sphere, which was a bold step. As Antero and others
agreed that the type of social mobilization they aimed at should be under-
taken by presenting new, bold, and unifying ideas that fitted their century,
and not exactly the type of mass politics pursued by men like Fontana, they
planned a series of conferences on various subjects, from politics to literature.
The idealist Antero dreamed of igniting a national movement that would bring
the awakening of the Portuguese people under the same patriotic spirit.41 The
Cenacle’s members were fast to organize, and by April 1871 they were already
38 BNP. Espólio E4. Caixa 59, 2. Letter from Reis to Celeste Cinatti, September[?] 1870.
39 Reis, “Annos de Lisboa,” in Anthero de Quental, 460.
40 BNP. Espólio E4. Caixa 58, 3(5). Letter from Reis to Celeste Cinnati, May[?] 1871.
41 Letter from Antero to Teófilo Braga, April 1871 apud Martins, Antero de Quental. Cartas I,
186–8.
360 Gamito-Marques
making contacts to assemble a group of speakers and outlining the confer-

ences’ program.
The organization of public conferences was an important step for the
Cenacle. Its members were finally willing to change their relationship with
Lisbon in a dramatic way: to bring their internal discussions to a space that
could be frequented by many people. They may have been cautious about
publicly disclosing their most radical opinions, but when they did, they
made the effort of reaching far and wide. The Cenacle arranged a room at
the Casino Lisbonense (Lisbon Casino), with permission from the city’s Civil
Administration, and announced, what they called, “Democratic Conferences.”
This bold title, however, was not a call to arms, but rather an expression of
their intention of opening the conferences to “all kinds of people, and from all
[social] conditions.”42
One aspect of these “Democratic Conferences” that is continuously over-
looked is the space in which they took place. It is quite strange that the Cenacle
would choose the Lisbon Casino for what they intended to be a respectable
debate over progressive ideas. The Lisbon Casino had been founded by the end
of 1857 under the name of “Café Concerto” (Music-Hall), a title that appro-
priately reflected its character. Like similar houses in Britain, it was a popu-
lar space for entertainment, where people watched concerts and comedy acts
while drinking alcohol and playing some legal card games. Occasionally, the
space would host masked balls and charity events. By 1871, now renamed the
Lisbon Casino, its hottest and most controversial attractions were the can-
can shows. Imported from Parisian houses of bohemian entertainment, this
acrobatic dance caused scandal due to the provocative poses and the revealing
moves of the female groups that usually performed it.43 Such an environment
echoed the Cenacle’s bohemian inclinations, but it is hard to imagine how it
would contribute to the credibility they wanted to instil to their socialist views.
It is possible that the Lisbon Casino was chosen simply because the Cenacle’s
members personally knew its director, who could be therefore willing to rent
them one room for the conferences.44 At the same time, the Casino presented
other advantages: it was close to Chiado’s coffee shops, where the city’s intel-
lectuals gathered, and it stood between the relatively recent Gymnasium and
42 Ibidem.
43 On the Music-Hall, later Lisbon Casino, see Pinto de Carvalho (Tinop), Lisboa d’Outros
Tempos. Volume II: Os cafés (Lisboa: Parceria António Maria Pereira – Livraria Editora,
1899), 266–8. On the popularity of music-halls, see Dagmar Kift, The Victorian Music Hall
(Irthlingborough: Cambridge University Press, 1991). On the can-can, see Nadège Maruta,
L’Incroyable Histoire du Cancan (Paris: Parigramme, 2014).
44 Reis calls the director a friend in Reis, “Introdução,” in Queirós, Prosas Bárbaras, 45. It is
possible that he occasionally attended the Cenacle’s meetings.
Trindade Theatres.45 The Lisbon Casino was, therefore, located in an area of

the city that people were used to walking back and forth, a strategic place to
catch their attention.
The Democratic Conferences began in May 1871, with an introductory ses-
sion by Antero, who presented Cenacle’s program. Among the conferences
that followed, the most well-known is the second, which was also delivered
by Antero, on the political, economic, and cultural decadence of Portugal and
Spain since the end of the sixteenth century. The conference was later pub-
lished and became a foundational text in Portuguese culture, since it addressed
a feeling that pervaded the Portuguese elite for centuries and that many saw
as the fatal condition of the nation.46According to Antero, both Portugal and
Spain had lived under a period of prosperity from Ancient Rome to the late six-
teenth century, when the conjunction of three factors precipitated their down-
fall: the triumph of the Counter-Reformation, the adoption of a centralized
Absolutist rule, and the reorientation of the economy towards the commercial
activities of the Age of Expansion.
Much has been said about Antero’s analysis, but I would like to stress two
of the factors he presented that are directly related to the status of science
and technology in Portugal. In Antero’s view, the compliance of Iberian kings
with Rome and the repressive activity of the Inquisition in their territories
hampered scientific development. In addition, the aristocrats’ concentration
on the lucrative maritime commerce with Asia had the fatal consequence of
leaving Portugal’s domestic sites of agriculture and industry largely under-
developed. As an alternative, Antero boldly argued for a break with the past
by stimulating philosophical and scientific inquiry, by constructing a federal
republican regime, and by adopting a socialist model of industrial develop-
ment that echoed Proudhon’s proposals.47 Such proposals synthesized the
45 On the Gymnasium Theatre, see Pinto de Carvalho (Tinop), Lisboa d’Outros Tempos.
Volume I: Figuras e scenas antigas (Lisboa: Livraria de António Maria Pereira, 1898),
166–77. On the Trindade Theatre, see Júlio César Machado, Os Theatros de Lisboa (Lisboa:
Livraria Editora de Matos Moreira & C.ª, 1874), 191–236.
46 Antero de Quental, Causas da Decadencia dos Povos Peninsulares nos ultimos tres seculos.
(Porto: Tipografia Comercial, 1871). A good modern edition with a foreword by Eduardo
Lourenço was published in 2010 by Tinta-da-China. There is a significant body of litera-
ture on the Democratic Conferences. Some examples are António Salgado Júnior, História
das Conferências do Casino (Lisboa: Tipografia da Cooperativa Militar, 1930); José Augusto
França, ed., As Conferências do Casino no Parlamento (Lisboa: Horizonte, 1973); João
Medina, ed., As Conferências do Casino e o Socialismo em Portugal (Lisboa: Dom Quixote,
1984); Carlos Reis, As Conferências do Casino (Lisboa: Alfa, 1990).
47 On the decadence of Iberian philosophical and scientific thought, see Quental, Causas da
Decadencia, 15–7, 91. On the consequences of the Age of Expansion, see ibidem, 14, 37–42,
46–7.
362 Gamito-Marques
Cenacle’s members’ attitude toward science and technology: they were ready
to embrace new developments as long as they were part of broader social and
cultural reforms that would give them a higher civic purpose. The sharp criti-
cism that Antero and other Cenacle members directed at Portuguese politi-
cians was based on their perception that current political reforms gave an
excessive emphasis to the material development of the country.48
Antero’s analysis was so striking that even his housemate Reis was
galvanized,49 but the conference’s bold statements were opposed by the catho-
lic press and earned Antero the label of dangerous revolutionary. In any case,
the reaction also had the advantage of bringing much publicity to the event,
which drew in more and more people, even if the initial intent of attracting
elements from all social classes remained unfulfilled. The conferences were
the culmination of years of readings and discussions by the Cenacle’s mem-
bers, and it comes as no surprise they mostly caught the attention of the edu-
cated middle class: they were made by and for intellectuals and were regarded
as sophisticated as controversial.50
The following two conferences were focused on literature and continued
to be attended on average by two hundred people, which was a fairly good
number, but it was precisely their success that brought their downfall. During
the fifth conference, while discussing the state of education in Portugal, the
speaker went as far as dismissing the professors at the ancient University of
Coimbra as incapable of producing new knowledge. Even liberal newspapers
turned against such attacks, and the government ultimately intervened. The
Minister of the Kingdom prohibited further conferences and used the gesture to
exemplify his personal stance towards public manifestations that were directly
or indirectly aligned with the Parisian Communards.51 This unprecedented
decision for this period of Portuguese politics took educated public opinion
by surprise. After Antero stumbled upon the official notice of prohibition
nailed to the door of the Lisbon Casino on the day the sixth conference was
supposed to take place, he rallied various attendees and walked furiously down
the street to the nearby Central Coffee House, where he wrote a reply to the
minister that he later published in the press. The government’s decision was
not reversed, but the controversy indeed grew until it reached parliament.52
48 Ramos, História de Portugal, 62–9.

49 BNP. Espólio E4. Caixa 58, 5(6). Letter from Reis to Celeste Cinatti, 29 May 1871.
The ban made the Cenacle’s members realize that their ideas were too radi-
cal to be openly discussed in public spaces. Although they voiced their com-
plaints in the press, they understood the need to return to their usual spaces
of privacy, and they acted accordingly. However, neither Antero nor Reis,
two of the most politically engaged members of the group, felt intimidated.
In fact, only one month after the abrupt end of the conferences, they agreed
to meet with Spanish representatives of the First International and played
an active role in the founding of its Portuguese branch, collaborating with
Fontana and other working-class socialists. Reis reassured his girlfriend that
he would not take part in any armed revolution, but he and Antero helped
groups that certainly wanted it. Even as the Paris Commune was declared dead,
their socialist enthusiasm was gaining momentum in the underground spaces
of Lisbon.53
4 The Spatial Dispersal of the Cenacle
By the end of 1871, however, things started to change. A new executive led by the
experienced leader of the conservative Regenerator Party, who presented him-
self as the reliable alternative to a period of domestic instability, was in place
in September. He was able to navigate these troubled waters and maintain
his party in power in the following years.54 But there were also changes at the
level of the Cenacle itself. In November, Antero moved to the northern city of
Porto to work on a philosophical treatise away from any distracting revolution-
ary activities.55 In the first months of 1872, Reis’s involvement in agricultural
matters finally paid off and he was appointed Head of Agricultural Services
at the Agrarian Institute, which gave him his first stable job and allowed him
to finally marry his girlfriend and have a family. Eça, who had won second
place in an earlier call for diplomats, was by then appointed to a position in
Havana, Cuba. Before the end of the year, Reis was now happily married and
sharing a new house with his wife away from the bohemian Bairro Alto, Eça
53 On the Portuguese socialist movements of this period, see Carlos da Fonseca, A Origem da
1.ª Internacional em Lisboa (Lisboa: Estampa, 1978); Maria Filomena Mónica, O Movimento
Socialista em Portugal (1875–1934) (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional/Casa da Moeda e Instituto
de Estudos para o Desenvolvimento, 1985); Ramos, “A formação da intelligentsia,” 483–528.
54 Leal, A Rotação Partidária, 151–2.
55 Letter from Antero to Oliveira Martins, 19 or 20 November 1871 apud Martins, Antero de
Quental. Cartas I, 239–41.
364 Gamito-Marques
was starting a new life an ocean away, and Antero was living alone in Lisbon.56
This does not mean that any of them gave up their plans of having an impact
on Portuguese society, as it is exemplified by later projects; however, they now
had responsibilities that were no longer compatible with extended bohemian
incursions.57 The spatial dispersal of the main members of the Cenacle led to
the group’s dissolution.
It was during a time of political instability, from the late 1860s to the early
1870s, that a group of young Portuguese intellectuals formed the Cenacle, a
group in which they discussed ways to transform their society and open it to
the new ideas of their century. The group’s members attracted the attention of
their contemporaries with critical analyses of the country’s situation and bold
reformist proposals, but they were unable to leave enduring marks in the city.
The Democratic Conferences – their only attempt to transform Portuguese
society – stumbled upon the politicians’ fears of social strife motivated by the
rise of the Paris Commune. On the contrary, it was Lisbon that imposed itself
on the Cenacle’s members. The city left such a strong impression on Eça, for
example, that he placed the action of his most important novels in Lisbon
and filled them with countless references to its urban spaces and social types,
despite the fact that he spent the remainder of his life as a diplomat in foreign
countries.58 Lisbon ultimately proved too small for the Cenacle’s ambitions
and could only be properly engaged with inside the minds and in the writings
of its members, the only places in which they succeeded in praising Lisbon’s
few virtues and criticizing its many vices.
Reis was the only member of the Cenacle who had a scientific background
and frequented scientific spaces in the city. Although his scientific studies and
the Cenacle’s activities constituted different worlds, evolutionism became an
important topic for its main members in later years. That said, in 1873, Antero
was already discussing the views of Ernst Haeckel, the most important popula-
riser of evolutionism in Europe.59 From 1874 to 1888, Eça served as a diplomat in
56 On Antero’s return and Reis’s marriage, see letter from Antero to João Lobo de Moura,
early October 1872 apud Martins, Antero de Quental. Cartas I, 268–9. On Eça’s appoint-
ment, see Mónica, Eça de Queirós, 149–50.
57 One of these later projects was the publication of the Western Magazine (Revista
Ocidental) in 1875, another attempt at creating a common platform to unite Portuguese
and Spanish intellectuals.
58 Such are the cases of Cousin Bazilio (O Primo Basílio) and The Maias (Os Maias), but also
of the posthumously published works To the Capital (A Capital!) and The Tragedy of the
Street of Flowers (A Tragédia da Rua das Flores). For examples, see Marina Tavares Dias, A
Lisboa de Eça de Queiroz (Lisboa: Quimera, 2001).
59 Letter from Antero to Oliveira Martins, 26 September [1873] apud Martins, Antero
de Quental. Cartas I, 320–5. On the importance of Haeckel, see Eve-Marie Engels,
Britain and his novels incorporated the controversies he followed over Darwin’s
theory of evolution.60 From the second half of the 1870s, other Portuguese
intellectuals connected to the Cenacle and its discussions addressed evolu-
tionism in their published works on history, sociology and anthropology.61 It
is possible that Reis was responsible for introducing the theory to the group,
since he explicitly mentioned it as early as 1871, while the topic was generally
restricted to Portuguese academic circles.62 In spite of the Cenacle’s dominant
political discussions, from the late 1870s onwards not only did these intellec-
tuals embrace evolutionism, they even placed it at the heart of their views.
Evolutionism was a powerful theory to reinforce their ideas on the need for
social and cultural reforms in Portugal because it argued that change went as
far as being even constitutive of organic life, thus opposition to it amounted
to the violation of a natural law. Moreover, change was understood as advanta-
geous, a view that cohered with the nineteenth century’s tendency of viewing
higher levels of complexity, prosperity, and civilization as direct consequences
of evolution.63 Such Spencerian views persisted among the Cenacle’s members
and mobilized scientific authority to strengthen their interventions in the fol-
lowing years. As a result, the Cenacle helped legitimize the actions of techno-
scientific experts who vied for the modernization of the country.
Acknowledgements
Research for this chapter was supported by the Foundation for Science and
Technology, under projects PTDC/IUC/HFC/3122/2014, UID/HIS/UI0286/2013,
UID/HIS/UI0286/2019 and UIDB/00286/2020 UIDP/00286/2020. I wish to
thank Ana Carneiro for her comments and suggestions to earlier versions of
this chapter.
Thomas F. Glick, “Editors’ Introduction,” in The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe.
Volume I, ed. Eve-Marie Engels, Thomas F. Glick (Norfolk: Continuum, 2008), 1–22.
60 Patricia Silva McNeill, “Echoes from Albion: The Reception of Darwin by José Maria
de Eça de Queiroz,” in The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe.
Volume 4, ed. Thomas F. Glick, Elinor Shaffer (Fakenham: Bloomsbury, 2014), 553–79.
61 Ana Leonor Pereira, Pedro Ricardo Fonseca, “The Reception of Charles Darwin in Portugal
(1865–1914) with Special Reference to the Role of the ‘Generation of 1870’,” in Glick and
Shaffer, The Literary and Cultural Reception, 527–52.
62 See the excerpt from Jaime Batalha Reis, Carta ao Ex.mo Sr. Marquês de Ávila e Bolama
(Porto: Tipografia Comercial, Belmonte, 1871) apud Medina, ed., As Conferências do
Casino, 86–90.
63 On the links between evolution and progress in the nineteenth century, see Peter J. Bowler,
Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2009), 274–6.
Chapter 13
Working-Class Universities: Itinerant Spaces for

Science, Technology and Medicine in Republican
Lisbon
1 Introduction
When Halley’s comet graced Portuguese skies with its presence in May 1910,
many seized on this astronomical phenomenon and its worldwide media cov-
erage to promote the republican movement, with science and technology at
the centre of its political agenda. In fact, economic frailty, along with political
and social instability, had led to an inexorable decline of the monarchy, open-
ing the way for the republican party to rise to power with its new forward-
thinking and progressive policies.
On 5 October 1910, a few short months after Halley’s appearance, the
Republic was established and the process of shaping the “new republican
citizen” began to take form. It became imperative to reform the educational
system from bottom to top, from children to adults, men and women, and
naturally, higher education played a vital role in this process. The secular
monopoly of the University of Coimbra was challenged on the occasion of the
founding of the University of Lisbon and the University of Porto in 1911. Both
cities established their own Faculties of Medicine and Sciences. Additionally,
in the field of engineering, the Faculty of Engineering was created in Porto, and
the Technical Institute was set up outside the university, in Lisbon.
In Lisbon, the Faculty of Sciences was set up in the Polytechnic School build-
ing, with the rectory being located in a building right next door, convenient for
a university represented by rectors emerging from the sciences, throughout
the whole of the first Republic (1910–1926).1 The Faculty of Medicine occupied
a newly constructed building in Campo de Santana, one of several additions to
the new romantic Lisbon expanding into the north according to modernization
1 Ana Simões, Ana Carneiro, Maria Paula Diogo, Luís Miguel Carolino, and Teresa Salomé
Mota, Uma História da Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa (1911–1974) (Lisboa:
FCUL, 2013).
© Ana Simões and Maria Paula Diogo, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004513440_018

Working-Class Universities 367
trends epitomized by Haussmanian Paris.2 In a clear manifestation of the co-

construction of science and the city, the hills of Lisbon took their names from
the higher-education institutions that rested upon them, coming to be known
as the Colina das Ciências (“Hill of the Sciences”) and Colina da Medicina (“Hill
of Medicine”).3 Their relevance to the new urban scientific landscape was such
that the writer and doctor, Fialho de Almeida, imagined them united by an
imposing bridge in his utopian description of Lisbon, “Lisboa Monumental”
(see chapter 3 in this volume).4 They would be later joined, during the dictato-
rial regime of the Estado Novo (New State), by the Colina da Engenharia (“Hill
of Engineering”), with the establishment of the Technical Institute in 1930,
crowning the top of Alameda D. Afonso Henriques.
Figure 13.1 Fialho de Almeida’s monumental bridge

In Fialho de Almeida, “Monumental Lisbon”
2 José-Augusto França, Lisboa. História Física e Moral (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 2008); David
Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York and London: Routledge, 2006).
3 Sven Dierig, Jens Lachmund, and J. Andrew Mendelsohn, eds., Science and the City, Osiris, 18
(2003).
4 Fialho de Almeida, “Lisboa Monumental. I e II,” Ilustração Portuguesa, 36 (1906): 396–405;
39 (1906): 497–509; Ana Simões, “From capital city to scientific capital. Science, technology,
and medicine in Lisbon as seen through the press, 1900–1910,” in Urban Histories of Science.
Making Knowledge in the City 1820–1940, eds. Agustí Nieto-Galan, and Oliver Hochadel
(London: Routledge, 2019), 141–163.
From that moment onward, these institutions etched the scientific “face” of
the hills of Lisbon. However, it must be recognized that other informal institu-
tions of higher learning also left a significant mark on urban Lisbon, albeit in
a more transient and short-lived way. The Universidade Livre para a Educação
Popular (Free University for the Education of the People, or Free University
for short) (1912) and the Universidade Popular Portuguesa (Portuguese Popular
University) (1919) traversed the educational scene of Lisbon. Just as Halley’s
comet temporarily marked the skies of Lisbon, these informal institutions of
education were in existence for a relatively short duration. Contrary to conven-
tional universities, these “universities of the people” aimed at educating adults
with little formal schooling and were of an itinerant nature despite having for-
mal headquarters.5 This itinerancy allowed them both to fulfil their goals of
democratizing education, and to leave a clear mark that would trail all the way
across the capital’s urban and political scene.
Within the history of scientific education, the Faculty of Sciences, the
Free University and the Popular University have been studied separately, an
approach which has accentuated the dichotomy between the formal and infor-
mal teaching of the sciences and technology; between those being educated as
part of an elite in the higher education institutions and the education of the
people in non-academic institutions, such as the free and popular universities.6
From the perspective of urban history of science in Lisbon – a very recent
research field within history of science in Portugal – historians of science have
mainly addressed major scientific institutions and spaces, the role of experts,
and to a lesser degree the impact of science in everyday life.7 Following in the
footsteps of Sven Dierig, Jens Lachmund and J. Andrew Mendelsohn,8 his-
torians of science have explored instances of the co-production of science and
5 Their history went back to the mid-nineteenth century. Agustín Requejo Osorio, “As uni-
versidades populares: Contexto e desenvolvimento de programas de formação de pessoas
adultas,” Revista Lusófona de Educação, 8 (2006): 133–153.
6 Filomena Bandeira, A Universidade Popular Portuguesa nos anos 20 –os intelectuais e a edu-
cação do povo: entre a salvação da República e a Revolução Social, MSc dissertation (Lisboa:
Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 1994); Rogério
Fernandes, Uma experiência de formação de adultos na 1ª República. A Universidade Livre para
Educação Popular, 1911–1917 (Lisboa: Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, 1993).
7 Tiago Saraiva, Ciencia y Ciudad. Madrid y Lisboa, 1851–1900 (Madrid: Ayuntamiento de
Madrid, Area de Gobierno de las Artes, 2005); Tiago Saraiva, and Marta Macedo, eds., Capital
Científica. A Ciência Lisboeta e a Construção do Portugal Contemporâneo (Lisboa: Imprensa de
Ciências Sociais, 2019); Tiago Saraiva, and Ana Cardoso de Matos, “Technological Nocturne:
The Lisbon Industrial Institute and Romantic Engineering (1849–1888),” Technology and
Culture, 58(2) (2017): 422–458; Ana Simões, “From Capital City to Scientific Capital.”
8 Dierig, Lachmund, and Mendelsohn, “Science and the City.”
the city, in the process of integrating scientific innovation within urban envi-
ronments outside of those circumscribed to the capitals of the great European
powers.9
In this chapter we explore the intersection between the history of science
education and the urban history of science, not only with respect to fixed geo-
graphical locations but also itinerant routes of formal and informal higher edu-
cation institutions. This approach allows us to unveil the networks established
between the Faculty of Sciences, the Faculty of Medicine and the Technical
Institute and the Free University and the Popular University.
To this end, we will look at the map of Lisbon from the standpoint of
the teaching of science and technology “on the move,” taking a closer look
at the circulation of teachers, associated with the University of Lisbon’s exten-
sion (or outreach) project, among the various locations of the informal teach-
ing institutions of higher learning.10 We underline the direct involvement
of rectors João de Almeida Lima and Pedro José da Cunha, and a myriad of
other teachers, as well as their impact on the informal structures of education,
founding entities, and organs of management. Concomitantly we give voice to
a multitude of anonymous inhabitants of Lisbon, from the middle and work-
ing classes, who actively participated in these educational activities, in a quite
unique “bottom-up” movement, which illustrates the most recent populariza-
tion of science historiographical trends.11
9 Exemplary works on major European capitals include: Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity;
Miriam Levin, Sophie Forgan, Martina Hessler, Robert Kargon, and Morris Low, eds., Urban
Modernity. Cultural Innovation in the Second Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: The
MIT Press, 2010); Deborah R. Coen, Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty. Science, Liberalism
and Private Life (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007). For other European cities see:
Antonio Lafuente, and Tiago Saraiva. “The Urban Scale of Science and the Enlargement
of Madrid (1851–1936),” Social Studies of Science, 34 (4) (2004): 531–569; Saraiva, Ciencia
y Ciudad; Oliver Hochadel, and Agustí Nieto-Galan, eds., Barcelona. An Urban History
of Science and Modernity, 1888–1929 (London: Routledge, 2016); Oliver Hochadel, and
Agustí Nieto-Galan, “How to write an urban history of STM on the ‘Periphery’,” FORUM
Step matters, Technology and Culture 57(4) (2016): 978–88; Agustí Nieto-Galan, and
Oliver Hochadel, eds., Urban histories of science. Making Knowledge in the City 1820–1940
(London: Routledge, 2019).
10 Simões et al, Uma História.
11 See for example: Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, and Anne Rasmussen, eds., La science
populaire dans la presse et l’édition. XIX et XX siècles (Paris: CNRS, 1997); Roger Cooter,
and Steve Pumphrey, “Separate spheres and public spaces: reflections on the history
of science popularization and science in popular culture,” History of Science, 32 (1994):
237–67; Stephen Hilgartner, “The dominant view of popularization: conceptual problems,
political issues,” Social studies of science, 20 (1990): 519–39; Faidra Papanelopoulou, Agustí
Nieto-Galan, and Enrique Perdiguero, eds., Popularizing science and technology in the
European Periphery, 1800–2000 (Oxon: Ashgate, 2009); James A. Secord, “Knowledge in
It is our conviction that the analysis of the connections between the dif-
ferent kinds of teaching institutions of higher learning and those designed
for adult learning will unveil new relations between scientific and technical
training and the popularization of science and technology in Lisbon. It will
further identify new target groups and the creation of new centres of learn-
ing on Lisbon’s educational landscape. Often traced through their appearance
in newspapers and print-media,12 these new centres of learning left an indel-
ible, but episodic, mark and provide one with a fresh look at the structural role
of science and technology in the formation of the republican citizen, and the
transformation that made Lisbon the scientific capital of Portugal.
2 Republican Agenda, Faculties of Sciences and the University

of Lisbon Extension Projects
The republican project linked schooling to the new citizenship, to the building
of the “new man.”13 The end of the University of Coimbra’s monopoly, the cre-
ation of the two new universities in Lisbon and in Porto, and the sedimentation
of techno-scientific teaching aligned with the overall visions of the republican
political line. This vision, strongly influenced by Comte and Littré’s positivism,
proposed both science and technology as fundamental and constitutive ele-
ments in the construction of republican citizenship.
Contrary to the polytechnic schools that preceded them, the faculties of the
sciences defended the pursuit of disinterested research rather than the search
for solutions to pressing practical problems. As stated in April of 1911, the three-
fold mission of universities was:
transit,” Isis, 95 (2004): 654–72; Terry Shinn, and Richard Whitley, eds., Expository Science.
Forms and functions of popularization (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995); Josep Simon et al., eds.,
Beyond Borders. Fresh perspectives in history of science (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2008); Jonathan Topham, ed., FOCUS: Historicizing “Popular Science”, ISIS,
100 (2009): 310–18.
12 The sources pertaining to the Free University and to the Popular University, if they exist,
are scattered among private individuals, making their historical analysis extremely dif-
ficult. In this context, news in the periodical press, despite far from being easily and sys-
tematically available, constitute a very important source of information. News used in
this chapter were collected during the project An open window to representations of sci-
ence and technology in the Portuguese press (1900–1926) (PTDC/HCT/68210/2006).
13 There is an extensive bibliography on the First Republic. Examples are: Fernando Rosas,
and Fernanda Rollo, eds., História da I República Portuguesa (Lisboa: Tinta da China,
2009); Rui Ramos, ed., A Segunda Fundação, in História de Portugal, dir. José Mattoso,
vol. 6 (Lisboa: Editorial Estampa, 2001); Fernando Catroga, O Republicanismo em Portugal.
Da Formação ao 5 de Outubro de 1910 (Lisboa: Casa Letras, 2010).
a) To spur the progress of science, through the work of its masters and to
create a student elite commanding the methods of discovery and scien-
tific invention; b) To administer the general teaching of science and its
application, providing the essential basis for careers that require scien-
tific and technical qualifications; c) To promote the methodical study of
national problems and to disseminate “high culture” to the population at
large, by means of the extension programs of the universities.14
However, decreeing a new mission for higher education in Portugal was easier
said than done. Replacing previous practices was a complex task given the
fact that these new schools were taking on facilities, teachers, students, and
staff directly from its institutional predecessors. For example, on 15 May 1911,
at the time of the promulgation of the statutes of the newly formed Faculty of
Sciences of the University of Lisbon, republican legislators decided to transfer
teachers and pupils from the Lisbon Polytechnic School to the new Faculty of
Sciences, maintaining the former director as head,15 and occupying the same
building located in Rua da Escola Politécnica, a main street in the heart of the
“Hill of the Sciences.” This decision corroborated the Polytechnic teachers’
mistaken perception that there was a link or continuity of purpose between
the two institutions, a link which was emphasized for political reasons by the
mathematician, former rector of the University of Lisbon and ex-director of
the Faculty of Sciences Pedro José da Cunha, in the speech delivered on the
one-hundredth anniversary of the Polytechnic School (1937).
The organization of the space in which the Faculty’s teachers and students
developed their teaching and research activities became crucial for the emer-
gence and consolidation of novel scientific practices.16 However, conflation
with former spatial options taken from the Polytechnic School, the aims of
which were incongruous with those of this newer model of higher education,
may have complicated or impeded the implementation of a new research
ethos.
Operational, security, and efficiency issues were a constant source of worry.
Year after year, both annual reports and the Council of Faculty of Sciences
raised the issue of inadequate facilities while continuously discussing various
14 Decree of 19 April 1911, published in 22 April 1911 – Bases da Nova Constituição Universitária.
15 Diário do Governo, 15 May 1911.
16 David Livingstone, Putting science in its place: Geographies of scientific knowledge (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003); Robert Kohler, Landscapes and labscapes. Exploring
the lab-field border in biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). For the role
of locality in Lisbon see Saraiva, Ciencia y ciudad. For the special case of the Faculty of
Sciences see Ana Luísa Janeira, Sistemas epistémicos e ciências. Do Noviciado da Cotovia à
Faculdade de Ciências de Lisboa (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 1987).
Figure 13.2 The Faculty of Sciences of Lisbon

Arquivo Fotográfico da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, PT/AMLSB/
CMLSBAH/PCSP/004/BOB/000079
possible solutions. These solutions ranged from sporadic projects to plans of

retrofitting and improving existing spaces, to more radical measures such as the
relocation to what came to be the university campus (Cidade Universitária).
Relocation was successively and systematically postponed, due in no small
part to the problems posed by transferring the Museum, observatories, and
Botanical Garden to another location.17 The decision to move the Faculty of
Sciences to Campo Grande, in the north of Lisbon, dragged on for upwards
of five decades – a deliberation process that began around the same time as
the founding of the University of Lisbon (1911) and ended just as the univer-
sity campus was founded, crowned by the impressive Rectory building (1961).18
What is more, the geographical dispersal of the University of Lisbon over the
city during this fifty year period hindered the consolidation of its institutional
and cognitive identity. All the rectors addressed this issue, most particularly
the first three rectors who governed the University of Lisbon throughout the
17 Simões et al., Uma História, 103.

18 ARUL, Atas das Sessões do Senado da Universidade de Lisboa (Minutes of the Senate),
10 February 1920, p. 307.
entire first Republic: the mathematician and military engineer Augusto José da
Cunha, the physicist who would later become a general, João de Almeida Lima
and the mathematician and military engineer Pedro José da Cunha.19
Rectors like Cunha and Lima believed that the new university should follow
the example of the American technical universities and should integrate tech-
nical and professional institutions existing in Lisbon.20 In this way, they coun-
teracted past erudite learning, promoting a kind of learning based on practical
application, able to answer the need for economic development in the coun-
try. Equally inspired by the-then already “well-recognized” University of Rome
and University of Berlin, they claimed that this new way of doing could only
succeed if based on strong and original scientific research.21 This issue was rel-
evant for all schools of the University of Lisbon, and its persistence testified to
the resistance to change felt everywhere.
Parallel to this, the rector Pedro José da Cunha followed in the footsteps
of his predecessors by paying special attention to the role of the university
extension as an integral part of the university’s “social mission.” This aspect
resonated with the popularization of science dear to republicanism.22 The
new universities were meant to form the nation’s elites, but at the same
time they should propagate “high culture” throughout the various layers of
a largely unlettered population. These issues were addressed in Cunha’s first
talk at the beginning of the academic year of 1916–17, shortly after taking up
the role of rector. Discussing the role of universities in post-war societies, and
following primarily the example of American universities, Cunha considered
it vital to articulate the university’s two-fold dimensions – the technical and
humanistic – a virtuous fusion that would turn the university into an active
agent of economic development and a guardian of the unity of the “nation’s
soul.”23 For Cunha, the university’s connection to civil society took centre stage
in his considerations.24 Thus, in order to educate the masses, a network would
have to be created and, to this end, Cunha reached out to several partners.
19 ARUL, Minutes of the Senate, 23 May 1914, pp. 67–8, 24 March 1917, p. 49, 10 May 1917, p. 61,
10 February 1920, p. 307. Simões et al., Uma História.
20 ARUL, Minutes of the Senate, 10 December 1919, 292.
21 ARUL, Minutes of the Senate, 13 May 1919, 189–90.
22 Ana Simões, and Luís Miguel Carolino, “The Portuguese astronomer Melo e Simas (1870–
1934). Republican ideals and the popularization of science,” Science in Context 27 (2014):
49–77. For the Spanish case see Agustí Nieto-Galan, “A Republican natural history in
Spain around 1900. Odón de Buen (1863–1945) and his audiences,” Historical Studies in the
Natural Sciences 42 (2012): 159–189.
23 ARUL, Minutes of the Senate, 10 January 1917, 24.
24 ARUL, Minutes of the Senate, 10 January 1917, 23, 24.
The Institute of Agronomy offered the cooperation of its teachers,25 alongside

both the Technical Institute and the Institute of Commerce. However, unlike
their agronomic counterpart, both the Technical Institute and the Institute of
Commerce collaborated with Cunha but only based on maintaining their inde-
pendence and institutional autonomy.26 The School of Veterinary Medicine, by
contrast, delayed responding to Cunha’s call entirely.27
Several different town halls were contacted to ascertain their interest in the
university extension courses with responses coming in from across the whole
of Portugal.28 In response to the rector’s initiative, the Ateneu Comercial
(Commercial Athenaeum) requested lectures on fiduciary circulation,
national history from a commercial standpoint, political economics, indus-
trial legislation, commercial geography, history of commerce, physical and
natural sciences, while the Associação dos Caixeiros de Lisboa (Association of
Employees of Commerce of Lisbon) expressed a desire to host lectures at their
headquarters on topics such as general and national history and commercial
geography.29 In response to this influx of interest from across the country, the
rector appealed to the Railways’ Administrative Council to provide free tickets
to teachers and pupils who participated in these lectures, and highlighted the
importance of “advertising purposes” to make the project known.30
Additionally, the Academy of Free Studies and the Free University requested
lectures on physics, chemistry and hygiene. From the Faculty of Sciences,
Almeida Lima, physicist and ex-rector, and Jaime Xavier de Brito, offered to
deliver lectures on the first two disciplines, while the rector called upon the
Faculty of Medicine to find a speaker to deliver the lecture on hygiene.31
Moreover, Bettencourt Ferreira, a committed populariser of science and natu-
ralist from the Faculty of Sciences, offered to deliver a talk on natural history at
the Academy of Free Studies.32 Eduardo dos Santos Andrea, an astronomer and
colleague of Ferreira’s, announced the creation of the Sociedade Astronómica
de Portugal (Portuguese Society of Astronomy) – a society of amateur astrono-
mers – adding that the Faculty of Sciences would take it under its wing, as
25 ARUL, Minutes of the Senate, 10 February 1917, 36.

26 ARUL, Minutes of the Senate, 24 March 1917, 48, 21 April 1917, 55–6.
27 ARUL, Minutes of the Senate, 12 June 1917, 68.
28 Among them were Setúbal, Vila Franca de Xira, Vila Nova de Portimão, Vila Nova de
Ourém, Castelo de Vide, Aljezur, Torres Vedras, Monforte, Alportel, Cascais, Aljezur,
Extremoz, Tavira, Vila do Porto, Ponta Delgada and Lourinhã. ARUL, 10 February 1917, 36,
24 March 1917, 47.
29 ARUL, Minutes of the Senate, 21 April 1917, 57.
30 ARUL, Minutes of the Senate, 24 March 1917, 49, 12 June 1917, 70.
31 ARUL, Minutes of the Senate, 24 March 1917, 48.
a way of “extending the university to the people.”33 Meanwhile, the teaching

assistant Adolfo Sena offered to organize a special course in mathematics
for typographical setters, which would take place at the Imprensa Nacional
(National Press).34
Although it is admittedly difficult to ascertain exactly the university exten-
sion activities that took place, their exact dates and their lasting impact, there
is no doubt regarding Lima’s and Cunha’s connection to the Free University
and, later, to the Portuguese Popular University. Lima’s and Cunha’s involve-
ment with these universities left an indelible mark on these institutions,
despite their absence from past scholarship regarding the circulation of
scientists-academics among formal and informal higher education institu-
tions for adults.
3 Adult Education in the Free University and the Portuguese

Popular University
As we have seen, the agenda surrounding the formation of the “new republican
[and] complete man” as an “individual and as a social being”35 largely centred
on educational reforms.36 If the problem of illiteracy was of great concern to
the Republic, popular instruction for adults was always of relevance. Thus, and
following the rest of Europe, popular universities occupied a central role in the
context of what were “private courses as part of the university extension.”37 In
Lisbon, both the Free University and the Portuguese Popular University sought
to maintain a cross-class appeal with the general public, targeting individu-
als from the middle and lower middle class, alongside the poor and working
classes.
However, even before the establishment of the Republic, in 1904, the repub-
lican agenda for university expansion was already underway via the Academy

35 J. Salvado Sampaio, O Ensino primário, 1911–1969. Contribuição monográfica, vol. 1: 1º
Período 1911–1926 (Lisboa: IGC, 1975), 172.
36 Bibliography on republicanism and education in Portugal is extensive. Examples are:
Jaime Cortesão, “A Reforma da educação,” Seara Nova, 25 (1923): 11–13; Rogério Fernandes,
Bernardino Machado e os problemas da Instrução Pública (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 2009);
Manuel Ferreira Patrício, “A Instrução Pública: Os limites de uma reforma,” in Portugal
Contemporâneo, António Reis, dir. vol. 3 (Lisboa: Publicações Alfa, 1990), 233–252; Jorge
Ramos do Ó, O governo de si mesmo: Modernidade pedagógica e encenações disciplinares
do aluno liceal (último quartel do século XIX-meados do século XX) (Lisboa: Educa, 2003).
37 David Ferreira, “Sobre a Universidade Livre,” Diário de Lisboa, 17 November 1969.
for Free Studies, and later with the National League of Education, in 1907.
Common to both the Academy for Free Studies and the National League of
Education was the republican programs support by teachers linked to Masonry
and Republicanism.
The Academy of Free Studies (est. 1889) was founded in the working
class neighbourhood of Alto do Pina, in the East of Lisbon, by the masonic
lodge, Kindness and Unity, though, from 1904 onward, it became known as
the Academy of Free Studies – Popular University.38 In the same year, the
Academy integrated the Marquês de Pombal School, which was founded in
1882 by the Masonic lodge Triumphant Reason, which offered daytime classes
for poor children of both sexes, and night classes for adults. The Academy of
Free Studies carried out free courses, lectures, and school trips as part of its
mission to popularize science and culture to the masses. Amongst its promot-
ers were many well-known members of the Portuguese cultural and politi-
cal scene, often of republican leanings, such as Bernardino Machado, future
president of the Republic. Many of the courses and lectures gave preference to
patriotic themes, linked to Portuguese History and Literature, while included
classes on scientific topics deemed fundamental for the modern education
proper to the ideal of the “new man.” Such was the case of the lecture entitled
“The Portuguese night sky. Lessons in Astronomy,” by Pedro José da Cunha.
The same themes dictated the choice of school trip destinations, in which
national history landmarks and emblematic locations linked to present eco-
nomic issues dominated.
In 1907, The National League of Education was founded under the super-
vision of José Francisco Trindade Coelho (a writer, pedagogue, magistrate
and politician) and Manuel Borges Grainha (high school teacher, pedagogue,
politician and mason). The overall goal of the League: “to improve national
schooling, in all areas of study, but mainly targeting primary and popular edu-
cation.” One of its missions was to “promote the development of the so-called
Popular Universities, forming a nucleus of lecturers and speakers able to visu-
ally convey, in a pleasant manner, topics of interest to the various popular
associations.”39 Such republican endeavours were so successful that, while its
headquarters were located in Lisbon, it maintained branches all over the coun-
try and its African colonies (Bié and Benguela in Angola).
38 Joaquim Antônio de Sousa Pintassilgo, “O projecto pedagógico das universidades popu-

lares no Portugal das primeiras décadas do século XX. O exemplo da academia de estu-
dos livres”, texto pdf. accessed at http://repositorio.ul.pt/bitstream/10451/4036/1/O%20
projecto%20pedagógico%20das%20universidades%20populares.pdf.
39 Liga nacional de instrução (National League of Education), Arquivos dos seus trabalhos,
Lisboa, 1ª série, January to March 1915.
Figures 13.3a–b The headquarters of the Free University, Plaza Luís de Camões, Chiado.
Arquivo Fotográfico da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, PT/AMLSB/
CMLSBAH/PCSP/004/PAG/000460; Portuguese Popular University
headquarters
picture by authors
Founded in 1912 during the first Republic, the Free University would con-
tinue to pursue its educational function for roughly 20 years. According to
António Cabreira, mathematician, journalist and publicist, behind its genesis
was the Royal Institute of Lisbon (or the “19th of September Institute”) founded
in 1894 by Cabreira himself; an institution dedicated to professional training
and qualification.40 From the very beginning, the Free University established
a privileged relationship with another of António Cabreira’s projects, the
recently formed Academy of Sciences of Portugal, whose first president, from
1915 onward, was Teófilo Braga, who would also serve as the second president
of the Portuguese Republic.
The Free University was inaugurated on 28 January, in the Coliseum room,
which was, then, still located in Rua da Palma. Its sponsor was the promoter of
republican associativism, Alexandre Ferreira (an entrepreneur who donated
his properties to build the Commercial Invalids Nursing Home). The inau-
guration was graced by the presence of the Republic’s President, Manuel de
Arriaga, along with teachers from primary and technical schools to teachers
at the university level, and even a handful of high-profile individuals from the
regime.41 The public announcement of the Free University’s inauguration was
issued via pamphlet, which stated its objectives while simultaneously encour-
aging the participation and contribution of all those described to be “patriots
and lovers of progress.”
With strong connections to Freemasonry, the new institution’s anti-clerical
discourse and activities were geared towards post-primary education, both
of a medium level and of a supplementary nature when compared to official
schooling. Within the secular context of the Freemasons, post-primary educa-
tion aimed at cultivating informed citizens via their “moral, social, aesthetic
and scientific education”42 that included a proactive approach aiming to o
“combat vices as a whole and particularly workers’ attraction to the taverns.”43
Thus, the Free University’s curriculum embraced a vision of continuous educa-
tion, in order to complement the schooling of those who reached out for it, no
matter what their level of education, including lectures, courses, and cultural
excursions, often on scientific topics.
The Portuguese Popular University was founded on 27 April 1919, seven years
after the Free University’s inauguration and in the wake of the dictatorship
40 Fernandes, Uma Experiência, Annex 2, p. 123.

41 Fernandes, Uma Experiência, 38, and Annex 2, 123.
42 BMUL, Vida Associativa da UL. Relatório do Conselho de Administração 1911–3, 216;
Fernandes, Uma Experiência, 17–18.
Fernandes, Uma Experiência, 55.
of Sidónio Pais. Even though the Popular University would come to an end
in 1950, practically speaking it had ceased all significant activity from 1933
onward given the rise of Salazar’s dictatorship, the Estado Novo (New State).
At the inauguration ceremony, there were two proselytes of the popular educa-
tion movement, Pedro José da Cunha and Leonardo Coimbra. Cunha, who was
rector of the University of Lisbon at the time and president of the Organizing
Committee, delivered the speech introducing the new institute, followed by an
address by the philosopher, pedagogue, and Minister of Education, Coimbra.
Given the significance of the event, the President of the Republic was the one
who presided over the session. On 10 May, the government attributed the stat-
ute of public service to the Popular University in order
to recognize that this institute is employing pedagogical measures, of the

very best standard, with magnificent success, such as the creation of a
model library for all, a cinematographic room with regular sessions pro-
moting science, history and the arts, as well as series of lectures delivered
by some of the most prestigious teachers and professors from the univer-
sities, high schools and other official schools.44
The Popular University gathered intellectuals and workers with the aim of
popularizing and spreading education and culture. Its headquarters were
based in the neighbourhood of Campo de Ourique, but it had sections in
other working-class neighbourhoods (see chapter 3 in this volume) in order
to reach as many workers as possible. The University’s Administrative Council
was made up of five teachers and seven workers, a group of men politically
involved not only in republicanism, but also in left wing politics, which aligned
them with organizations such as the Democratic Unity Movement and the
Portuguese Communist Party. The founder of the Popular University and first
director was António Augusto Ferreira de Macedo, who was a mathematician,
professor at the Technical Institute, co-founder of the journal Seara Nova, and
a member of the National Library Group. After Macedo, it was Bento de Jesus
Caraça, a mathematician, professor at the Institute of Economic and Financial
Sciences, and active opposer of the New State regime who would serve as the
Council’s director. Both Macedo and Caraça would go on to participate in the
Mathematical Movement but were eventually expelled from the University
during the political purge of 1947.
Teaching and lecturing on scientific topics and culture were favoured meth-
ods in spreading the new “gospel” of positivism both at the Portuguese Popular
44 Decree 5781, 10 May 1919. Ministry of Public Instruction.

University and at the Free University. Science, in this context, was viewed as
capable of emancipating individuals from old beliefs, both superstitious and
religious. It was a vehicle of progress, and the privileged road to a new republi-
can ethos, in all its different facets, including that of politics. In these informal
universities, the preferred means and method of instruction were visual aids,
including slideshows, diagrams, and pictures, reflecting the popular educa-
tional techniques of the time.
4 Science on the Move. The Circulation of Teachers and Projects

in the Urban Space
“The Portuguese Popular University is not an act of university extension,

dependent on the University of Lisbon. It has its own life; it is an organism
in its own right. Its name is self-explanatory and precise and is intrinsically a
promoter of schooling and education for the people at large.”45 These words
about the Popular University by Faria de Vasconcelos, professor at the Faculty
of Humanities of the University of Lisbon and one of the most prestigious ped-
agogues connected to the New School movement, could just as well be applied
to the Free University.46 They clearly invoked the tension attached to these
universities’ statutes, from their origin as university extension, and the need
for them to emancipate, and thereby distinguish, themselves from formal uni-
versities in general and the University of Lisbon in particular. And it would be
by means of agendas that prioritized political, ideological and social transfor-
mation, and were fundamentally geared towards the interests of the working-
class. Despite this underlying conflict, the critical relationship between the
popular universities and the University of Lisbon was noteworthy, insofar as
it managed to weave a strong fabric of close-knit relationships between both
individuals and institutions.
It is with this backdrop in mind that Almeida Lima, rector of the University
of Lisbon and professor at the Faculty of Sciences, considered the cooperation
between formal and popular universities as the touchstone of the university
45 Faria de Vasconcelos, “O que deve ser a Universidade Popular Portuguesa,” Educação

popular 1 (1921): 1–5, transcribed in Bandeira, A Universidade Popular, 2ª parte, 53.
46 The New School movement appeared in Europe at the turn of the nineteenth and the
twentieth centuries. It was geared towards the spiritual upbringing of children anchored
on reflexive freedom and moral autonomy, so that school’s overall aim was to turn chil-
dren into independent human beings capable of taking decisions based on autonomous
thinking.
extension; a matter which he addressed on the occasion of the fourth anniver-

sary of the Free University.47 Since it was “an almost a priori undeniable truth
that knowledge or science is the number one economic factor in the devel-
opment of wealth of the nations,”48 education, including scientific education,
could not be restricted to an elite since, as Lima puts it, “industry, commerce
and agricultural worlds must also be educated; it is of pressing importance to
educate and elevate the people, so as to enhance their capacity to produce; it
is vital to enlighten and above all educate.” In order for the formal universities
to be able to exercise “their redeeming role,” knowledge should be integrated
into centres for popular education and should be adapted to a “polytechnic
approach, as Comte had already advised in the preceding century.”49 For both
Cunha and Lima, there was an inextricable link between conventional and
popular universities, despite their unique specificities and autonomy. Hence,
they argued for the perpetuation and reproduction of their on-going dialogue,
sticking to common ground in which complementary roles and functions
would be brought to life through the work of their mentors and participants.
In what follows we will, therefore, focus on the circulation of teachers
between the Free and Popular universities and the University of Lisbon, iden-
tifying the places in which they delivered their lectures and talks, the topics
discussed and the profile of their public, to highlight the intense, itinerary
but ever-constant presence of science and technology in Lisbon. Not simply
a product of a top-down movement associated with the appearance of major
institutions and actors, the transformation of Lisbon into the Portuguese sci-
entific and technological capital50 was accomplished via the episodic use of a
multitude of pre-existing spaces, often associated with trade unions, workers’
associations, or republican centres, in which many middle- and working-class
inhabitants of Lisbon, including a substantial number of women, participated
in a bottom-up trend, looking actively for informal instruction and profes-
sional training.
The Free University and the Popular University were instruments of
power that differed from more canonical examples such as the Viennese
Volkshochschulen,51 insofar as they were the result of a bottom-up movement
47 BMUL, “Em prol da Universidade.”

48 BMUL, Almeida Lima, “Como eu entendo a extensão universitária,” 34.
49 BMUL, Almeida Lima, “Como eu entendo a extensão universitária,” 38.
50 Ana Simões, “From capital city to scientific capital.”
51 See Taschwer, Klaus. “People´s Universities in a Former Metropolis: Interfaces between
the Social and Spatial Organization of Popular Adult Education in Vienna, 1890–1930.” In
Intellectuals, Activists and Reformers. Studies of Cultural, Social and Educational Reform
controlled by the working classes albeit within the Republican agenda to cre-
ate the “new Man”. This is exemplified nowhere better than the institution’s
lecture-based format and the places where lectures were held. The concept
underlying the Free and Popular universities was never to deliver formal or
structured courses – a task that was part of the mission of commercial and
industrial schools and public institutes – but to introduce a wide range of top-
ics to the working classes, even if they were not directly useful to their profes-
sional life. On the other hand, these lectures were held in the professional and
cultural spaces of everyday working-class life, and hosted by affiliated institu-
tions such as unions, mutual aid groups, and cultural associations.
In line with this working-class leadership, the lecturers – mostly univer-
sity teachers – perceived these “teaching duties” as part of their mission as
Republicans: they answered without charging any fees to the requests from
workers’ associations as a contribution to the Republican political agenda. In
this context, the concept of university extension used by the rector scientists
of the University of Lisbon is very different from the top-down approach that
usually characterizes this type of movement.
The Free and the Popular universities were political tools of empowerment
of the Lisbon working class in the context of the Republican agenda and as
part of a growing influence of urban unionist and anarcho-syndicalist groups.
These itinerant institutions aided in the eventual overthrow of the monarchy
in 1910 and became some of the most outspoken defenders of workers’ aspira-
tions in the following decades. For what lay behind the practices of republi-
cans and anarchists alike, was a vested interest in upholding the Baconian idea
of scientific and technological knowledge as a source of power and progress,
contributing to mould the new republican citizen and, by consequence, a new
society.
Among the speakers from the Free University who went to the working-
class neighbourhoods of Lisbon were several scientists, many of whom were
associated with the University of Lisbon. Notable participants include: Melo
e Simas and Eduardo dos Santos Andrea, who addressed astronomy topics;
João Maria de Almeida Lima, José Júlio Rodrigues and Charles Lepierre, who
addressed physics and chemistry; Artur Ricardo Jorge, Rui Teles Palhinha, and
Baltazar Osório, who addressed natural science, and Pedro José da Cunha who
addressed mathematics.52 With the exception of Melo e Simas (astronomer at
the Astronomical Observatory of Lisbon) and Charles Lepierre (chemist at the
Movements in Europe, 1890–1930, edited by Barry J. Hake and Tom Steele, 175–202. Leeds,
1997.
52 Fernandes, Uma Experiência, Annex 2, 123; BMUL, ano 1, nº 1, Jan 1914, 5.
Campo Pequeno 8
IST
Alamena
Parque
Florestal de
Monstanto
4 Alto do
Pina
Parque
Eduardo VII
Marquês
de Pombal
Marquês
de Pombal
5
FM 12
Campo de UL 1 1 N
Ourique FC 8
3 11 14 Fac. Medicina FM
Jardim da 5
UP Estrela 2 2 3
Castelo de Fac. Ciências FC
9 S. Jorge
4 7
UL UL Inst. Superior Técnico
9 IST
6
13
Terreiro do Univ. Livre UL
Paço Rio Tejo
(Belém) 6 Univ. Livre (sessao) x
Univ. Popular UP
7 10
(Barreiro) (Alfeite) Univ. Popular (sessao) x
Figure 13.4 Map of Lisbon with the location of the Faculty of Sciences and the Faculty of Medicine, as
well as the sections of the Free and Popular universities
FM: Fac. de Medicina, Cp. Mártires Pátria; FC: Fac. de Ciências, R. Escola Politécnica; IST:
Instituto Superior Técnico, Alameda
[UP]: Universidade Popular (headquarters); [1]: Centro Escolar Republicano Dr. António
José de Almeida – Trav. Nazaré; [2]: Associação de Classe dos Caixeiros de Lisboa – Trav.
Nova S. Domingos; [3]: Associação do Pessoal do Arsenal do Exército – Cp. Santa Clara;
[4]: Sindicato Único das Classes Metalúrgicas – Cl. Combro; [5]: Sindicato dos Operários
Chapeleiros – R. Arco Marquês Alegrete; [6]: Secção de Belém da Federação de Construção
Civil – Belém; [7]: Sede do Sindicato Único da Construção Civil (de Lisboa), Cl. Combro,
38; [8]: Secções da Construção Civil e Metalúrgica do Alto Pina – Alto Pina; [9]: Secção do
Sindicato dos Chauffeurs – R. Era
[UL]: Universidade Livre (sedes); (1): Centro Escolar Republicano Dr. António José de
Almeida, Tr. Nazaré, 21; (2): Associação da Classe dos Caixeiros de Lisboa, Tr. Nova de
S. Domingos; (3): Centro Republicano Radical Português, R. Glória; (4): Clube Estefânia,
R. Alexandre Braga; (5): Associação do Registo Civil e do Livre Pensamento, Lg. Intendente;
(6): Sociedade Promotora do Ensino Popular, R. Alcântara; (7): Instituto Ferroviário,
R. Heliodoro Salgado 50, Barreiro; (8): Associação dos Socorros Mútuos dos Empregados
do Comércio e Indústria, R. Palma; (9): Associação da Classe dos Ourives, R. Atalaia;
(10): Operários do Arsenal do Alfeite e da Cordoaria Nacional, Alfeite; (11): Sociedade de
Geografia de Lisboa, R. Portas Sto. Antão, 100; (12): Faculdade de Medicina de Lisboa, Cp.
Mártires Pátria; (13): Sociedade de Instrução Militar Preparatória, Santos-o-Velho; (14):
Caixa Económica Operária, Rua Voz do Operário
Courtesy of José Avelãs Nunes
Technical Institute), these researchers all belonged to the Faculty of Sciences.

What is more, Lima and Cunha did not limit themselves to arm-chair rectors
of the University of Lisbon, since they too counted themselves among the sci-
entists and professors who viewed working-class neighbourhoods as equally
legitimate spaces of knowledge production.
By means of talks, classes, and thematically organized lectures, a variety of
subjects were presented to a vast and diversified public that included individu-
als from both the middle and working class, since, as Melo e Simas put it, “the
rich cannot have the monopoly of science.”53 In keeping with the social func-
tion of formal and informal models of higher education, the selected themes
were often far from the public’s immediate interests.
On 11 February 1921, Melo e Simas delivered the inaugural lecture at the
Caixa Económica Operária (Workers’ Savings Bank), on Rua da Voz do
Operário. In line with the lectures dedicated to “the usefulness of astronomy,”
“the grandeur and magnificence of the universe,” and “the general idea of the
distribution of the worlds,” Simas used this platform to advocate for the power
of “scientific schooling and positive education.” Simas, however, was not shy
in identifying astronomy as the privileged science capable of moulding and
elevating the spirit of a young and promising republican nation; a privileged
science whose transformative potential was to be gleaned from the sublime
splendours unveiled by astronomy via its practices of cosmic observation and
in the mathematical rigor of its calculation.
Several other lectures would follow: “The eclipses of the Sun and Moon”,
by Simas as well; “Mathematics: what is it and what purpose does it serve?”,
by Eduardo dos Santos Andrea; “Physics: what is it and what purpose does it
serve?”, by Almeida Lima; “What is Chemistry?”, by Charles Lepierre; “Botany”,
by Ricardo Jorge; “The Creature that is Man”, by Teles Palhinha; “A Prologue
to Zoology”, by Baltazar Osório; and “The nature of mathematical reasoning”,
by Pedro José da Cunha.54 Lectures started with brief introductions, follow-
ing the typical pattern for popularization of science and then moved on to its
main theme, and alternated between a strictly theoretical engagement of the
subject at hand and a more situated approached that linked a given theme to
current events (e.g. eclipses).55 They proceeded from the simple to the com-
plex, starting with matters relating to the universe and then emphasizing the
53 BMUL, 1–1-14, Melo e Simas, “A Instrução Popular,” 10–12, 10.

54 A summary of these lectures is included in BMUL, Vida Associativa da UL. Relatório do
Conselho de Administração 1911–3, 222–32.
55 Fernandes, Uma Experiência, 82.
material and moral usefulness of the sciences, in their own right and in regards
to the formation of the new republican citizen.
Simultaneous with these lectures were talks held in various locations. During
the academic years of 1913–14, 1914–15, and 1915–16 for which we have docu-
mentation, 132 talks were recorded, 73 of which revolved around topics such as
medicine and technology, delivered by 7 different speakers. “The human body”,
“Dental hygiene” and “Industrial hygiene” were the selected themes for talks
related to medicine and public health. Included in the list of speakers were the
doctor and pedagogue Ladislau Piçarra, the naturalist and teaching assistant
at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Antero Seabra,56 den-
tist Carlos Cília, and Manuel de Vasconcelos, a specialist in analysis of water
and residues. Talks dedicated to the theme of technology and related issues,
included lectures on resources, machines, and construction projects associ-
ated with both transport and communication. Given the available documenta-
tion, notable topics included: “The metallurgical nature of iron”, “White coal
and the transmission of force from a distance,” “The steam-powered machine,”
“Sea ports,” and “Lighthouses and high towers,” with a list of speakers that
included Agostinho Fortes (Faculty of Humanities of the University of Lisbon)
and Frederico Simas (Minister of Public Education and teacher at the Army
School).
Of the many distinguishing factors proper to the Free University, mobility
was to become its chief characteristic. It was common practice for speakers
and lecturers from the Free University to make their way around the heart of
the capital city, filling venues, usually dedicated to other ends, with scientific
knowledge. Not simply confined to the distance between the University and
the Workers’ Savings Bank, speakers and attendees would travel to various
workers’ centres, professional associations, and republican centres,57 as well as
to the Society of Geography of Lisbon, the Faculty of Medicine, and the Society
of Preparatory Military Instruction.58
56 Seabra studied metropolitan and ultramarine fauna at the then National Museum of
Lisbon, under the guidance of Barbosa du Bocage. He was also the director of the Vasco
da Gama Aquarium, and later professor of natural sciences at the University of Coimbra.
57 Centro Escolar Republicano Dr. António José de Almeida, Associação da Classe dos
Caixeiros de Lisboa, Centro Republicano Radical, Clube Estefânia, Associação do Registo
Civil, Sociedade Promotora do Ensino Popular, Instituto Ferroviário, Associação dos
Socorros Mútuos dos Empregados do Comércio e Indústria e Associação da Classe dos
Ourives, Operários do Arsenal do Alfeite e da Cordoaria Nacional.
Fernandes, Uma Experiência, 82.
It is noteworthy that at the 40 talks that took place during the first two years
(1912–14) approximately 15,000 persons were in attendance.59 In the 1914–15
school year of the 5,725 people in attendance, 4,765 were male and 960 were
female. Thus, on average, between 12% and 16% of the audience was female.60
The Free University also delivered “practical courses,” consisting of several
lessons of an immediate professional application. Subjects such as literature,
history, and foreign languages would be paired with more scientific disci-
plines, such as elementary mathematics, mathematics applied to commerce,
algebra, natural sciences, and geography. These and similar courses began on
17 November 1912, a date that marks the Free University’s temporary move
from its headquarters Rua dos Fanqueiros, 267–1ºEsq, to Praça Luís de Camões,
46.61 Regarding archived documentation of attendance, the Free University’s
Monthly Bulletin detailed the number of students frequenting these courses,
including their profiles, which were ranked according to qualifications and
profession.62 In terms of demographics, a vast majority of its students were
also trade and commerce employees, while an equally significant number
held other professions (including tailors, barbers, plasterers, labourers or fac-
tory workers, army and navy personnel and locksmiths). In other words, these
courses were sought after by people with a very basic level of education or
those who were barely literate. Its student body did not greatly differ from that
of the Portuguese Popular University, considering its proximity to the labour-
force side of society.
The Portuguese Popular University was installed on the second floor of
the building of the Cooperativa A Padaria do Povo (Cooperative the People’s
Bakery) in Campo de Ourique, a neighbourhood where the middle-class
rubbed shoulders with the working class. From 1921 onward, and with the sup-
port of the anarchist trade union, Confederação Geral do Trabalho (General
Confederation of Labor), and its representative on the board of directors of the
Popular University, ten sections were opened in several trade union buildings
across Lisbon, Barreiro, and Setúbal. In this manner, further to their headquar-
ters at the Cooperative the People’s Bakery, the other branches of the Popular
59 BMUL, 1–1-14, 5, 7.
62 BMUL, ano 1, n. 5, Maio 1914, 87 – Mapa do grau de habilitações dos indivíduos que se
inscreveram nos cursos práticos de 1913–14; BMUL, ano 1, n. 6, Junho 1914, 103 – Mapa das
profissões dos indivíduos que se inscreveram nos cursos práticos de 1913–14; BMUL, ano 2,
n. 20, Agosto 1915, 163 – Mapa do grau de habilitações dos indivíduos que se inscreveram
nos cursos práticos de 1914–15; BMUL, ano 2, n. 20, Agosto 1915, 164–5 – Mapa das pro-
fissões dos indivíduos que se inscreveram nos cursos práticos de 1914–15.
University in Lisbon were located, similarly with the Free University, at various
workers’ centres, trade unions and professional associations.63
Until the end of the first Republic, around five hundred lectures were held,
and roughly a fifth of them dedicated to scientific, technological, and medi-
cal subjects.64 In total, the lectures covered 13 different subject matters, three
of which were clearly of a scientific, technical, and medical bent. The first
included cosmography, physics, chemistry, mineralogy, botany, zoology and
biology; the second, included human anatomy, physiology, general hygiene,
physical education, sports and educational games, social hygiene and child-
care; and the third focused on raw materials and useful products for everyday
life, as well as technology and other fundamental industries. Also covered was
the subject of history, which included discussions on the history of the discov-
eries and innovations that arose from developments in science and technology.
Around 70 speakers delivered one or more of these lectures, in different sec-
tions of the university. The scientific topics were normally hosted at the head-
quarters (1st section), in the 4th section, the Associação do Pessoal do Arsenal
do Exército (Association of Army Arsenal Personnel) and in the 5th section,
the Sindicato Único das Classes Metalúrgicas (Trade Union of Metallurgists),
as well as at the Faculty of Medicine, situated on the “Hill of Medicine.”
Among the speakers from the Faculty of Sciences was the prolific and omni-
present Pedro José da Cunha, who was the main lecturer on “Astronomy” as
well as “Female Education” (an area of study that he fought for); the doctor
and naturalist, Bettencourt Ferreira, who, as already mentioned, was an active
popularizer of science who was a constant presence in the daily press, lectured
on “Applied Zoology” and “Animal Protection;” and Ferreira’s colleague, doctor
Barbosa Sueiro, offered lectures on the subject of “Bones and Articulations.”
The visible presence of doctors from the Faculty of Medicine is indicative of
the proselytizing spirit that characterized the group, which centred and grew
from two key figures, Celestino da Costa and Ferreira de Mira. While Celestino
da Costa gave a conference on the theme “What the microscope teaches us,”
Ferreira de Mira lectured on the topic of “Food Hygiene.” Moreover, from
amongst Celestino da Costa’s disciples, Simões Raposo presented the theme
“The educational value of scientific investigation” and “The moral value of
science,” while his other student, Adelino José da Costa, lectured on “The
63 Associação de Classe dos Caixeiros de Lisboa, Associação do Pessoal do Arsenal do

Exército, Sindicato Único das Classes Metalúrgicas, Sindicato dos Operários Chapeleiros,
Secção da Construção Civil de Belém, Sede do Sindicato único da Construção Civil,
Secções da Construção Civil e Metalúrgica do Alto Pin and the Secção do Sindicato dos
Chauffeurs.
64 Fernandes, Uma Experiência, 97, 2nd Part e Bandeira, A Universidade Popular, 2nd Part.
peripheral nervous system.” Lopo de Carvalho, the doctor who worked with
Egas Moniz (who was to win the Nobel Prize) and Pedro Almeida Lima, son
of the rector Almeida Lima, chose to speak on the subject of “Tuberculosis in
Portugal,” a serious public health problem; Henrique de Vilhena talked about
“The History of Anatomy” and Sebastião da Costa Sacadura spoke on “Social
Hygiene and Childcare.” From the Technical Institute, chemist Charles Lepierre
delivered a lecture on “The Metallurgy of Iron,” a topic which he had also spo-
ken on at the Free University, and the mathematician Ferreira de Macedo
focused on issues concerning the “Great Inventions and Scientific Discoveries”
and “The import of science in everyday moral and social life,” wherein Macedo
included discussions on Kepler and Newton’s laws.
The available information on the Free University and the Portuguese
Popular University makes it clear that various scientists and physicians, who
were also professors at the Faculty of Sciences or the Faculty of Medicine of
the University of Lisbon, circulated with noteworthy intensity among these
various premises scattered around the city. As republican intellectuals, they
considered it their mission, not only to train the new regime’s elite, but to take
knowledge, both scientific and technical, to the people, henceforth providing
them with the educational tools they needed to be reborn as the new republi-
can man.
The tight connection between the University of Lisbon, and the Free and
Popular universities, was materialized into palpable events, geographically sit-
uated. They created an invisible network criss-crossing all over urban Lisbon,
as these experts moved from the premises of the Faculty of Sciences at Rua da
Escola Politécnica (situated in the so-called Hill of the Sciences), and the build-
ing of the Faculty of Medicine at the Campo de Santana (in the so-called Hill
of Medicine) to the middle-class and mostly working-class neighbourhoods of
Graça, Campo de Ourique, Alcântara or Alto do Pina, carving science deep in
the urban landscape. They bestowed upon the city a new identity, founded on
the Republic’s educational project in which science played centre stage.
5 Conclusions
Throughout the entire duration of the first Republic, Lisbon’s urban landscape
was animated by the appearance of several venues, whose transient quality
takes nothing away from their remarkable character. These were spaces where
scientific, technological, and medical topics were transmitted to many dif-
ferent target audiences. No longer confined to the halls of the University of
Lisbon, scientists from the Faculty of Sciences and doctors from the Faculty of
Medicine lectured on basic health, public hygiene and science-related themes
at the various outposts of the Free and Popular universities in working-class
associations and trade union spaces. And to a lesser extent, teachers from the
Technical Institute addressed technological issues concerning the emergence
and integration of new means of communication and new raw materials.
Often splitting their time between various tasks and obligations, both inside
and outside the university, they reserved a significant portion of their time and
energy to the education of these new target-groups. Thus, despite differences
in specialization, what unifies these professors-cum-public intellectuals was
a shared commitment to the idea that education and raising consciousness
regarding science, technology and medicine were the necessary preconditions
for the making of the new, republican, man and woman.
Parallel to this, in a singular bottom-up movement, the middle- and working-
class population of Lisbon actively accessed these forums in which scientific
and technological knowledge was debated, often in parallel with trade unions’
and associativist activities. The Free University conferred greater emphasis on
science in their lessons, and to medicine in their lectures, while the Popular
University prioritized medicine. Teachers from the University of Lisbon were
predominantly present in these universities, amongst whom stood their
rectors.
It was for these reasons that a plethora of places sprung up between the
“Hill of the Sciences” and the “Hill of Medicine”, forming a dynamic network
contributing to the affirmation of the capital as the scientific capital of the
country. Although the imagined bridge that the writer and doctor, Fialho
de Almeida, so wanted to see unite the “Hill of the Sciences” to the “Hill of
Medicine” was nothing more than an elitist techno-scientific utopia anchored
on a structure of formal and classic architecture, it could be said that dozens
of much less impressive locations ended up being much more effective in
the long-run. They succeeded in bringing the two hills of the city together by
means of teaching and popularization of knowledge by doctors, scientists and
engineers who addressed a large fraction of the inhabitants of Lisbon, rang-
ing from the elite who frequented the faculties of the University of Lisbon, to
the middle- and working-class people who worked in the city and massively
participated in the activities of the Free University and the Portuguese Popular
University. Their invisibility has been the result of their transient character but
also of the historians’ ways of addressing formal and informal institutions of
higher learning in a disconnected way.
6 Acknowledgements
This chapter is an adapted translation of the chapter Ana Simões, Maria Paula
Diogo, “Ciências para o Povo: espaços de ensino superior para adultos na
Lisboa Republicana,” in Capital Científica. A ciência lisboeta e a construção do
Portugal Contemporâneo, eds. Tiago Saraiva, Marta Macedo (Lisbon: Imprensa
de Ciências Sociais, 2019), 251–282. We thank the editors for their permission
to publish the chapter in this new version. Research behind this chapter as well
as the translation of the original version into English were supported by the
Foundation for Science and Technology, under projects UID/HIS/UI0286/2013,
UID/HIS/UI0286/2019 and UIDB/00286/2020 UIDP/00286/2020.
Chapter 14
A Fascist Coney Island? Salazar’s Dictatorship,

Popular Culture and Technological Fun (1933–1943)
Jaume Valentines-Álvarez and Jaume Sastre-Juan
[…] Ó fábricas, ó laboratórios, ó music-halls, ó Luna-Parks,

Ó couraçados, ó pontes, ó docas flutuantes –
Na minha mente turbulenta e encandescida
Possuo-vos como a uma mulher bela […]
Álvaro de Campos, Ode Triunfal, 1915
∵
1 Introduction
Ode Triunfal was the first poem of engineer Álvaro de Campos, the futurist
heteronym of Fernando Pessoa. Published in 1915, it is a vanguardist hymn to
the objects, rhythms and perceptions brought about by the machine age, in
which the poet abandons himself in a sensual and patriarchal fusion with “all
things modern”.1 Just as his predecessor Cesário Verde, who sang the romantic
“technological nocturne” of Lisbon’s avenues illuminated by gas in 1880, Álvaro
de Campos embraced the infrastructures and forms of life of the industrial
city as the materialization of a new aesthetics and subjectivity.2 Among the
icons of urban mass culture described in the poem, Álvaro de Campos includes
“Luna-Parks”. However, while factories, bridges, music-halls, battleships, and
floating docks could all be found in Lisbon in 1915, the first big-scale amuse-
ment park in the city would only be inaugurated two decades later.
In June 1933, the press announced that Lisbon would “finally have an amuse-
ment park” with “the greatest international rides”.3 Two hundred trucks had
1 Álvaro de Campos. Obra completa (Lisboa: Tinta da China, 2014 [1915]), 52.
2 Tiago Saraiva and Ana Cardoso de Matos. “Technological Nocturne: The Lisbon Industrial
Institute and Romantic Engineering (1849–1888),” Technology and Culture 58, no. 2 (2017):
422–458.
3 Diário de Notícias, June 10, 1933, 3 [advertisement].
© Jaume Valentines-Álvarez and Jaume Sastre-Juan, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004513440_019

392 Valentines-Álvarez and Sastre-Juan
been rented and were ready to carry the mechanical rides that were about to
arrive in two ships from the port of Antwerp.4 The newspaper Lisbon Daily
(Diário de Lisboa) welcomed the amusement park as a sign of modernity that
would “transform the peaceful and insipid physiognomy” of the city and bring
“happiness, modern life, [and] civilized movement” to Lisbon.5 “All the great
capitals of the world”, claimed the weekly newspaper Illustrated News (Notícias
Ilustrado), “have a Luna Park. Berlin, Paris, London, New York all possess since
a long time ago wide enclosures where the so-called ‘attractions’ rise in a fairy
illumination, attracting every night, and many afternoons, the city crowd,
eager of the air, movement, youthfulness and joy of a few hours that take them
away from the nightmare of the job, the school, the daily work. Lisbon has just
imitated these other capitals”.6 The amusement park was called Luna Parque
(Luna Park) after its original homonym in Coney Island.
Amusement parks were indeed a global phenomenon of urban mass cul-
ture. They took a standard shape in the United States at the turn of the century
and quickly spread all around the world.7 In the first decades of the twentieth
century, the engineered fun of roller coasters, water-chutes, bumper cars, and
other mechanical thrill rides was globalized and circulated in heterogeneous
spaces that ranged from big enclosed amusement parks to small traveling fairs.
Cultural and social historians have analysed amusement parks as “industrial
saturnalia” in which social and gender codes were negotiated.8 However, as
already analysed by John Kasson and Tony Bennett, the fact that bodies were
turned upside down did not necessarily mean that social relations were also
temporarily inverted as in carnivals.9 Historians of technology such as Arwen
Mohun have paid attention to the design, production, and international
4 “Lisboa vai ter…,” Notícias Ilustrado, June 11, 1933, 15; “O Luna Parque…,” Notícias Ilustrado,
June 18, 1933, 8.
5 “Lisboa vai ter…,” Diário de Lisboa, June 13, 1933, 5.
6 “O Luna Parque…,” Notícias Ilustrado, June 18, 1933, 8.
7 Arwen Mohun. “Amusement Parks for the World: The Export of American Technology
and Know-How, 1900–1939,” ICON 19 (2013): 100–112; Carroll Pursell. From Playgrounds to
Playstation: The Interaction of Technology and Play (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2015).
8 Gary Cross and John Walton. The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2005). In his 1937 novel Capitães da Areia, Jorge Amado
beautifully depicts the socially heterogeneous publics of a traveling carousel in Salvador da
Bahia.
9 John Kasson. Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Farrar,
Strauss and Giroux, 1978); Tony Bennett. “Hegemony, Ideology, Pleasure: Blackpool,” in
Popular Culture and Social Relations, eds. Tony Bennett, Colin Mercer and Janet Woollacott,
135–154 (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1986). In a previous work (see note 11), we inac-
curately attributed to John Kasson a different point of view in this regard.
A Fascist Coney Island? 393
circulation of the rides, to their links to electrification and transport systems,

and to the commodification of risk.10 Drawing on these approaches, and engag-
ing with urban history, in a previous work we analysed amusement parks in
early twentieth-century Barcelona as spaces in which new regimes of pleasure
were entangled with new regimes of knowledge and technocratic ideologies.11
In this chapter, we study the urban inscription of new regimes of pleasure in
relation to a specific political regime: Salazar’s dictatorship.
In Lisbon, the remarkably late arrival of amusement parks coincided with
the proclamation of the Estado Novo (New State) in April 1933. Led by António
de Oliveira Salazar, the Estado Novo institutionalized the military dictatorship
in power since 1926 and advanced towards a fascist corporatist organization
of the state. Fun and popular culture were crucial for fascism, which tried
to manage social life in all its aspects, from work to private life and leisure.12
Salazarism was no exception, and the Portuguese capital, which had grown
from 228.000 inhabitants in 1878 to 600.000 in 1930, became a key battle-
ground in this regard.13 Daniel Melo and Vera Marques Alves have studied in
detail how the official cultural policies of the regime attempted to frame popu-
lar culture from above at several levels and for different audiences, through the
creation of institutions such as the National Propaganda Board (Secretariado
de Propaganda Nacional), the National Federation for Joy at Work (Federação
Nacional para a Alegria no Trabalho), or the Houses of the People (Casas do
Povo), as well as through the organization of festivities and exhibitions.14
10 Arwen Mohun. Risk: Negotiating Safety in American Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
11 Jaume Sastre-Juan and Jaume Valentines-Álvarez. “Technological Fun: The Politics and
Geographies of Amusement Parks.” In Barcelona (188–1929): An Urban History of Science
and Modernity, eds. Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan (London and New York:
Routledge, 2016), 92–112.
12 Victoria de Grazia. The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi. Fascist
Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California
University Press, 1997). On the debate about the totalitarian and fascist nature of
Salazarism, see: Fernando Rosas. “O salazarismo e o homem novo: ensaio sobre o Estado
Novo e a questão do totalitarismo,” Análise Social xxxv, no. 157 (2001): 1031–1054; Irene
Flunser Pimentel. História das organizações femininas no Estado Novo (Lisboa: Círculo
de Leitores, 2000), 14–22; Tiago Saraiva. Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the
History of Fascism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), 3–6.
13 Fernando Rosas. Lisboa revolucionária, 1908–1975 (Lisboa: Tinta da China, 2007), 18.
14 Daniel Melo. Salazarismo e cultura popular (1933–1958) (Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências
Sociais, 2001); Vera Marques Alves. Arte popular e nação no Estado Novo: A política fol-
clorista do Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional (Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais,
2013). See also: Margarida Acciaiuoli. Exposições do Estado Novo, 1934–1940 (Lisboa: Livros
However, as argued by Rahul Kumar in his path-breaking study on the place

of football in the Estado Novo, less historiographic attention has been paid to
the intersection between fascism and the different expressions of global urban
mass culture, which he analyses in Bourdieusian terms as “relatively autono-
mous fields” that the state tried to shape with varying success.15 The spread of
Hollywood cinema, boxing, jazz, or – we add – amusement parks, was part of
what historian Victoria de Grazia called an “irresistible empire” to which the
European fascist countries were not impermeable regardless of their attempts
at controlling the sources of popular culture.16
At a time in which the Estado Novo was trying to regulate leisure and plea-
sure, what was the place for the bodily shakes and strong emotions of the
international, urban, and technological fun of amusement parks? Salazarism
mobilized a rhetoric of an idyllic rurality based on the minifundist commu-
nities of the North of Portugal as the pillar of national regeneration.17 In his
discourses, Salazar criticized on many occasions technological modernity and
praised what he considered the traditional virtues of God, Nationhood and
Family over urban life, which he condemned as morally dubious and inclined
to class struggle. However, as shown by Tiago Saraiva, among others, this dis-
course was articulated with a program for developing an alternative moder-
nity that implemented innovative techno-scientific practices and transformed
both the rural landscape and the urban fabric.18 Likewise, the “politics of
spirit” (política do espírito) promoted by the National Propaganda Board used
a wide range of modernist aesthetics and techniques of mass communication
in order to create new national traditions and cultural forms. Behind the rheto-
ric of a return to a “genuinely Portuguese” spirit there was a modern process of
re-codification of selected elements from rural folklore for urban audiences.19
In this context, what form did amusement parks adopt? How did they relate
to the aesthetics of fascist modernity? What was their place in Lisbon’s geog-
raphies of leisure? To answer these questions, we study the three amusement
Horizonte, 1998); Ramos do Ó, Jorge. Os anos de Ferro: O dispositivo cultural durante a

‘Política do Espírito’, 1933–1949 (Lisboa: Estampa, 1999).
15 Kumar, Rahul. A pureza perdida do desporto: Futebol no Estado Novo (Lisboa: Paquiderme,
2017).
16 Victoria de Grazia. Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through Twentieth Century
Europe (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005). See also: Robert Rydell and Rob Kroes. Buffalo
Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869–1922 (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 2005).
17 Fernando Rosas. O Estado Novo nos anos 30, 1928–1938 (Lisboa: Estampa, 1986).
18 Saraiva, Fascist Pigs; Tiago Saraiva and Marta Macedo, eds. Capital científica: Práticas da
ciência em Lisboa e a história contemporânea de Portugal (Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências
Sociais, 2019).
19 Alves, Arte popular.
parks created in Lisbon in the decade following the institutionalization of the

Estado Novo. We analyse their different urban inscriptions and their different
regimes of pleasure, which we understand, with Tony Bennett, as “not merely
the forms of pleasure on offer but the system of signs and associated ideolo-
gies under which they are constructed and offered as pleasures.”20 The first
section of the chapter deals with Luna Park, an amusement park associated
with an international and modernist rhetoric. It was created by private ini-
tiative in 1933 and stayed for three summers at Eduardo VII Park, at the end
of Avenida da Liberdade (Liberty Avenue). The second section analyses two
amusement parks, which were directly or indirectly organized by the fascist
state. This section begins its analysis with the neighbourhood of Belém, where
technological fun coexisted with the exhibitionary climax of Salazarism at the
1940 Exhibition of the Portuguese World. The section concludes by providing
an analysis of the Palhavã area, close to the expansion district of the Avenidas
Novas (New Avenues), where the Feira Popular (Popular Fair) was created in
1943. Rhetorically presented as a restoration of the old traditional fairs, in its
early years it served as a showcase for government corporatist institutions, and
its mechanical rides marked several generations of Lisboners.
2 Luna Park (Eduardo VII Park, 1933–1935)
The first amusement park in Lisbon was located at Eduardo VII Park, at the
northern end of Lisbon’s main boulevard, Liberty Avenue. Built in the 1880s
as part of the symbolic and material construction of the capitalist city, this
Haussmannian boulevard quickly became a space of bourgeois leisure.21 In the
1930s, it was a central artery in the axis connecting the Terreiro do Paço (next
to the Tagus River) to the Avenidas Novas neighbourhood, which, at that time,
was still under construction. This axis hosted the dwellings of the middle and
upper classes and most of the political and economic institutions. The upper
segment of the axis, the Chiado-Restauradores-Liberty Avenue, was where
the elegant cinemas, theatres and opera halls were located, but it was also the
space of Bohemian night leisure (see chapter 12 in this volume).22 This urban
20 Bennett, “Hegemony”, 136.

21 Marta Macedo. “Engenheiros e capital: Crédito e ciência na Escola Politécnica e na Escola
do Exército,” in Capital científica: Práticas da ciência em Lisboa e a história contemporânea
de Portugal, eds. Tiago Saraiva and Marta Macedo (Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais,
2019), 45–80.
22 Margarida Acciaiuoli. Os cinemas de Lisboa: Um fenómeno urbano do século XX (Lisboa:
Bizâncio, 2013b).
axis was surrounded by popular neighbourhoods, while the factories and the
industrial working-class neighbourhoods stretched along the riverside.23
During its first half century of existence, Eduardo VII Park was a wide non-
urbanized space near the dense city centre. It played, however, a key role not
only as a strategic place in the military uprisings of the period but also as a
space for temporary events such as official parades, fairs, and exhibitions.24
In 1898, the top of Liberty Avenue hosted a big fair commemorating the
“Portuguese discovery” of the sea route to India. The Feira Franca, as it was
called, featured colonial displays, regional music, light shows and freak per-
formances with trained fleas.25 Some years later, technological fun made its
presence felt in Eduardo VII Park. In the summers between 1908 and 1915, in
the August Fair, Lisboners could attend animatography sessions, eat typical
oily farturas (fried pastry), and experience the kinaesthetic joy of an electric
carousel, a big toboggan or a scenic railway.26 In 1926, Eduardo VII Park was
also the chosen location for the largest roller coaster that had been installed in
the city until then.27
In 1932 and 1933, Eduardo VII Park hosted the Portuguese Industrial
Exhibition. It was organized by the Portuguese Industrial Association (Asso
ciação Industrial Portuguesa), the main industrialists’ association of the coun-
try. Led by engineer José Maria Alvares, it represented an influential economic
sector that was waging a battle for political hegemony with the large agricul-
tural landowners.28 As many other industrial exhibitions, the goal was to pro-
mote national industry, colonial products, and a techno-nationalist identity.29
The Exhibition took place at the Palace of Exhibitions as well as at temporary
industrial and commercial stands. The visitors were to be reminded of the
“modernity” of the metropolis through the contrast between the machines on
display and the crafts of the inhabitants of a tribal village from Guinea, which
were exhibited as a human zoo.30
23 For a more nuanced account of this schematic tripartite socio-geography of the city, see:
Rosas, Lisboa revolucionária, 18–37.
24 Rosas, Lisboa revolucionária.
25 José Augusto França. Lisboa 1898. Estudo de factos socioculturais (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte,
1997), 43–99.
26 Mário Costa. Feiras e outros divertimentos populares de Lisboa: histórias, figuras, usos e
costumes. (Lisboa: Cámara Municipal de Lisboa, 1950), 191–200.
27 “Montanha Russa, Parque Eduardo VII, 1926”, PT/AMLSB/CB/14/02/534, Arquivo Muni
cipal de Lisboa.
28 Rosas, O Estado Novo.
29 “Uma grande parada…,” 1932; “A grande Exposição…,” 1932.
30 Luiz Castellão. Grande Exposição Industrial Portuguesa: Roteiro 1932–1933 (2º ciclo) (Lisboa:
Grande Exposição Industrial Portuguesa, 1933). On human zoos, see: Pascal Blanchard,
Nicolas Bancel, Eric Deroo, and Sandrine Lemaire, eds. Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle
in the Age of Colonial Empires (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009).
This was the spatial and ideological context in which Luna Park opened
its doors as part of the second season of the Exhibition. The City Council
leased 15.000 square meters of Eduardo VII Park to the company Sociedade de
Diversões (Entertainments Society), which had been created for the purpose.
In turn, the company had to urbanize the area, pay a percentage of the reve-
nue, and install mechanical rides “of a modern and artistic aspect”.31 Two of the
three stockholders were engineers: António Branco Cabral, who held a high
position within the Portuguese Railway Company, and José Belard da Fonseca,
who specialized in construction with reinforced concrete. The third stock-
holder was the building contractor Amadeu Gaudêncio.32 The economic suc-
cess of the 1933 season made the Entertainments Society to ask for a renewal
of the concession.33 And in 1934, the company partnered with show business
entrepreneur Ricardo Covões, owner of the famous and eclectic Coliseu dos
Recreios, which programmed cinema, opera, boxing, mesmerizing spectacles,
and even automobile shows.34
The promoters held influential economic and civic positions. Politically,
they ranged from the more conservative liberal sector of the regime to demo-
cratic republican positions. Branco Cabral, for example, did not hide his pro-
Allied leanings during an investigation by the political police in 1940 under
the accusation of defaming the Army. But at the same time, he invoked in his
defence his commitment to the Estado Novo and his familiar connections with
key figures of the government.35 Ricardo Covões was a prominent republican
who had been private secretary to former president of the Republic Bernardino
Machado, who went into exile after having been overthrown by the military
coup of 1926. The ongoing political relationship with Machado and his little
sympathy for the Portuguese dictatorship (and for Italian fascism) also caused
him troubles with the police in the 1930s.36
31 “Condições a que deve obedecer a concessão…,” Boletim da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa,

336, June 15, 1933, 13–16.
32 “Sociedade de Diversões, Limitada,” Diário do Governo, III Série, 132, June 9, 1933, 1082.
Belard da Fonseca was a representative for the construction companies at the Corporative
Chamber (1935–1942), director of the Superior Technical Institute (1942–1958) and presi-
dent of the Portuguese Engineering Association (1947–1950). Gaudêncio, who is remem-
bered as a republican, an atheist and a mason, became a major player in the (literal)
construction of the regime after founding his own company in 1935.
33 “Concedendo licença à Sociedade de Diversões Ltda,” Boletim da Câmara Municipal de
Lisboa, 363, December 22, 1933, 22–25.
34 Ricardo Covões. O cinqüentenário do Coliseu dos Recreios (Lisboa: Tip. Freitas Brito, 1940).
35 “Processo do engenheiro António Branco Cabral,” July 13, 1940, Arquivo Histórico Militar,
PT/AHM/FO/033/1/478/2957.
36 Ricardo Covões to Bernardino Machado, October 4, 1932, Documentos Bernardino
Machado, folder 07016.030, Arquivo da Fundação Mário Soares; Ricardo Covões to
Bernardino Machado, October 31, 1932, Documentos Bernardino Machado, folder
07016.037, Arquivo da Fundação Mário Soares); Covões, O cinqüentenário, 81.
Figure 14.1A–B Eduardo VII Park in 1934: Aerial view

Photograph by José Pedro Pinheiro Corrêa
(above); Close-up of the roller coaster Vertigo.
Photograph by Judah Benoliel (below)
When Luna Park was inaugurated in July 1933, it featured many imported
rides installed by local workers under the direction of German and Portuguese
engineers.37 In an atmosphere marked by the light of 20.000 electric bulbs,
37 “É preciso ministrar…,” Indústria Portuguesa 65 (1933): 26. The German connection went
perhaps through architect Moritz Ernst Lesser, who had a share of the company’s ini-
tial capital by delegation of Branco Cabral (“Sociedade de Diversões, Limitada,” Diário do
Governo, III Série, 132, June 9, 1933, 1082). Lesser, who was a Jew, was forced to exile and
moved to Lisbon in 1934.
the smell of a 15-meter-high perfumed light fountain, and the “noise of the
powerful machinery of the rides and the constant twittering of the crowd”, the
thousands of visitors at Luna Park immersed themselves in a multi-sensory
experience: they could loudly scream in a bumper car, nervously laugh in a
water-chute, experience the thrilling emotion of turning around in a carousel,
or feel the suspense of seeing an acrobatic motorbike in the Wall of Death.38 In
the 1934 season, the most remarkable novelty was the 650-meter roller coaster
Zig-Zag Vertigo. That year, the public could also enjoy the Whip, a famous thrill
ride consisting in a string of wagons following a track, patented by the “amuse-
ment inventor” William F. Mangels and first installed in Coney Island. One
could also get dizzy at the flying stairs, travel in the haunted train, or slide in
the toboggan.39
In 1935 new rides such as gasoline-powered boats and a carousel with sim-
ulated planes, which was pompously described as a “colossal work of engi-
neering”, joined old favourites as the bumper cars or the Wall of Death.40 Still
another novelty was the Automobile Tour of Portugal, a 200-meter racetrack
for gasoline-powered miniature cars. According to the Daily News “Everyone
can be a ‘chauffeur’, with no need of special licenses […] and without worrying
about danger”.41 These simulation rides not only offered the thrill of speed but
represented a ludic way of negotiating risk and familiarizing the population
with large socio-technical systems that were in expansion at that time.42
All these attractions co-existed with a varied offer of non-mechanical fun:
fortune-tellers, illusionists, music orchestras, shooting galleries, live animals
carousels or natural “monsters” such as a 700-kilogram turtle captured at
Costa de Caparica, near Lisbon.43 Actually, the main attraction of the sum-
mer nights at Luna Park were perhaps its many open-air restaurants, cafés, and
bars. People could eat an ice cream at the Inuit Stall, have dinner at the House
of Seafood or hear fado stars at the fancy Retiro da Severa, which recreated a
picturesque nineteenth-century tavern.44
38 “O Luna Parque será…,” Diário de Lisboa, July 3, 1933, 5; “Inaugurou-se…,” Notícias Ilustrado,
July 9, 1933, 12–13.
39 “Luna-Parque…,” Diário de Lisboa, June 20, 1934, 2; “O Luna Parque foi…,” Diário de
Notícias, June 8, 1934, 2.
40 Diário de Notícias, June 5, 1935, 5.
41 “O automobilismo ao alcance de todos…,” Diário de Notícias, June 19, 1935, 5.
42 Mohun, 2013a; Luísa Sousa. A mobilidade automóvel em Portugal, 1920–1950 (Lisboa:
Chiado Editora, 2016).
43 Diário de Lisboa, September 7, 1934, 2 [advertisement].
44 “Os recantos do Luna Park,” Notícias Ilustrado, August 12, 1934.
Luna Park presented itself and was portrayed in the press under a “modern-
izing” rhetoric.45 The name itself, after the original in Coney Island, emphasized
the foreign origin of the attractions and was described as “a magic evocation”
reminiscent of “movement, modern vibration, true cosmopolitanism”.46 A
chronicle in the Daily News praised the opportunity that Lisboners now could
have fun “in contact with civilization and modern progress” as it should be
the case for “a European city like ours”.47 Along the same lines, an advertise-
ment in the Lisbon Daily claimed that it was “a duty of civilized people to go to
Luna Park”.48
But who went to Luna Park? What was its place in the urban geography of
leisure? When Luna Park was already closed after its first season, an article in
the Lisbon Daily made an informal survey of the leisure on a Sunday in the city.
On 5 November, more than 80,000 Lisboners had paid for entertainment: basi-
cally football (35,000), cinema (22,000), theatre (15,000), bullfighting (7,500)
and circus (3,000). Many others enjoyed free entertainments or meals in sport
and neighbourhood associations. The article also mentioned the amusement
park as part of the commodified leisure in Lisbon: “[people strolling in the ave-
nues] contented themselves to look at the others, the passing cars, Eduardo VII
Park, (…) the palisade of Luna Park, that fantastic and fairy world of illusion,
where there is always an implacable door or an implacable doorman that inter-
dicts the entrance to those who do not present the magic ticket”.49
While the “magic ticket” excluded the poorest and the lower working
classes, we should assume a certain degree of social heterogeneity. The stan-
dard entrance fee was 2,5 escudos, and when the season was already advanced
there were “Popular Nights” in which the public could get in for just 1,5 escudos.
It was not extremely expensive: during the 1930s, a litre of wine and the cheap-
est tramway ticket costed about 0,5 escudos, a coffee was 0,80 escudos and a
film at a chic cinema 3,5 escudos.50 Moreover, the Entertainments Society had
to give 1.000 tickets to the City Council each week to be distributed among
45 See, among many other examples, the advertisements published in: Diário de Notícias,
June 15, 1933, 3; June 30, 1933, 3; June 9, 1934, 11.
46 “Lisboa vai ter…,” Diário de Lisboa, June 13, 1933, 5; “Lisboa cosmopolita…,” Diário de
Notícias, June 5, 1935, 5.
47 “Abriu hoje o Luna…,” Diário de Notícias, June 1, 1935, 5.
48 “Ir ao Luna Parque,” Diário de Lisboa, August 26, 1935, 2.
49 “Domingo de sol!” Diário de Lisboa, November 6, 1933, 4.
50 José Augusto França. O Ano X, Lisboa 1936. Estudo de factos socioculturais (Lisboa:
Presença, 2010), 282 and 291; João Néu. Em volta da Torre de Belém. Vol III (Lisboa: Livros
Horizonte, 2006), 302.
schools, charity institutions, and district councils.51 However, the prices of the
attractions (the water-chute, for example, costed 2 escudos),52 and the fact that
Luna Park was advertised as being free of “that danger of mixtures from which
our best public instinctively runs away”, shows that it was mainly addressed
to the middle and upper classes.53 The High-Life section of the Lisbon Daily
listed the names of the distinguished ladies and gentlemen of the urban elite
that attended “the most chic and civilized entertainment venue of the capital”
during the “Fashion Nights”.54
This can be illustrated with an article published by the Lisbon Daily on
9 July 1933, which reproduced the reactions of playwright João Bastos to a visit
to the newly inaugurated Luna Park. Bastos was expecting a “Lona Park”, that
is “just another of those bric-a-brac fairs to which we are used” (“lona” means a
cheap and perhaps shabby canvas in Portuguese). But he was surprised to find
an atmosphere that led him to believe that Lisbon would soon have “the aspect
of the great European capitals”. The article described an enthusiastic public
made, among others, of young kids from sports clubs and high schools, well-
to-do foreign citizens living in the coastal town of Cascais, and “the names of
our best aristocracy, high finance, politics, industry and arts”. What is more, the
article gave special emphasis to the fact that Luna Park was “a place where half
of Lisbon was introduced to the other half”, highlighting the massive atten-
dance of women.55
Luna Park’s promotional rhetoric and iconography, as well as its coverage by
major news outlets, reflect ongoing redefinitions of urban middle-and upper-
class femininity. In line with Bastos’ opinion, another (male) journalist argued
that Luna Park showed how “our women, so defamed by foreigners and nation-
als, do not acquiesce to remain perpetually doing tricot at home and demand
their share of air, light and movement”.56 A 1933 promotional film for the
Portuguese Industrial Exhibition ended with a close-up of six young actresses
with stylish haircuts shouting and laughing while they descended the water-
chute.57 The big promotional poster depicted in Figure 2 went even further in
51 “Condições a que deve obedecer a concessão…,” Boletim da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa

336, June 15, 1933, 15.
52 “As Aventuras do Quim e do Manecas,” Diário de Lisboa, August 22, 1933, 3.
54 “A verbena de amanhã…,” Diário de Lisboa, September 17, 1935, 3; Diário de Lisboa, June 21,
1935, 2 [advertisement].
55 “O Luna Parque…,” Diário de Lisboa, July 9, 1933, 4.
57 “O Adivinhão Topa-Tudo” (1933), Promotional Documentary, 35 mm, 22 min, directed by
Aníbal Contreiras, Filmes Castello Lopes, Arquivo da Cinemateca Portuguesa, ID: CP-MC:
7000182.
Figure 14.2A–B Different advertisements of Luna Park: Thrill and gendered emotions (left)
along with order and mass entertainment (right)
drawing by Emmerico Nunes, illustrator and later team
member of the National Propaganda Board
selling the amusement park as a space in which sensuality could be explored

through technology. The thighs under the flying skirt of the girl in the first
row, the kinaesthetic exhilaration of her body, abandoned to the sensation of
freedom enhanced by the mechanical power of the water-chute, as well as the
flirting in the second row, do not seem to be in line with the hegemonic ideals
of femininity promoted by the regime. The Salazarist gender ideals encour-
aged Catholic virtues and domestic roles for the “New Woman” at the service
of the “New State”, and also feminine sport, movement, and authoritarian joie
de vivre.58
An effort was made, however, to highlight the respectability of Luna Park.
The emphasis on its cosmopolitan character was always coupled with a rheto-
ric welcoming “healthy modernism” and amusement parks as salutary social
balms for urban populations.59 Free Sunday matinées, for example, were reg-
58 These ideals crystallized in the creation of the Feminine Portuguese Youth in 1937:
Pimentel, História das organizações; Irene Flunser Pimentel. Mocidade Portuguesa
Feminina (Lisboa: A Esfera dos Livros, 2007).
ularly organized for children and families. The Lisbon Daily highlighted the
importance of bringing young people to the “open air” to enjoy the “naïve fun”
of Luna Park.60 Actually, the open spaces, the familiar public and the relatively
expensive mechanical rides served to demarcate Luna Park from other geo-
graphically close but more morally suspect nocturnal spaces of leisure, such as
the Parque Mayer (Mayer Park).
Located close to Liberty Avenue, the Mayer Park was a space of mass
entertainment that brought together bohemians, intellectuals, journalists,
the underworld, and the middle class. It was mainly known as the mecca of
vaudeville shows (revista), but it also featured carousels, skating rinks, illegal
gambling, boxing, and jazz music.61 The thigh of a girl riding the water-chute
of Luna Park seemed to be more respectable than the thigh of the vedettes of
the Mayer Park, who were sometimes the target of Catholic fundamentalists.
The author of a 1937 pamphlet condemned it as a space of depravation and
concealed prostitution and argued that it should be “set on fire for human-
ity’s sake”.62 The fire would have also burned some mechanical rides, as they
were common in the Mayer Park. In November 1934, for example, some of the
attractions of the amusement park at the Porto Colonial Exhibition were trans-
ferred to Mayer Park.63 They stayed there, at much lower prices, until they were
transferred to Luna Park in April 1935.64 The very same bumper cars, gasoline-
powered boats, and motorbike round racetracks were enjoyed in all three
spaces, with their different regimes of pleasure, institutional settings, urban
inscription, aesthetic features, prices, and publics.
The mechanized amusement of Luna Park also coexisted spatially with
state-regulated fun linked to the process of (re)invention of a folkloric tradi-
tion for Lisbon. In June 1934 and 1935, the City Council organized a cultural
program for the Festivities of the City which included historicist and nation-
alist parades, as well as the Marchas Populares (Popular Marches), a danc-
ing contest among different neighbourhoods of the city. The first edition of
60 “A alegria nocturna…,” Diário de Lisboa, June 15, 1933, 1.

61 Daniel Melo. “As marchas populares: A encenação da cidade de Lisboa,” in Vozes do Povo:
A Folclorização em Portugal, eds. Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco and Jorge Freitas
Branco (Oeiras: Celta Editora, 2003a), 307–321. On the night clubs spiced up by jazz, gam-
bling and cocaine consumption, in the Chiado-Restauradores-Liberty Avenue axis, see:
Cecília Vaz. Clubes nocturnos modernos em Lisboa: Sociabilidade, diversão e transgressão,
1917–1927 (MA diss.) (Lisboa: ICSTE, 2008).
62 Z. Larbak. Parque Mayer, em chamas (Lisboa: Edição do autor, 1937), 16.
63 The Porto Colonial Exhibition included a roller coaster, a haunted train, bumper cars
and automobile-boats. “Atrás do Reposteiro,” Diário de Lisboa, November 29, 1934, 2; “Do
sucesso da exposição,” Ultramar, October 15, 1934, 8.
64 “Ultimos dias das diversões mecánicas no Parque Mayer,” Diário de Lisboa, April 14, 1935, 8.
the Popular Marches was organized in 1932 at the Mayer Park by journalist,
playwright, and filmmaker José Leitão de Barros. He was the director of the
Illustrated News, and as we show in the next section, eventually became a key
actor in the creation of the Popular Fair. In 1934 the Popular Marches were
appropriated by the City Council, which codified and supervised in the strict-
est of manners every detail of the contest down to the dresses and the lyrics.65
In the sentimental landscapes of many Lisboners, the memories of Luna Park
must have been seamlessly tied to the Popular Marches. On 9 June 1935, for
example, the parade started in the Terreiro do Paço near the river, went up
Liberty Avenue and arrived at the lower part of Eduardo VII Park around mid-
night. The crowd spent the night around (and inside) Luna Park.66 Only three
days later a crowd gathered at Luna Park to watch the fireworks over the Tagus
River to celebrate the feast day of Saint Anthony, the patron saint of Lisbon.67
According to the press, Luna Park was one of the most frequented spots during
these celebrations.68
After three summers of being part of the trendiest Lisbon nights, how-
ever, Luna Park did not open its doors the following year. In March 1936, the
Entertainments Society asked for a renewal of the contract that expired in
September 1935, but it was never granted by the City Council.69 There is an elo-
quent silence in the press, whose only mention of Luna Park seems to be depre-
ciative. By contrast, the Lisbon Daily praised the Algés Fair, which was located
that year in the western outskirts of the city and was described as a revival
of the old August Fair, even though its featured racetrack was likely to be the
one that had been at Luna Park one year prior. According to the Lisbon Daily,
the Algés Fair would become “the shelter of all the population of Lisbon dur-
ing the coming midsummer heat, since nothing entertaining exists in the city
after the fatiguing and useless attempt of Luna Park”.70
The silence of the sources forbids a detailed reconstruction of the reasons
behind the end of Luna Park, but several relevant factors can be identified.
The drums of war in Europe, as well as the victory in February of the Popular
Front in Spain, led to the ideological and repressive hardening of the regime.
In April 1936, the Fascist youth organization Mocidade Portuguesa (Portuguese
65 Melo, “As marchas populares”.

67 Diário de Lisboa, June 13, 1935, 2 [advertisement].
69 “Sociedade de Diversões Lda. dispensada do pagamento…,” Boletim da Câmara Municipal
de Lisboa, 483, March 19, 1936, 20.
70 “A Feira Franca de Algés inaugura-se amanhã,” Diário de Lisboa, July 28, 1936, 4.
Youth) and the Tarrafal concentration camp in islands of Cabo Verde were
created.71 In this context, the new plans for Eduardo VII Park did not include
technological fun. On 28 May a commemorative official exhibition was inaugu-
rated there on the ten years of the establishment of the dictatorship. The con-
tiguity of the exhibition with Luna Park was most likely seen as not adequate,
in a context in which even the Festivities of the City had been cancelled to
avoid large concentrations of people and to focus on the cultural and political
program around the anniversary.72
Also, in June 1936, the press announced the imminent expansion of Liberty
Avenue and plans to monumentalize Eduardo VII Park. The debate on whether
Eduardo VII Park should be the green closing of Liberty Avenue, or the begin-
ning of its future expansion had been going on for decades. Architect Luís
Cristino da Silva, who had advocated for the second option since the early
1930s, advanced with a project to turn Eduardo VII Park into a monument
glorifying the regime, including a huge Triumphal Arch, gardens, canals, and
buildings that were to host several museums.73 This grand project never took
place, and it took several years until the final project, by architect Francisco
Keil do Amaral, was approved and implemented. Meanwhile, Luna Park had
disappeared.
It is difficult to settle to what extent the end of Luna Park was fundamen-
tally related to financial, political, or urban planning reasons. While Luna Park
had not been promoted by the state, nor was it aligned with the officialist dis-
courses, nothing indicates that the regime explicitly wanted to wipe it off from
the face of Lisbon. It is worth mentioning, for example, that the inauguration
of the 1934 season was attended by the Minister of the Navy, the Navy General
Commander, the Civil Governor, the Police Commander, the Censorship
Inspector, and representatives of the City Council.74 Yet, the transformation of
Eduardo VII Park into a solemn space of exaltation of the fascist “national rev-
olution” did not seem to match with the “international attractions” promoted
71 The fascination with the summer of 1936 as a crucial moment in Portuguese history can
be seen in three well-known novels in which the city of Lisbon is one of the main charac-
ters: Jorge de Sena. Sinais de fogo (Lisboa: Edições 70, 1979); José Saramago. O ano da morte
de Ricardo Reis (Lisboa: Caminho, 1984); Antonio Tabucchi. Sostiene Pereira (Milano:
Feltrinelli, 1994).
72 On Lisbon in 1936 and the exhibition, see: França, O Ano X, (esp. pp. 479–488).
73 “O prolongamento da Avenida,” Diário de Notícias, June 3, 1936, 1; “Lisboa, Capital do
Imperio,” Diário de Notícias, June 4, 1936, 1. Curiously enough, Cristino da Silva had
designed an impressive art deco entrance and a path-breaking modernist Capitólio
Theatre for the Parque Mayer in 1931.
74 “O Luna Parque foi ontem visitado…,” Diário de Notícias, June 7, 1934, 1.
Figure 14.3A–B Fascist echoes and national grandeur in the

urbanization of Eduardo VII Park
Project by L. Cristino da Silva, 1936
(above) and project by F. Keil do
Amaral, [c.1948] (below)
by liberal and republican engineers and entrepreneurs. As the next section

makes clear, however, it would be wrong to conclude that mechanical rides as
such were incompatible with the cultural policies of Portuguese fascism, since
the two amusement parks that were created in Lisbon after Luna Park were
either officially organized or had full official support.
3 Amusement Park of the Exhibition of the Portuguese World

(Belém, 1940) and Popular Fair (Palhavã, 1943)
In 1940 Salazar’s dictatorship commemorated the centenaries of the “founda-

tion” and “restoration” of Portugal through the Exhibition of the Portuguese
World, which became the most ambitious showcase of Portuguese fascism
and its imperial project (see chapter 9 in this volume).75 The exhibition was in
the western outskirts of the city, next to the impressive Jerónimos Monastery
and the Belém Tower. These monuments of the sixteenth century marked the
place from which the Portuguese caravels set sail to India and America. In the
early twentieth century, however, the Belém area was one of Lisbon’s industrial
neighbourhoods, with a landscape composed of workshops, storehouses, and
working-class housing.76 The 1940 Exhibition was the turning point for trans-
forming Belém into what Elsa Peralta has analysed as a “memory complex”,
an urban space that materializes, still to this day, a nation-building mythol-
ogy around the imperialist echoes of the so-called Portuguese Discoveries.77
The head of the National Propaganda Board António Ferro, architect Cottinelli
Telmo and the other members of the Commission for the Commemoration
of the Centenaries sought to materialize the “politics of spirit” through a
monumental architecture combining historicism and a remarkable modern-
ist interior design. The folklorist displays about arts and crafts in Portugal and
the reconstruction of villages from all over the country presented a sanitized
notion of popular culture. The Exhibition also featured medievalist parades
with knights, heralds, and trumpets as well as the “Nau Portugal”, a replica of
a ship from the “golden ages” of the sea route to India. The Colonial Garden
included Fula women, drummers from Quinpungo, native huts, handlooms,
and other craft technologies from the Portuguese colonies (see chapter 8 in
this volume).
75 Acciaiuoli, Exposições; David Corkill and Carlos Almeida. “Commemoration and

Propaganda in Salazar’s Portugal: The Mundo Português Exposition of 1940,” Journal of
Contemporary History, 44, no. 3 (2009): 381–399. On international exhibitions around
World War II, see: Robert Kargon, Karen Fiss, Morris Low, and Arthur Molella. World’s Fairs
on the Eve of War: Science, Technology and Modernity, 1937–1942 (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2015).
76 Ana Martins Barata. “A ordenação do espaço litoral de Lisboa, 1860–1940,” Scripta
Nova XIII, 296, no. 4 (2009) (http://www.ub.edu/geocrit/sn/sn-296/sn-296-4.htm; last
accessed: 15 May 2019).
77 Elsa Peralta. “A composição de um complexo de memória: O caso de Belém, Lisboa,” in
Cidade e império: Dinâmicas coloniais e reconfigurações pós-coloniais, eds. Elsa Peralta and
Nuno Domingos, 361–407 (Lisboa: Edições 70, 2013).
In parallel, modern technology also played a role. Aerial railways, electric

trains, and light fountains were part of the technological entertainment at the
Exhibition, which according to the organizers was “an assertion of national
technique”.78 The company Electro-Reclamo displayed the “secrets of modern
luminotechnics”, while Phillips Portuguesa managed a network of one hun-
dred megaphones reproducing music and information.79 Within the medieval-
style houses of the Industrial and Commercial Neighbourhood, there were not
just old fishermen repairing fishing nets and women cross-stitching, but also
engineering companies. The Pavilion of Telecommunications displayed “the
lyricism of the technique and the poetry of progress,” the main electrical com-
panies popularized those technologies that “dissipate darkness”, and the oil
company SACOR introduced the visitor to the future oil refinery in Cabo Ruivo,
in the eastern outskirts of Lisbon.80
Technological fun was also part of the huge fascist spectacle of the Exhibition
of the Portuguese World, even if the amusement park occupied a peripheral
position. Located in one of the corners of the Exhibition, it was relatively inde-
pendent from the rest of the Exhibition. Visitors could access the amusement
park either from inside the Exhibition (the general ticket including the right
to access the park cost 3,5 escudos instead of 2,5) or directly from the outside
(paying 1,5 escudos).81 In fact, whenever official guides listed or described the
spaces and pavilions, they typically referred to the amusement park towards
the end of the overview. In many short guides, souvenir pamphlets, and films
it was not even mentioned.
The architectural design of the amusement park was commissioned to
Francisco Keil do Amaral, a young modernist architect who had already been
behind the planning of the Portuguese Pavilion in the Paris World’s Fair in 1937.
He was working under civil engineer Duarte Pacheco, the Mayor of Lisbon, and
78 “A Exposição do Mundo Português será uma afirmação de técnica nacional,” Revista dos
Centenários 6 (1939): 11–17; Manel Melo. “A Exposição do Mundo Português,” Boletim da
Ordem dos Engenheiros 48 (1940): 441–473. See: Nuno Madureira. A economia dos inter-
esses. Portugal entre guerras (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 2002), 99–116 (esp. 112–113).
79 António Manuel de Bivar. “A instalação de som da Exposição do Mundo Português,”
Boletim da Ordem dos Engenheiros 48 (1940): 473–485; Barroso Ramos. “O som na
Exposição Histórica do Mundo Português,” A Arquitectura Portuguesa 73 (1941): 1–20
(offprint).
80 “O Pavilhão das Telecomunicações…,” Diário de Notícias, July 20, 1940, 4; Participação
das principais emprêsas produtoras e distribuidoras de energia eléctrica (Lisboa: Editorial
Império, 1940), 6; “Exposição do Mundo…,” Boletim Oficial das Juntas de Freguesia de
Lisboa 11–16 (1940): 22.
81 Guia oficial. Exposição do Mundo Português ([s.l., s.n.], 1940).
Figure 14.4A–B The Exhibition of the Portuguese World. Map of

the final project (including the amusement park
in the upper left area) (above) and Maquette
(below)
Drawing by Fred Kradolfer, Swiss
artist, and team member of the
National Propaganda Board
Minister of Public Works, and was involved in the design of the some of the
largest green spaces in the city: Monsanto Hill (for which forced labour of pris-
oners was used), Campo Grande Park, and Eduardo VII Park, whose centre was
defined by classical geometric lines and whose upper portions were marked by
two tall obelisks of fascist and imperial overtones.
In his project for the Exhibition’s amusement park, Keil do Amaral com-
bined modernist forms with circus aesthetics. He conceived a high rectan-
gular entrance giving access to a round square with eight monoliths and a
Figure 14.5A–B Sketches of the 1940 Exhibition of the Portuguese World:

The projected captive balloon (above) and the mural
decorations at the amusement park (below)
Drawings by Francisco Keil do Amaral
fifty-meter-high captive balloon in the centre.82 The decoration of the monu-

ment included a mural depicting a weightlifter, a woman with a gun (ready to
use it in the shooting gallery), and the winding rail of a roller coaster. Keil do
Amaral also designed two one-floor modernist pavilions as a restaurant and
a bar. However, this ambitious project was finally put aside by the organizing
commission. The high captive balloon with its circus motifs could distort, as
82 “[Parque de atrações da Exposição do Mundo Português, Lisboa],” 1940, Collection “F. Keil
do Amaral”, Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa.
seen from the Empire Square, the majestic view of the Jerónimos Monastery.83
Finally, a less spectacular proposal for the amusement park was put forward
in collaboration with architect António Lino, who was already planning other
leisure spaces in the Exhibition, such as the colourful Children’s Playground
and the neoclassical Garden of the Poets.84
The expert in charge of the technical systems of the amusement park was
engineer José Mendes Leal. Mendes Leal was a well-known professor at the
Instituto Superior Técnico (Superior Technical Institute), who had campaigned
for a higher political role for engineers and for practical education in engi-
neering through well-equipped specialized workshops and the collaboration
with the private sector, taking inspiration from the United States.85 The orga-
nizing commission opened a tender for the concession of the services at the
amusement park, and the mechanical rides were finally rented in Milan.86 Yet
just before the ship that transported the gears, rails and engines could weigh
anchor in Genoa and head to Lisbon, Mussolini’s government forbade Italian
boats to sail in international waters: Italy had entered the war on 10 June 1940.87
As a result, on 23 June the Exhibition of the Portuguese World was inaugurated
without its amusement park.
Despite this initial failure, the organizers rushed to build a made-in-
Portugal amusement park, and ordered against the clock new rides to
Portuguese workshops.88 When the amusement park was finally inaugurated
83 Joana Brites. “Arquitectura e cenografia política: o Mosteiro dos Jerónimos na Exposição

do Mundo Português de 1940,” Murphy: Revista de História e Teoria da Arquitectura e do
Urbanismo 2 (2007): 120–145, esp. 128–129. See: “Fotografias da ‘maquette’,” Revista Oficial
do Sindicato Nacional dos Arquitectos 10 (1939): 280–281.
84 Maps, technical drawings, and artistic drawings of the Exhibition are preserved at the
Arquivo Histórico de Obras Públicas (1939–1940, Comissariado da Exposição do Mundo
Português, PT/AHMOP/CEMP).
85 José Mendes Leal. “A moderna função social do engenheiro,” Revista da Associação dos
Engenheiros Civis Portugueses, 639 (1927): 15–22; José Mendes Leal. “A função das ofici-
nas do Instituto Superior Técnico,” Técnica, 12, no. 88 (1937): 345–347. See also: Maria
Fernanda Rollo and Ana Paula Pires. Ordem dos Engenheiros. 75 anos de História: Inovação
e desenvolvimento em Portugal (Lisboa: Ingenium, 2012).
86 “Informação relativa aos concursos de adjudicação…,” September 30, 1939, Presidência
do Conselho de Ministros, 1932/1974 (PT/TT/SGPCM-GPC/0007-C/00005), Arquivo
Nacional Torre do Tombo; Costa, Feiras, 420.
87 Carlos Fontes. Feira Popular de Lisboa: diversão e poder (MA diss.) (Lisboa: ISCTE, 1999),
52; Costa, Feiras, 420–421.
88 Costa, Feiras, 420. The scarcity of sources about mechanical rides in Lisbon makes the
reconstruction of the making and circulation of artefacts very difficult. It might be the case
that rides like the Whip and the Haunted Train at the 1940 Exhibition of the Portuguese
World were the same that were featured in Luna Parque in 1934 and 1935. Carlos Fontes
suggests that there might be a connection between the rides of the amusement park at
on 7 August 1940, the press coverage was limited to a few lines in the advertise-
ment section: “At 9 pm – Amusement Park of the Exhibition of the Portuguese
World – the best rides and amusements from foreign Luna-Parks – the Rivière
Mysterieuse stands out among them – absolutely unknown in Portugal”.89 In
the following months, among pages with horrific war news and pictures of
Hitler and Franco, advertisements of the “sensational novelties” and “world-
class rides” of the “Grand Luna-Park” were regularly published. These adver-
tisements were one of the few mentions to the amusement park that we
have found in the press. Unlike the case of Luna Park, at Eduardo VII Park,
the amusement park at the Exhibition of the Portuguese World seems to have
been rhetorically hidden.
The silence of the press, however, did not prevent many of the three mil-
lion visitors of the Exhibition from enjoying the amusement park. The visitors
could access the “modern rides” that were inaugurated week after week.90 At
the end of August, the amusement park possessed some of the well-known
standardized rides found in Luna Parks around the world, such as the above-
mentioned Whip, the Haunted Train, a Scenic Railway, the Devil’s Wheel, elec-
tric cars, and carousels. Additionally, there were several stalls featuring lethal
tropical snakes or the medium Ferdoli, not to mention fireworks, car rallies,
and the open-air terrace of the Casanova Dancing Bar.91
The amusement park closed with the Exhibition on 2 December 1940, at a
time of the year in which open-air leisure was not very popular because of the
weather. While the plan was to re-open the amusement park in the following
summer season, on 15 February 1941 a cyclone destroyed many of the rides and
facilities.92 The presence of technological fun in Belém was thus quite ephem-
eral, disappearing from a space that continued to represent one of the main
symbolic urban inscriptions of Salazarism. But it would not take long until the
mechanical rides went back to the city.
…
On 10 June 1943 the Popular Fair was inaugurated in a private park in Palhavã,
between Eduardo VII Park and the bullring in Campo Pequeno. This Park had
hosted the Zoo between 1894 and 1905, and had, afterwards, been closed to the
the Exhibition of the Portuguese World and the ones at the Feira Popular through the
company Sociedade Lusitana de Atracções (Fontes, Feira Popular, 115).
89 Diário de Lisboa, August 7, 1940, 2 [advertisement].
90 Guia da Exposição do Mundo Português ([s.l.: s.n.], 1940).
91 See the advertisements published in Diário de Notícias (p. 3), Diário de Lisboa (p. 2) and
O Século (p. 3), in August, September, and October.
92 Costa, Feiras, 420.
public. It is interesting to note that, after a brief presence in Belém, mechani-

cal rides came back to the city at a location that was close to the first Luna
Park. It seems as if technological fun accompanied again the urban expansion
of Lisbon, moving north along the Chiado-Restauradores-Liberty Avenue axis
towards the new urban centrality of the bourgeois area called Avenidas Novas
(New Avenues). New Avenues had been planned to follow a geometrical grid
in the early twentieth century and slowly implemented during the following
decades.
The Popular Fair was born at the initiative of the newspaper The Century
(O Século) to raise funds for their Sea Summer Camp for Children. The main
characters behind the idea were João Pereira da Rosa and José Leitão de
Barros. Pereira da Rosa was the director of The Century and had political and
personal ties with Salazar. Leitão de Barros was the artistic director of The
Century Illustrated (O Século Ilustrado), and a key actor in creating a new folk-
loric tradition for Lisbon and the nation.93 Besides his early Fado films and
the already-mentioned involvement in the Popular Marches parade at Lisbon’s
City Festivities, he was behind the organization of many other events, from
knight tournaments at the Jerónimos Monastery in the 1930s to the Exhibition
of the Portuguese World in 1940 as a member of the general commissariat.94
The Popular Fair was promoted as a “resurrection of the Lisbon Fairs” of the
past, such as the Alcântara Fair or the August Fair, and must be seen as a con-
tinuation of these efforts.95
Equally important is the fact that the Popular Fair had the full support of
the regime.96 The first season in 1943 was inaugurated by the Ministers of
Economy, Public Works, and the Colonies, and the 1944 season was inaugu-
rated by the President of the Republic.97 The Organismos de Coordenação
Económica (Organisms for Economic Coordination), the Agência Geral das
Colónias (General Colonial Administration), or the Houses of the People, set
up propaganda stands to praise the achievements of the autarkic and colonial
policies of the corporatist regime.98 The Popular Fair even became a public
stage for diplomacy between the Portuguese government and its new preferred
allies after 1943, when the fascist discourse was accommodated to the shifting
93 Michael Colvin. “Images of Defeat: Early Fado Films and the Estado Novo’s Notion of
Progress,” Portuguese Studies 26, no. 2 (2010): 149–167.
94 Another member of the Executive Board of the Feira Popular, Gustavo de Matos Sequeira,
had been organizer of the Lisboa Antiga historicist theme park in São Bento area and part
of the general commissariat of the 1940 Exhibition.
95 “A Feira é reconstituição exacta das de há 50 anos e afirmação da arte moderna,” O Século,
June 11, 1943, 1.
96 Fontes, Feira Popular, 38.
97 “Os Senhores Ministros…,” O Século, June 11, 1943, 1; “A Feira Popular de Lisboa…,” O Século,
May 25, 1944, 1.
98 “Os Senhores Ministro de Economia e…,” O Século, June 8, 1944, 1.
composition of the overall geopolitical context. This entailed the installation

of an official pavilion of the United States and the United Kingdom, the pres-
ence of the ambassadors of both countries in the inauguration of the 1945 sea-
son, the organization of events such as homages to the Brazilian Expeditionary
Corps, and the inclusion of candy bars and popcorn in the gastronomic offer of
the Popular Fair through the Stall of American Specialties.99
At the Popular Fair in Palhavã, technological fun was framed within a
regime of pleasure that was aligned with the ideological and aesthetic tenets
of the Estado Novo. Unlike the rhetoric of international urban modernity sur-
rounding Luna Park, the discourse regarding the Popular Fair swung towards
a nationalist revindication of the old Lisbon fairs. The entertainment offer
included the police brass band, popular orchestras, folklore performances
by farmers from Alentejo region and fado (even though vaudeville and jazz
were also present). One could also attend religious ceremonies, sport events,
cinema, puppets, and tombolas (games in which people pick tickets out of
a revolving drum, some of which win immediate prizes), as well as partici-
pate in allegedly “genuine” regional festivities, with traditional food and wine
stands.100 There was also space for the fair shows of the “electric saw” and the
“electric woman”, the display of “extravagant and curious” Portuguese inven-
tions, and a haunted house with “prodigious mechanisms”.101 In its first year of
existence, the Popular Fair had few mechanical rides.
However, from 1944 onward, the more picturesque fair was combined with
a stronger emphasis on technological display and technological fun. On the
one hand, a permanent trade fair with two hundred stands was organized
to promote national industry and international commerce. The Popular Fair
slowly became a showcase for new electric appliances and technologies of
communication in Lisbon (the Radio Marconi stand, for example, was very
successful).102 On the other hand, a large number of mechanical rides offered
thrills to the crowds that visited the Popular Fair: one million in 1943, one mil-
lion and a half in 1944, and two million in 1945 (according to official numbers).
Like the 1940 Exhibition before it, technological fun was never highlighted as
such in the official rhetoric. Nevertheless, mechanical rides were a key part of
the Feira Popular.
99 “Hoje, véspera de…,” O Século, June 18, 1945, 2; “Os bravos soldados brasileiros…,” O Século,
September 1, 1945, 1; “Foi uma loucura…,” O Século, September 4, 1945, 1.
100 “A Feira Popular de Lisboa foi um éxito…,” O Século, June 11, 1943, 1–2, 5; “Os campinos das
lezírias…,” O Século, September 12, 1943, 1.
101 “A grande expectativa que apaixona Lisboa…,” O Século, June 9, 1943, 2; “A Feira popu-
lar…,” O Século, June 11, 1943, 5; “O primero domingo…,” O Século, June 14, 1943, 2; “A Feira
Popular,” O Século, July 4, 1943, 2.
102 Fontes, Feira Popular, 126, 131 and 224.
Figure 14.6A–B Fun, technology, and diplomacy at the Feira Popular.

New Circus (and new mechanical rides) for the New
State in 1943 (above); Members of the Portuguese
government and ambassadors of allied powers right
before the end of WWII (the Ferris Wheel in the
upper area) (below)
PHOTOGRAPHS BY JUDAH BONOLIEL
A 1945 promotional documentary film allows us to have a panoramic view

of the Popular Fair.103 The documentary shows a multitude of men, women,
103 “Grande Feira Popular de Lisboa,” Documentary, Sociedade Nacional de Tipografia,

35 mm, 11 minutes, 1945, Arquivo da Cinemateca Portuguesa, ID: CP-MC: 7001355.
and children, mostly well dressed, enjoying the kinaesthetic thrills of several
mechanical rides. One of the most popular was a locally built Ferris Wheel,
which was bombastically compared to the famous one in Vienna (despite
being much lower). The Century also highlighted that it provided “a baptism of
air, but without danger”.104 Visitors could also have fun by descending a water-
chute, riding several swing rides and merry-go-rounds, or driving gasoline
boats. Women appeared driving bumper cars, having a drink in taverns, and
smoking in high class gala dinners. In fact, “nights devoted to madams” were
regularly organized in Pavalhã and the wives of the president of the Republic
and other prominent dignitaries showed up.105 The short film also shows how
the public visited commercial stands, official stands, or a colonialist display
of dioramas of tropical landscapes, and how they enjoyed bullfighting, circus
performances, dancing and fado restaurants. The co-habitation of all these
elements in the same space is what characterized the regime of pleasure of
the Popular Fair, in which the technological fun of mechanical rides was inte-
grated into the production of popular culture by the Estado Novo.
The connection with the regime would become clearer in 1949, when the
state took charge of the organization of the Popular Fair through the Governo
Civil (Lisbon Civil Government); that is, until 1951 when the newspaper The
Century would resume oversight of the Popular Fair’s organization. In a similar
way to what happened to the Popular Marches’ folklore parade, which were
born at the initiative of a newspaper and were later organized by the City
Council, the Popular Fair was nationalized and replicated. At a time of internal
political tensions, the regime promoted at a national level the regime of plea-
sure that had been stabilized in Lisbon, and new “Popular Fairs” were inaugu-
rated in Porto and Coimbra in 1950. The story of the Popular Fair in Lisbon in
the second half of the twentieth century is still to be written. But its first years
of existence already show that it played a key political role during Salazarism.
4 Conclusions
A fascist Coney Island? There is no straightforward answer to the question

posed by the title of this chapter. While the expression is useful to point to the
tensions between global mass culture and the cultural program of Portuguese
fascism, it would be misleading to answer with a clear-cut yes or no. Like fado,
104 “Cresce cada dia o interesse…,” O Século, June 23, 1944, 2.

105 O Século, June 12, 1943, 2; O Século, August 18, 1943, 2.
football, or cinema, amusement parks should be understood as cultural and

political battlegrounds. In this chapter, we have seen how the technological
fun of amusement parks arrived in Lisbon under a rhetoric of international
urban modernity in the early years of the Estado Novo, and how the regime
attempted to frame this expression of urban mass culture along the lines of its
cultural policies. The historiography of popular culture under Salazarism has
rarely taken amusement parks into account, most likely because of its empha-
sis on state institutions as objects of study and the fact that technological fun
does not match the expected folklorist approach. Yet, we have shown how they
played a significant role in Lisbon’s geographies of leisure and how they were
embraced by the Estado Novo, especially with the creation of the Popular Fair
in the early 1940s.
The mechanical rides circulated in Lisbon during the 1930s and 1940s in
several spaces such as enclosed amusement parks, exhibitions, small fairs,
or the Mayer Park. They were very similar, sometimes even the same. But the
geographical locations, the symbolic settings, and the regimes of pleasure in
which they were inscribed were quite different. It is through the study of these
differences that we can grasp the cultural appropriation of these technologies
for fun in Salazarist Lisbon. Luna Park was a commercial amusement park
that was not promoted nor sponsored by the state, and its creation in 1933 at
Eduardo VII Park should be understood as the expression of the urban mass
culture that proliferated in the Chiado-Restauradores-Liberty Avenue axis.
Targeted to the middle and upper classes, Luna Park promoted its mechanical
rides as a factor of urban modernization that would push Lisbon up the ladder
of cosmopolitanism. This rhetoric, and the aesthetics and iconography that
went with it, were not in line with the incipient cultural program of the Estado
Novo. The kind of urban modernity represented by Luna Park was not aligned
with that of the “politics of spirit” of the National Propaganda Board nor with
that of the (re)invented urban folklore of the City Festivities. While the aspira-
tion of the promoters of Luna Park, who mostly belonged to the more liberal
sectors of the regime, was to import a standardized form of globalized mass
culture (and to make money), the goal of the Estado Novo in the 1930s was
to re-signify elements of local culture to produce a new national approach to
fascist modernity. Thus, the main source of tension between Luna Park and
Salazarism was not the mechanical rides as such, but how they were framed
within a specific regime of pleasure that was significantly different to those of
the amusement parks that were eventually organized by the regime.
Technological fun was mobilized in the 1940 Exhibition of the Portuguese
World, the most ambitious display of fascist modernity under Salazarism.
Despite being peripheral in spatial and rhetorical terms, a big enclosed area
behind the Jerónimos Monastery in Belém was devoted to an amusement

park. The kinaesthetic experience of visitors was now shaped by the fact that
the mechanical rides were surrounded by a broad nationalist and colonialist
official narrative that permeated the “memory complex” of the Belém area.
The fact that amusement parks did not consolidate as a business in the 1930s,
made their appropriation (and monopolization) by the Estado Novo in the
1940s much easier. The creation of the Popular Fair in Palhavã in 1943, close
to the expanding neighbourhood of the New Avenues, represented the offi-
cially sanctioned appropriation of amusement parks by the Estado Novo. The
Popular Fair should be understood in relation to the process of (re)inventing
traditions for Lisbon. Just like the Popular Marches attempted to restore an
alleged folkloric tradition of old neighbourhoods, the Popular Fair was pro-
moted as a return to traditional Portuguese fairs. Both cases were closely con-
nected through the participation of the same actors, like José Leitão de Barros,
and we are in front of new cultural forms. The Popular Fair was a veritably
hybrid space mixing historicist aesthetics, folkloric shows, propaganda stands
of corporativist and colonial state institutions, national and international nov-
elties of an industrial fair, diplomatic events, geopolitical showcases, and, of
course, the thrills of mechanical rides. Technological fun helped in making the
Popular Fair extremely successful in terms of assistance while simultaneously
functioning as a privileged space for the regime to modify and reproduce its
own conceptions of popular culture and urban modernity.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Cláudia Castelo, Carlos Godinho, Inês Gomes, Marta
Macedo, Celia Miralles and Luísa Sousa, as well as the editors of the book and
the participants at the session “Estado Novo, Cidade Nova? Ciência, cidade e
fascismo em Lisboa, 1933–1945” of the 6th Encontro Nacional de História das
Ciências e Tecnologia (Monte da Caparica, 9–11 July 2018), for their careful
comments and insightful suggestions. We are also grateful to João Machado
and Sofia Viegas for their help with newspaper sources. We thank the following
institutions for their financial support: Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia,
Portugal (through PTDC/IVC-HFC/3122/2014, UID/HIS/00286/2019 and UIDB/
00286/2020) and AGAUR, Generalitat de Catalunya (2017 SGR 1138 & Serra
Húnter Program).
Supplement
Historical Urban Cartography of Lisbon

João Machado
The historical urban cartography of Lisbon was part of a research project

funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology called
“Visions of Lisbon. Science, technology and medicine and the making of a
techno-scientific capital (1870–1940),” project PTDC/IVC-HFC/3122/2014,
which took place from 2016 to 2019 (hereafter, VISLIS). It involved members of
the Interuniversity Centre for the History of Science and Technology (CIUHCT),
which includes around sixty graduate students, junior and senior historians of
science, technology, and medicine affiliated with the University of Lisbon or
the University NOVA of Lisbon (see http://ciuhct.org).
Profiting from the information gathered during the VISLIS project, digital
humanities techniques were used for constructing a research tool freely avail-
able online, mapping sites of Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) in
Lisbon and situating them within the period analysed in this volume. The tool
was built using the free tools QGIS and Mapbox and was conceived and imple-
mented by João Machado with the help of José Carlos Avelãs Nunes.
The reader can access it at http://ciuhct.org/vislis-map/.
The mapping carried out a formalised survey of various formal and informal
STM spaces, sites, and objects, which existed in Lisbon and were studied in the
context of the project VISLIS. Many of the spaces, sites, and objects included
in this map are discussed in this volume. The identification of various sites
includes the following: scientific, engineering, and medical institutions, pro-
fessional associations, teaching institutions or institutions used for learning
purposes, port institutions, working-class neighbourhoods, gardens and tree-
lined streets, streets, pavements, and mosaic sidewalks, amusement parks,
and techno-scientific objects, such as the armillary sphere and mathematical
games. The layers of maps allow for a fine-grained analysis of their relations
and their connection with the reorganisation and expansion of the city.
The tool is available online as a companion to this volume, and visitors can
use it to filter STM place markers by type or by year, and see them in context,
using overlaid, high-resolution, and geo-referenced historical cartography.
© João Machado, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004513440_020

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Index
Academy of Free Studies 374, 376 Cabral, António Branco 397

Adulteration/fraud 179, 180, 181, 183, 197, 199 Cais da Rocha 209, 214
Agache, Alfred 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, Calceteiros/pavers 40, 43, 45, 50, 51, 52, 59
138, 270 Capital (Lisboa/Lisbon) 7, 8, 9, 12, 22, 23, 24,
Agrarian Institute 347, 357, 358, 363 26, 28, 33, 37, 60, 61, 73, 74, 75, 90, 93,
Agronomy 256, 347, 358, 374 94, 100, 103, 104, 106, 111, 130, 137, 147,
Airport 205, 220, 229, 280 148, 149, 150, 153, 172, 192, 193, 201, 202,
Alfândega/Customs House 180, 181, 182, 186, 206, 231, 240, 257, 259, 261, 262, 266,
188, 189, 193, 194, 195, 199 267, 268, 269, 271, 282, 293, 295, 296,
Almeida, António de 255 326, 328, 343, 347, 354, 368, 369, 381,
Almeida, José Joaquim de 236, 243, 247 385, 389, 392, 419
Amaral, Francisco Keil do 405, 408, 409, Cars 34, 64, 65, 140, 214, 392, 399, 400, 403,
410 412, 416
Architecte-urbanists 122, 129, 130, 131, 143, Casino Conferences/Democratic Conferences
144 360, 361, 362, 364
Armillary sphere 16, 57, 148, 149, 262, 266, Cenáculo/Cenacle 292, 344, 345, 351, 352,
270, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 282, 353, 355, 356, 357, 358, 359, 360, 361,
283, 286, 419 362, 363, 364, 365
Asphalt 49, 59, 63, 64 Centennial commemorations (1940) 121,
Associação Industrial Portuguesa/Portuguese 123, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130
Industrial Association 396 Champs-Élysées 82, 304
Asylum 311, 330, 332 Chemical analysis 181, 184, 188, 190
Avenida da Liberdade/Avenue of Liberty Chiado 48, 55, 56, 63, 64, 350, 351, 356, 360,
11, 12, 23, 38, 48, 55, 70, 72, 73, 78, 79, 80, 395, 413, 417
81, 84, 85, 101, 102, 292, 302, 303, 304, Children 13, 77, 99, 108, 245, 252, 310, 311,
395, 396, 403, 404, 405, 413, 417 312, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 320, 321, 356,
366, 376, 403, 411, 413, 416
Bairro Alto 192, 347, 349, 350, 351, 356, 363 Cholera 10, 78, 151, 152, 155, 163, 172, 175, 220,
Bairro Grandela/Grandela Neighbourhood 223, 225, 337
14, 111, 112, 114, 115, 118 Circulation 2, 10, 18, 25, 27, 30, 33, 34, 36, 46,
Barros, José Leitão de 404, 413, 418 57, 58, 64, 65, 90, 95, 101, 102, 129, 135,
Bastos, Guilherme Wilfried 185, 186, 197, 139, 140, 147, 155, 158, 159, 179, 180, 191,
199, 201 193, 197, 199, 204, 232, 247, 292, 327, 333,
Belém 16, 57, 73, 129, 130, 141, 148, 166, 172, 336, 337, 341, 342, 343, 369, 374, 375,
175, 209, 210, 217, 221, 222, 232, 236, 237, 380, 381, 393
239, 241, 251, 252, 253, 257, 259, 261, 265, Citizenship 101, 300, 370
266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 275, 285, City Council (Lisbon) 8, 9, 11, 24, 38, 39, 43,
292, 350, 395, 407, 412, 413, 418 45, 46, 48, 50, 52, 54, 62, 63, 68, 70, 73,
Bite 336, 340 75, 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 86, 88, 89, 92, 94,
Bottom-up 60, 369, 381, 389 101, 218, 267, 271, 294, 298, 299, 301, 302,
Boulevards 23, 25, 33, 34, 38, 67, 71, 73, 75, 305, 306, 307, 308, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314,
78, 82, 84, 85, 86, 93, 94, 108, 291, 395 317, 318, 321, 323, 329, 330, 331, 397, 400,
Braga, António Gonçalves 215, 225 403, 404, 405, 416
464 Index
Colina da Engenharia/Hill of Engineering Darwin 365

367 De Gröer, Etienne 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137,
Colina da Medicina/Hill of Medicine 23, 24, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144
75, 77, 86, 101, 192, 367, 387, 388, 399 Department of Gardens and Green Grounds
Colina das Ciências/Hill of Sciences 23, 24, 68, 69, 70, 71, 74, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85,
75, 77, 88, 192, 367, 371, 388 86, 89, 90, 93, 94, 298, 299, 301, 302,
Colonial agricultural education 234, 241, 303, 304, 305, 321
244, 248 Discoveries 19, 57, 148, 237, 251, 259, 261,
Colonial Agricultural Museum 16, 21, 148, 262, 265, 266, 268, 269, 271, 273, 274,
230, 232, 234, 243, 245, 246, 249, 252, 280, 283, 286, 407
256, 257, 258, 259 Discoveries Pavilion 16, 266, 276, 278
Colonial Garden 21, 148, 230, 231, 232, 234, Discoveries Sphere 266, 276, 277, 278, 280,
236, 237, 239, 240, 241, 243, 244, 245, 282
246, 247, 248, 249, 252, 253, 256, 257, Diseases 88, 108, 147, 148, 149, 162, 163, 172,
258, 259, 407 175, 178, 203, 208, 212, 218, 219, 220, 236,
Colonies (Portuguese) 7, 8, 13, 16, 17, 36, 244, 324, 326
39, 89, 147, 149, 150, 201, 205, 230, 231, Disinfection 151, 155, 160, 170, 176, 293, 206,
232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 241, 244, 245, 207, 210, 211, 212, 214, 219, 226
246, 247, 248, 249, 252, 253, 255, 257, Disinfection Station 175, 176, 206, 207, 209,
259, 263, 277, 280, 286, 287, 308, 352, 210, 211, 213, 214, 215, 217, 218, 219, 221,
376, 407 222, 226, 227, 228
Commerce and trade 173, 179, 181, 193, 195, Dog 12, 17, 86, 291, 292, 318, 323, 325, 326,
198, 201, 386 328, 329, 330, 331, 332, 333, 335, 336,
Commissão de unificação dos processos de 337, 338, 339, 340, 341, 342, 343
analyse dos vinhos e azeites/Commission
for the Unification of Analyses of Wine Emigrants 217, 218, 221, 226, 354
and Oil 197 Empire (Portuguese colonial) 7, 8, 14, 15,
Communications 24, 27, 33, 37, 103, 178, 16, 25, 57, 74, 130, 147, 148, 149, 230, 231,
205, 295 232, 233, 235, 237, 252, 253, 259, 260,
Companhia Predial Portuguesa/Portuguese 262, 263, 264, 268, 269, 270, 273, 274,
Building Company 116 275, 278, 280, 282, 286
Conflicts 11, 108, 182, 194, 217, 227, 256, 234, Engineers 10, 17, 21, 22, 34, 37, 39, 40, 64, 70,
325, 328, 332, 339, 342, 343 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 99, 101, 109, 114,
Conselho Superior das Alfândegas/Board of 117, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128, 143, 155,
Customs 182 157, 158, 160, 201, 231, 244, 259, 264, 266,
Contrução Moderna/Modern Construction 298, 321, 389, 397, 398, 406, 411
110, 112 Epidemics 78, 148, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 174,
Cooperativa Popular de Construção 175, 176, 178, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208,
Predial/Popular Cooperative of Building 209, 210, 215, 219, 220, 223, 225, 226,
Construction 116, 117 227, 228, 229, 336
Costa do Sol /Sun Coast 127, 128, 130, 131, Estado Novo/New State 8, 14, 13, 16, 18, 24,
136, 137, 138, 143 25, 34, 35, 56, 57, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124,
Cottinelli Telmo 264, 268, 276, 407 125, 126, 129, 130, 132, 133, 138, 144, 149,
Councillors 63, 70, 73, 318, 321 235, 250, 251, 252, 259, 262, 263, 264,
Covões, Ricardo 397 266, 267, 268, 273, 275, 276, 282, 285,
Craft knowledge/craftsmanship 34, 36, 39, 286, 292, 367, 379, 393, 394, 395, 397,
40, 54, 57, 66, 275 402, 414, 416, 417, 418
Index 465
Estrela Garden 21, 88, 291, 294, 295, 296, Geraldes, Carlos Eugénio de Mello 241, 244,
297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 248, 249
305, 307, 308, 310, 311, 312, 314, 317, 318, Gossweiller, John 247
319, 321 Green infrastructures 12, 26, 33, 37, 67, 84,
Evolutionism 363, 365 85, 93, 295
Experts 4, 9, 10, 17, 19, 19, 21, 22, 24, 27, 29, Greenhouses 239, 240, 248, 260, 303, 305,
34, 38, 40, 52, 57, 61, 62, 63, 65, 68, 70, 307, 321
71, 73, 74, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87, 94,
99, 100, 101, 109, 114, 117, 118, 137, 142, Hands-on 34, 40, 50
143, 147, 148, 152, 161, 165, 179, 181, 182, Haussmann/Haussmannian/Hausmanized
183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 191, 196, 199, 10, 12, 23, 25, 27, 33, 38, 39, 55, 65, 71,
202, 219, 233, 244, 247, 261, 298, 308, 72, 80, 82, 85, 96, 101, 291, 301, 303, 304,
319, 320, 321, 345, 358, 365, 368, 388 367, 395
Exposição do Mundo Português/ Portuguese Health Bill 207, 223, 224, 225, 226
World Exhibition/Exhibition of the Health Station 21, 166, 172, 175, 207, 208,
Portuguese World 16, 21, 57, 130, 139, 148, 209, 210
149, 232, 261, 279, 280, 292, 395, 407, Homem de Vasconcellos, António 161, 165,
408, 411, 412, 413, 417 172, 215, 216
Hospital 74, 75, 77, 89, 158, 160, 162, 174, 176,
Faculty of Medicine 163, 192, 366, 369, 374, 192, 193, 219, 220, 221, 222, 228, 237, 319,
385, 387, 388, 389 338
Faculty of Sciences 192, 239, 255, 366, 368, “Human zoo” 260, 396
369, 371, 372, 374, 380, 384, 385, 387, Hygienic model 108
388, 389
Feira de Algés/Algés Fair 404 Iberian union/unification 353
Feira de Agosto/August Fair 396, 404, 413 Imperial Lisbon 7, 8, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27,
Feira Popular/Popular Fair 292, 395, 404, 407, 28, 121, 130, 132, 147, 148, 149, 202, 205,
412, 413, 414, 415, 416, 417, 418 213, 230, 232, 241, 258, 260, 261, 267,
Ferro, António 125, 262, 263, 407 268, 282, 286
Fialho de Almeida 22, 23, 100, 106, 109, 367, Industrial city (Lisbon) 24, 33, 96, 100, 103,
389 104, 108, 391, 407
Fonseca, José Belard da 397 Infrastructure/s 910, 11, 12, 16, 17, 19, 21, 26,
Fontana, Giuseppe 356, 357, 359, 363 33, 34, 37, 38, 39, 65, 67, 68, 73, 80, 84,
Fragateiro, Bernardo de Oliveira 243, 245, 85, 87, 93, 94, 97, 101, 104, 108, 118, 120,
247, 256, 258 124, 134, 143, 144, 149, 155, 160, 201, 207,
Freemasonry 13, 378 233, 295, 296, 297, 304, 305, 307, 311,
French literature 82, 298, 303 321, 391
French picturesque 304 Instituto Industrial de Lisboa/Industrial
Froebel (Froebel Institute/school) 312, 313, Institute of Lisbon 13, 14, 181, 185, 193, 198
314, 315, 316, 317, 321 Instituto Superior Técnico/Technical
Furtado, Euzébio 41, 43, 45, 46, 48 Institute 56, 125, 198, 411, 292, 366, 367,
369, 374, 384, 388, 389, 411
Gaudêncio, Amadeu 397 International Exhibitions 110, 160, 246, 251
Garden city 132, 133, 134, 144 Itinerant 21, 292, 366, 368, 369, 382
Gardeners 34, 68, 70, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86,
239, 243, 244, 260, 298, 302, 303, 305, Jorge, Ricardo 174, 175, 204, 211, 224, 225,
310, 316, 319, 321 255, 382, 384
466 Index
Killing (dogs) 329, 330, 333 Mocidade portuguesa/Portuguese Youth,

Feminine Portuguese Youth 402n58
Laboratório Aduaneiro/da Alfândega/ Modernity 8, 13, 16, 17, 23, 25, 27, 39, 70, 103,
Customs laboratory 12, 21, 148, 179, 182, 108, 118, 149, 251, 275, 280, 286, 292, 296,
183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 318, 392, 394, 396, 414, 417, 418
193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, Monumental Lisbon 22, 24, 100, 106, 109,
202 367
Lazaretto 12, 21, 148, 150, 153, 154, 155, 156, Mosaic pavement/Portuguese Pavement/
157, 158, 159, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167, Calçada Portuguesa 27, 34, 36, 39, 40, 41,
169, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57,
203, 206, 207, 208, 209, 211, 212, 216, 219, 58, 59, 60, 64, 65, 75, 93, 147, 345
221, 227 Moses, Robert 120, 135
Le Play, Fréderic 133 Municipal 11, 12, 23, 64, 70, 71, 73, 74, 78, 80,
Liberals 73, 78, 80, 297, 345 81, 84, 87, 88, 89, 90, 97, 106, 174, 180,
Lisboa in the year 2000 22, 100, 103, 109 181, 194, 195, 203, 220, 318, 323, 328, 329,
Lisbon Casino 360, 361, 362 330, 331, 332, 333, 334, 337, 341, 342,
Low-cost housing 100, 106, 109, 110, 114, 115, 343, 354
116, 117 Municipal Comission of Public Works 38,
Luna Parque/Luna Park 16, 17, 21, 292, 391, 60
392, 395, 397, 398, 399, 400, 401, 402, Museum Barbosa du Bocage 255
403, 404, 405, 406, 412, 413, 414, 417 Muzzle 329, 331, 338, 339, 340, 341
Macadam 27, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65 National Congress of Mutuality 111, 117
Marchas Populares/Popular Marches 403, National Identity 17, 262, 263, 273, 275, 396
404, 413, 416, 418 National League of Education 376
Margiochi, Francisco Simões 80, 82, 86, 303 National Symbol 56, 57, 262, 275, 286, 345
Maritime Expansion 237, 262, 266, 271, 273, Nautical Science 275, 276
274, 278, 286 Navel, Henri 239, 240, 243
Maritime Health/Maritime Health Service Neto, António Lino 198
175, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, Network 4, 10, 14, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 35,
211, 213, 214, 215, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 87, 92, 93, 96, 108, 127, 129, 132, 135,
222, 223, 224, 226, 227, 228 141, 147, 149, 156, 177, 178, 187, 192, 193,
Marques, Paulo 124, 125 196, 197, 200, 201, 205, 206, 207, 219,
Medical 21, 23, 33, 99, 101, 102, 106, 112, 118, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 227, 228, 233,
152, 153, 154, 155, 163, 165, 172, 173, 175, 259, 292, 294, 357, 369, 373, 388, 389,
177, 178, 193, 203, 204, 205, 207, 212, 408
218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 224, 226, 227, Newspaper/journal 18, 48, 86, 89,110, 112,
335, 336, 337, 338, 341, 343, 387, 388, 122, 170, 174, 176, 188, 189, 201, 248, 264,
419 270, 278, 280, 300, 311, 314, 316, 326, 333,
Medical follow-up 207, 212, 222 335, 338, 341, 342, 349, 350, 351, 362,
Melo de Matos 22, 100, 103, 104, 109, 110, 111, 370, 379, 392, 413, 416, 418
116, 117, 118 Nurseries 34, 67, 71, 84, 88, 89, 298, 302, 303,
Miasma and Germ theories 152 308, 310, 321
Ministério dos Negócios da Fazenda/Ministry
of Finances 77, 181, 184, 187, 193, 195, 196 O Século (The Century) 413
Mobility 35, 37, 81, 102, 118, 122, 129, 134, 138, Organismos de Coordenação Económica/
139, 140, 142, 143, 144, 385 Organisms of Economic Coordination
Mobility (in)justice 122, 144 413
Index 467
Pacheco, Duarte 16, 56, 121, 128, 130, 131, 143, Public Promenade 11, 73, 79, 80, 82, 84, 296,
267, 269, 408 300, 301, 302, 303, 321, 346, 347, 350,
Panopticon 156, 162, 163, 165, 177 356
Paris Commune 359, 363, 364 Public spaces 11, 14, 37, 54, 55, 56, 58, 68, 87,
Parque Mayer/Mayer Park 403, 404, 417 93, 292, 307, 359, 363
Park of Liberty 85 Public sphere 190, 192, 296, 297, 298, 312,
Pasteur 335, 336, 337, 338 316, 321, 359
Pebble pavements 41, 43, 51
Pezerat, Pierre-Joseph 23, 24, 37, 38, 78, 84 Quarantine(s) 12, 148, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156,
Physical anthropology 255 157, 158, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167, 170,
Physicians 10, 17, 22, 99, 102, 117, 148, 155, 172, 173, 175, 178, 203, 204, 207, 208, 212,
175, 203, 204, 205, 212, 218, 219, 220, 221, 219, 220, 221, 224, 225, 226
222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 388 Queirós, Eça de 11, 90, 344, 346, 347, 349,
Pinheiro, Rafael Bordalo 45, 169, 170, 172 350, 351, 352, 355, 357, 358, 359, 363, 364
Plague 174, 176, 204, 220, 222, 223, 224 Quental, Antero de 351, 352, 353, 355, 356,
Política do Espírito/Politics of Spirit 263, 357, 359, 361, 362, 363, 364, 385
394
Port city 7, 8, 27, 28, 149, 150, 151, 154, 172, Rabies 292, 323, 332, 335, 336, 337, 338, 340,
193, 222, 293 341, 342, 343
Port of Lisbon 24, 104, 148, 151, 154, 172, 176, Realism 357, 358
181, 201, 210, 213, 214 Rectors 366, 369, 372, 373, 384, 389
Porto (city) 13, 14, 63, 121, 174, 181, 193, 194, Regeneration (historical period) 10, 11, 13,
204, 207, 216, 244, 246, 252, 253, 255, 33, 68, 69, 96, 294, 296, 297, 311
354, 363, 366, 370, 403, 416 Regulations / instructions / ordinances 9,
Portuguese pavement /Calçada Portuguesa 12, 41, 70, 90, 172, 174, 181, 187, 188, 204,
27, 36, 39, 40, 41, 45, 46, 48, 50, 51, 52, 217, 220, 226, 248, 316, 318, 327, 328, 329,
54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 65, 75, 93, 282, 331, 332, 335, 337, 338, 341, 342, 343
345 Reis, Jaime Batalha 347, 349, 350, 351, 352,
Portuguese World Exhibition/Colonial 355, 356, 357, 358, 359, 362, 363, 364,
Section 365
Prison 43, 50, 156, 162, 163, 170 Republican/Republicanism 12, 13, 14, 34, 95,
Private concession 157, 165, 167 97, 101, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 115,
Progress 10, 12, 13, 25, 35, 36, 111, 114, 116, 125, 117, 118, 169, 189, 235, 240, 266, 273, 275,
149, 188, 203, 216, 234, 251, 287, 292, 294, 276, 286, 292, 315, 353, 361, 366, 370,
295, 318, 322, 345, 359, 371, 378, 380, 371, 373, 375, 376, 378, 379, 381, 382, 384,
382, 400, 408 385, 388, 389, 397, 406
Proletariat 99, 108, 354, 359 Ressano Garcia, Frederico 38, 79, 80, 82, 84,
Propaganda 35, 122, 125, 148, 232, 235, 246, 85, 173
255, 258, 259, 262, 264, 273, 413, 418 River/Tagus river 11, 16, 24, 26, 33, 40, 46,
Prophylaxis 155, 337, 338, 341 61, 73, 78, 96, 100, 102, 103, 104, 106, 127,
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 352, 353, 361 129, 131, 147, 150, 153, 154, 161, 178, 193,
Public gardens 74, 85, 86, 88, 140, 291, 294, 203, 209, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 227, 228,
296, 297, 299, 300, 307, 308, 310, 321 237, 265, 268, 270, 300, 304, 310, 339,
Public health 9, 14, 21, 37, 63, 70, 74, 97, 127, 350, 356, 395, 404
148, 154, 155, 162, 163, 170, 176, 180, 182, Roads/ Parkways/ Motorways 10, 15, 25, 34,
196, 203, 204, 207, 215, 220, 222, 225, 35, 36, 37, 40, 54, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65,
226, 227, 229, 304, 308, 317, 325, 338, 67, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128,
341, 385, 388, 389 134, 135, 139, 140, 141, 142
468 Index
Rosa, João Pereira da 413 Terreiro do Trigo/Wheat Market 195, 196,

Rossio/ King Pedro IV Square 46, 75, 345 201
Royal Botanical Gardens 230 Top-down 381, 382
Royal Central Association of Portuguese Tourism 15, 17, 35, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, 127,
Agriculture 358 128, 130, 144, 253, 257, 319
Transport/transportation 15, 24, 25/ 27, 33,
Saint-Simonianism 14, 34, 65, 97, 101, 102, 35, 37, 63, 65, 67, 102, 103, 118, 120, 124,
104, 109, 111, 114, 115, 117, 118 129, 134, 135, 138, 139, 142, 179, 192, 203,
Salazar, António de Oliveira/Salazarism 14, 213, 214, 217, 218, 220, 229, 245, 248, 249,
15, 121, 123, 124, 125, 131, 133, 186, 262, 253, 291, 295, 306, 326, 385, 398, 411
263, 266, 271, 273, 280, 292, 379, 391, Traveller(s) 61, 154, 166, 174, 204, 205, 206,
393, 394, 395, 402, 407, 412, 413, 416, 417 207, 208, 209, 211, 212, 214, 217, 218, 219,
Sanitary Station 172, 175, 177 220, 221, 222, 224, 226, 228, 247, 319, 328
Santos, Fernando Mattoso 185, 186, 187, 188, Tree species 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 88, 303, 305,
197, 198, 199, 201 308
Scientific instruments 104, 179, 183, 187, 189, Tree-lined streets 33, 34, 67, 68, 69, 71, 74,
201, 275 75, 82, 85, 86, 87, 93, 94
Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional/ Tuberculosis 98, 101, 108, 163, 221, 388
National Propaganda Board 17, 125, 262,
393, 394, 407, 417 Universidade Livre para a Educação Popular/
Sidewalks 11, 25, 36, 39, 41, 45, 48, 50, 54, 58, Free University/Free University for the
59, 60, 63, 64, 65, 73, 74, 84, 90, 92, 108, Education of the People 14, 292, 368,
128, 419 369, 374, 375, 376, 378, 380, 381, 382,
Silva, Antonio Ferreira da 194, 197 385, 386, 387, 388, 389
Silva, João Francisco da 82, 302, 303 Universidade Popular Portuguesa/Portuguese
Smallpox 219, 220, 222 Popular University 14, 292, 368, 369, 375,
Socialist 100, 106, 114, 115, 118, 292, 344, 352, 376, 378, 379, 380, 381, 382, 386, 388,
353, 355, 356, 357, 359, 360, 361, 363 389
Sociedade de Diversões/Entertainments University extension 370, 371, 373, 374, 375,
Society 397 380, 381, 382
Socio-technical imaginaries 17, 19, 22, 24, Urban improvements 33, 37, 38, 78, 97, 101
99, 100, 292, 399 Urban sprawl 35, 120, 122, 133, 292
Sousa, João Crisóstomo de Abreu e 37 Urbanism 65, 70, 124, 131, 132, 133, 134, 140,
Spanish Flu 221 144, 270, 273, 286, 291
Stray (dogs) 11, 12, 86, 318, 233, 325, 328, 329, Urinals 219, 308
330, 331, 332, 335, 336, 338, 339, 342, 343 Utopian visions 24, 100, 118, 144
Street 11, 21, 25, 28, 33, 34, 36, 39, 40, 41, 45,
48, 49, 50, 54, 55, 56, 60, 61, 63, 64, 67, Vaccine/vaccination 228, 317, 343
68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 78, 79, 81, 86, 87, Veiga, Caetano Maria Beirão da 198
88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 108, 109, 179, Visiting nurse 222
253, 291, 304, 305, 323, 325, 328, 329, Von Bonhorst, Carlos (Carl/Karl) 185, 186,
330, 331, 332, 333, 334, 335, 336, 337, 188, 197, 201
338, 342, 343, 344, 349, 350, 419
Strychnine 329, 330, 332 Welfare 99, 118, 148, 154, 175, 206, 325, 326,
340
Technical Division 37, 38, 78, 79, 80, 84, Wine 148, 181, 182, 187, 190, 194, 196, 197, 200,
85, 86 349, 400, 414
Index 469
Working-class neighbourhoods 21, 24, 34, 354, 363, 366, 356, 375, 376, 379, 380,
35, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 108, 109, 114, 115, 381, 382, 384, 386, 388, 389, 396, 400,
118, 134, 152, 349, 354, 379, 382, 384, 388, 407, 419
396, 419 World War I and II/War 13, 15, 16, 143, 213,
Working class(es) 13, 14, 21, 24, 34, 43, 95, 214, 221, 235, 251, 266
97, 98, 99, 100, 106, 108, 109, 111, 114, 115,
118, 132, 134, 138, 152, 241, 291, 292, 317, Yellow fever 10, 151, 152, 163, 167, 170, 172, 174,
176, 216, 220, 223, 226

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Science, Technology and Medicine in the Making of Lisbon (1840–1940)

Cultural Dynamics of Science

Lissa Roberts (Science, Technology and Policy Studies (STePS), University of

Miruna Achim (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana–Cuajimalpa,

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cds

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Simões, Ana, editor. | Diogo, Maria Paula, editor.

This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Introduction: Science, Technology and Medicine in the making of

1 Paving the City and Urban Evolution: Science, Technology and

2 Trees, Nurseries, and Tree-lined Streets in the Making of Modern

3 Working-Class Neighbourhoods in Lisbon. Republican Hygienist

4 Crossing Urban and Transport Expertise to Pave Lisbon’s Future Urban

Introduction to Part 2 147

5 Hybrid Features at Lisbon’s New Lazaretto (1860–1908) 150

6 The Customs Laboratory of Lisbon from the 1880s to the 1930s:

7 Lisbon after Quarantines: Urban Protection against International

8 The Colonial Garden and the Colonial Agricultural Museum: Education,

9 Urbanising the History of “Discoveries:” The 1940 Portuguese World

Introduction to Part 3 291

10 A Liberal Garden: The Estrela Garden and the Meaning of

11 Allies or Enemies? Dogs in the Streets of Lisbon in the Second Half

13 Working-Class Universities: Itinerant Spaces for Science, Technology

14 A Fascist Coney Island? Salazar’s Dictatorship, Popular Culture and

Supplement: Historical Urban Cartography of Lisbon 419

1.1a Zigzag pavement in the castle’s parade, circa 1900 42

6.2 The collection of scientific instruments at the customs laboratory

José Carlos Avelãs Nunes

Maria Paula Diogo

Celia Miralles Buil

Ana Duarte Rodrigues

Ana Simões and Maria Paula Diogo

© Ana Simões and Maria Paula Diogo, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004513440_002

1 Why Write an Urban History of Science in Lisbon? Commonalities,

the use of historical categories such as peripheries and metropolises (centres),

places, and taken to be representative of the whole.12 Additionally we argue

metropole and periphery – while reassessing their relevance when treating

play a central role within the then-recently established maritime routes

and particularly its colony of Brazil. However, with Brazil’s declaration of

2 Why This Timeline? A Century between Backwardness

2.1 From the Regeneration Period to the First Republic (1850–1910)

and cosmopolitan atmosphere continued with the Passeio’s addition of the

2.2 The First Republic (1910–1926)

In 1910, the Republican Party overthrew the monarchy, thus inaugurating

30 Maria Eugénia Mata, As Finanças Públicas Portuguesas da Regeneração à Primeira Guerra

to the universities’ elite – and in a variety of forms – e.g. kindergartens and

2.3 The Estado Novo Dictatorship (1933–1974)

3 How to Write an Urban History of Science in Lisbon? Invisibilities,

In Portugal, urban history encompasses reflections of a variety of disciplines

35 Manuel C. Teixeira, “A história urbana em Portugal. Desenvolvimentos recentes,” Análise

40 Ana Simões, “From Capital City to Scientific Capital.”

affected the practice of writing urban histories of STM, impacting on those

42 Olga Kuchinskaya, “Twice invisible. Formal representations of radiation danger,” Social

determining factor in the construction of modern Lisbon. Thus, by attending

3.2 Socio-technical Imaginaries

46 G.E. Marcus, ed., Technoscientific imaginaries. Conversations, profiles, and memoirs

50 Pierre-Joseph Pézerat, Mémoire sur les études d’améliorations et emblissements de

Portuguese empire was reinforced during the Estado Novo’s modernisation

3.3 Urban Connections

53 Ash, Science in the Metropolis, Gantner, Hein-Kircher, and Hochadel, Interurban

The period under consideration in this volume is largely shaped by Lisbon’s

External connections, by contrast, refer to the network of transport and

forms of knowledge involved in the work of artisans and craftsman. Thus, by