Sé – the nave from above
A slow stroll across Praça do Comércio, a breath of damp air off the River Tagus, a coffee and a croissant were prelude to the ascent. I climbed first to the Romanesque gloom of Sé and its jewel-box neighbor, Santo António da Sé, then descended to the Museu do Fado where comfortable chairs and recordings of Fado songs eased my joints and touched my soul.
Panteão Nacional
street in Alfamas
The church of Santa Engrácia, better known as the Panteão Nacional, seemed nearby. Google Maps now tells me it’s 550 meters and about ten minutes distant, with a rise of 35 meters. If I did the math correctly—and I wouldn’t rely on that—the slope of that walk is about 65 degrees. My route involved several detours and lasted a bit more than ten minutes. That calculated uphill of 65 degrees? That’s what it felt like.
Santa Engrácia
Panteão Nacional
Now a monument to political, military, and cultural heroes, the church was enjoined around 1568 by the Infanta Maria of Portugal, daughter of King Manuel I. “Manueline” remains a description of that era and its architecture.
Construction did not go smoothly. A storm took most of the rising church down in 1681. A new architect, João Antunes, took over, creating a different, classicizing design based on the Greek Cross. When Antunes died in 1712, King João V focused his attention and funding elsewhere. Work slowed. The building, complete up to the royal cornice, withstood the massive earthquake of 1755 and a couple of years later was closed up with a wooden roof.
Other Uses
For a while, the project remained under the purview of the Franciscans. With the dissolution of the monasteries in 1834, the Ministry of War took over the unfinished church and ceded it to the Directorate-General of Artillery, who used it as a warehouse for scrap metal and foundry items. For a while it was an arsenal. During World War I it was dedicated to the manufacture of footwear for the Portuguese army,
In 1916, the Church of Santa Engrácia was designated by law the “National Pantheon.” The present dome was added during the Estado Novo of dictator António de Oliveira Salazar and the edifice completed only in 1966. Such luminaries as presidents, writers, fado singer Amália Rodrigues and footballer Eusébio are entombed there. Cenotaphs remember explorers like Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460) and Vasco da Gama (d. 1524).
Obras de Santa Engrácia
up into the dome
A new idiom emerged during the nearly 400 years that the church remained a building site. Obras de Santa Engrácia (works of Saint Engratia) became a byword for an endless construction project But why?
Could it be that the church was cursed?
It is said that in the mid-17th century, while Santa Engrácia was still incomplete, a young man named Simão Pires de Solis—a “new Christian”—fell in love with an aristocratic girl, Violante, whose noble papá was having none of it. The gentleman parked his daughter in the adjacent convent of Santa Clara; the besotted Simão nonetheless managed to meet her on the sly and they contrived to elope. Unfortunately, the same night they ran away, the reliquary of Santa Engrácia disappeared from the church.
Who had desecrated these religious precincts?
The Curse
Their love was not to be consummated and Simão was immolated.
looking back
Such regular trysts had not passed unnoticed and our lovesick swain was arrested by the king’s men and accused of stealing from the church. To protect his beloved, Simão kept secret his reason for lurking about the Convent the night before. He was quickly sentenced to be burned at the stake.
There seem to have been Jews in young Simão’s ancestral tree; the Inquisition was still very much a thing in that intensely Catholic country. It was established in 1536 and would not end until 1821. Simão protested his innocence, but to no avail. It is said that as the flames engulfed him, his screams doomed the church to perpetual unrealization.
And that, indeed, was nearly the case.
It is also said that years later, a dying man summoned Violante, by then a novitiate at the same Convent, to confess that he himself had stolen the relics and framed Simão for the crime. Tradition holds that Violante forgave him.
To the Dome and Beyond
view to the Tagus
181 steps take visitors from the ground level of the Pantheon past two levels with walkways around the drum that supports the dome with its cupola. The view down to the floor is vertiginous. The elevation of the site and the height of the building allows an unobstructed, 360-degree view of Lisbon from the broad roof terrace.
But I had greater heights to achieve. It was Tuesday and thus the Feira da Ladra, the “Thieves Market,” was open in the Campo da Santa Clara further uphill. It was a while since I had strolled a good flea market. And home, Rua dos Sapateiros 44 was all downhill from there.