Lisbon Cathedral (Sé)

In front of you stands the Sé, Lisbon Cathedral, the oldest church in the city still in use. Look at its towers: they belong more to a castle than a church, and that's no coincidence.

1A cathedral for a conquest

In October 1147, after a siege of several months, Afonso Henriques, the first king of Portugal, took Lisbon with the help of crusaders from northern Europe on their way to the Holy Land. One of them, the Englishman Gilbert of Hastings, was made bishop. Work on the cathedral began soon afterwards, probably on the site of the main mosque. On a frontier that was still insecure, a church with battlements made perfect sense.

2Centuries of rebuilding

The Romanesque body was finished in the early thirteenth century. Then came the Gothic cloister, under King Dinis, and the east end with an ambulatory that Afonso IV intended as a royal pantheon. Several medieval earthquakes damaged it, and the one in 1755 brought down part of the south tower and destroyed the main chapel.

What you see today owes a great deal to a twentieth-century restoration, begun in 1902, which gave it back a Romanesque look, more severe than the one it had in the eighteenth century.

In the cloister, archaeological digs have exposed Roman, Islamic and medieval remains: Lisbon's whole history in a single pit.

3What to look out for

• The two crenellated towers, framing the entrance like a fortified gate.
• The rose window above the portal, rebuilt during the twentieth-century restoration.
• Tram 28, brushing past the façade: compare the scale of the street with that of the building.