November 2009

Abandoning Lisbon (or What Was Left of It):
Father José Francisco de Isla’s Plan for a New Portuguese Capital
by Mark Molesky

Old Lisbon Hans Staden's voyage to Brazil began in 1546. Here his departure from Lisbon is shown in Theodor de Bry, America, part 3. Image from the collections of the John Carter Brown Library. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Finding a previously unknown contemporary source on the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 is, if not impossible, certainly unexpected. For over two and a half centuries, the great disaster, which all but destroyed the Portuguese capital and sparked a continent-wide debate about its meaning and causes, has attracted enormous scholarly attention. And so it was with enormous surprise and delight that during my first week at the JCB I encountered a manuscript copy of a letter (dated January 17, 1756) that I had never seen before.

Written by the renowned Spanish Jesuit preacher and satirist, Father José Francisco de Isla, to a Portuguese friend who had survived the earthquake, the letter begins with the usual lamentations about the thousands of lives and the incalculable riches lost in the disaster—but then adds a curious proposal. Because of the enormous cost it would take to clear away the mountains of charred rubble, Isla advises the Portuguese king (José I) to abandon Lisbon completely and move his capital to the city of Braga. There, in the middle of the rich inland plain of northeastern Portugal, the court would be surrounded by “pure and healthy air,” “abundant wine, wheat…, livestock,” and “fertile women.” It would also be sheltered from the dangerous and unpredictable forces of the sea (Lisbon’s shoreline had been devastated by a tsunami triggered by the earthquake). And new construction would hardly be necessary; Braga was already one of Portugal’s largest cities, and the king, Isla reckoned, could easily be accommodated in the archbishop’s palace.

Of course, Isla’s dream would never become a reality. The Portuguese would rebuild Lisbon on its original site; and the new, substantially redesigned capital would rise out of the ashes of the old (albeit over the course of several decades). Although a proposal to relocate the city several leagues to the east along the Tagus River had been briefly entertained by the king’s military engineers, no known plan envisioned such a radical break with the past as the one which sprang from Father Isla’s self-described “vivid imagination” (“vivísima imaginación”).