Who ruled Lisbon?

Lisbon is built on a series of steep hills on the north shore of the Tagus estuary, where the river widens into a broad, sheltered inner basin before narrowing again to meet the Atlantic. That basin is one of the finest natural harbours in Europe, and it made Lisbon a port for sea traders from at least the first millennium BCE. Two episodes define the city's history: the 15th and 16th centuries, when it was the starting point of the Portuguese voyages to Africa, Asia and Brazil, and the earthquake of 1755, which destroyed it and gave it the rebuilt centre it has today.

People of the Iron Age lived on the castle hill by the 8th century BCE, and Phoenician traders, probably based at Gadir (Cádiz), had a post or close contacts here. Rome brought the town into its sphere in 138 BCE, during the campaigns of Decimus Junius Brutus in the west of Iberia, and Olisipo became a prosperous municipality of the province of Lusitania, with a theatre, baths and fish-salting works. As the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century, Lisbon passed between Germanic invaders, among them the Suebi and finally the Visigoths.

In 714 the city fell to the Muslim armies of the Umayyad Caliphate, and as al-Ushbuna it remained under Muslim rule for more than four centuries, part of the Emirate and Caliphate of Córdoba and later of the taifa of Badajoz and the Almoravid empire. In 1147 Afonso Henriques, first king of Portugal, captured it after a siege of several months with the help of crusaders from northern Europe on their way to the Holy Land, a key moment of the Reconquista. Around 1255 Afonso III made Lisbon the main seat of the court in place of Coimbra, and King Dinis founded a university there in 1290.

In the 15th century Lisbon became the hub of Portuguese exploration down the coast of Africa. In 1497 Vasco da Gama sailed from Belém, on the city's western edge, and reached India the next year, opening the sea route around the Cape of Good Hope. Few European ports grew as wealthy as Lisbon did in the 16th century, when it was the market for spices from Asia, gold and enslaved people from Africa and later sugar from Brazil. King Manuel I built the Jerónimos Monastery and the Belém Tower in the ornate style later named after him. Wealth from the Portuguese Empire also brought a large enslaved African population into the city. From 1580 to 1640 Portugal was ruled by the kings of Spain, until a revolt in Lisbon on 1 December 1640 restored independence.

On the morning of 1 November 1755 a massive earthquake, followed by a tsunami and fires that burned for days, destroyed much of the city and killed tens of thousands of people. The chief minister, later Marquis of Pombal, had the lower town (Baixa) rebuilt on a regular grid with some of the first earthquake-resistant buildings in Europe.

During the Napoleonic Wars, French troops entered Lisbon in late 1807 just after the royal family had sailed for Brazil, and the court did not return until 1821. The 19th century brought civil war between liberals and absolutists, and in 1908 King Carlos and his heir were assassinated in the main square. On 5 October 1910 a revolution in Lisbon proclaimed the republic. A military coup in 1926 led to the Estado Novo dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar; Portugal stayed neutral in the Second World War, and Lisbon became a crowded escape route for refugees. On 25 April 1974 the almost bloodless Carnation Revolution, begun by army officers in Lisbon, ended the dictatorship and soon the colonial wars in Africa.

Lisbon is the capital of Portugal, with about 550,000 people in the city itself and nearly three million in the metropolitan area.