Sun, Sails, and a City Built to Stand Back Up

Lisbon is one of the few capitals where the river once walked into downtown, had a look around, and left the city to redesign itself around the visit.

Favorite humans and a boat

Jay and I spent a weekend in Portugal with Yvonne and Eileen, two of our favorite humans, and we did the sensible thing: we chartered a sailboat. A crew of two took us out on the Tagus, and we spent the day exploring the coastline under warm sunshine, which in Copenhagen terms is roughly a miracle.

The 25 de Abril Bridge hung red across the sky behind the sails, the Lisbon skyline ran along one bank, and the provisions on deck were exactly as sophisticated as you would hope: a bottle of Monte Baixo, glasses of rosé, KitKats, TUC crackers and a tub of fresh fruit. At some point the only reasonable thing left to do was jump off the back of the boat into the river. Several of us did, with excellent form and no regrets.

The colorful city

Back on land, we toured Lisbon, taking in all the sights and sounds of a city that seems to have been painted by someone who refused to choose a favorite color. From a hilltop lookout the whole thing spread out below us: terracotta roofs, the castle on its green hill, and the river beyond. We walked a street with a canopy of rainbow umbrellas strung overhead and a road painted pink underneath. We indulged in delicious wine and local dishes, and we soaked up as much sun as four people could reasonably absorb in one weekend.

It was that rare trip that managed adventure, relaxation, and a great deal of laughter all at once.

Why downtown Lisbon is a grid

If you walk the flat, orderly streets running up from the river, you are walking through the aftermath of a disaster.

On the morning of November 1, 1755, All Saints' Day, a great earthquake struck offshore while much of Lisbon was at Mass. The US Geological Survey puts its estimated magnitude at 8.5 to 9.0 and calls it the most destructive earthquake in European history. Fires broke out across the city. Then, about an hour after the shaking, the first tsunami wave surged up the Tagus. Historical documents describe waves around six meters high in Lisbon, and researchers estimate the water pushed roughly 250 meters into the city.

What came next is the part you can still see. Under the Marquis of Pombal, the king's chief minister, Lisbon approved a reconstruction plan in 1758. The tangle of medieval lanes in the lower town was replaced by a rational grid stretching from the riverside square (then the Terreiro do Paço, now the Praça do Comércio) up toward the Chiado hill. That district, the Baixa Pombalina, sits on Portugal's tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage status.

The clever bit is hidden inside the walls. Pombaline buildings were built around a gaiola, Portuguese for "cage": a three-dimensional timber frame of posts, beams and diagonal braces, with the gaps packed with small stones and lime mortar. The thick outer masonry walls might fall in a quake, but the wooden cage inside was meant to hold the building together and soak up the shaking. It is one of the earliest examples of earthquake-resistant construction anywhere, and engineers are still testing it: Portugal's National Laboratory for Civil Engineering has put full-scale Pombaline walls on its shake table.

The river has not entirely given up, either. A 2011 study modeling a 1755-like tsunami found that even with today's waterfront, it would still flood large parts of downtown more than a meter deep. So the colorful, very photogenic grid is not just a style. It is a city's answer to the worst morning in its history.

If you go

• Sailing. The Marina de Lisboa runs four recreational docks along the Tagus (Alcântara, Santo Amaro, Belém and Bom Sucesso), holding around 1,000 boats between them, and Lisbon's tourism board notes that local operators run trips on the river from the city. If you want to charter, those docks are where to start looking.
• Downtown. Start at the Praça do Comércio on the river and walk north into the Baixa grid. That square was the Terreiro do Paço before the earthquake; it is where the reconstruction plan began.
• Pace yourself on the sun. We tried to soak up as much as possible. Sunscreen is part of the itinerary.

The part I'm going back for

Lisbon got knocked flat, burned, and flooded in a single morning, and it answered by building a downtown designed to stand back up. We spent our weekend floating happily on the same water, and some of us jumped right into it. I can't wait to go back and see what else this country has been quietly engineering.