Railways, Shipping and Commerce.—Lisbon has five railway stations—the central (Lisboa-Rocío), for the lines to Cintra, northern and central Portugal, and Madrid via Valencia de Alcántara; the Santa Apolonia or Caes dos Soldados, at the eastern extremity of the quays, for the same lines (excluding Cintra) and for southern Portugal and Andalusia; the Caes do Sodré and Santos, farther west along the quays, for Cascaes; and the Barreiro, on the left bank of the Tagus, for southern Portugal. In 1902 the railways north and south of the Tagus were connected near Lisbon by a bridge. In the previous year an extensive system of electric tramways replaced the old-fashioned cable cars and mule trams. Electric and hydraulic lifts are used where the streets are too steep for trams. Lisbon is lighted by both electricity and gas; it has an admirable telephone service, and is connected by the Carcavellos cable-station with Cornwall (England), Vigo in Galicia, Gibraltar, the Azores and Madeira.
Ships of the largest size can enter the Tagus, and the Barreiro inlet is navigable at low water by vessels drawing 16 ft. There are extensive quays along the right bank, with hydraulic cranes, two graving docks, a slipway, warehouses and lines of railway. The government and private docks are on the left bank. Loading and discharging are principally effected by means of lighters. The exports are wines, oil, fruit, tinned fish, salt, colonial produce, cork, pitwood, leather and wool. The imports include cotton and woollen goods, linen, ale and porter, butter, tea, hardware, tin plates, coal, iron, machinery, chemical manure, &c., from Great Britain; grain and petroleum from the United States; dried codfish from Norway and Newfoundland; silks, perfumery and fancy goods from France; hemp, flax, grain, petroleum and cloth from Russia; linen, machinery, hardware, sugar, &c., from Germany and Holland, iron, steel, timber, pitch and salt fish from the Baltic; cocoa, coffee, wax and rubber from the Portuguese colonies. Towards the close of the 19th century the tourist traffic from Great Britain and Germany attained considerable importance, and Lisbon has long been one of the principal ports of debarcation for passengers from Brazil and of embarcation for emigrants to South America. Shipbuilding, including the construction of vessels for the national navy, is a growing industry. The fisheries have always been important, and in no European fishmarket is the produce more varied. Sardines and tunny are cured and tinned for export. In addition to a fleet of about 600 sailing boats, the Tagus is the headquarters of a small fleet of steam trawlers. The industries of Lisbon include dyeing, distillation of spirits and manufactures of woollen, cotton, silk and linen fabrics, of pottery, soap, paper, chemicals, cement, corks, tobacco, preserved foods and biscuits.
Education and Charity.—Although the seat of the only university in Portugal was fixed at Coimbra in 1527, Lisbon is the educational centre of the Portuguese world, including Brazil. Its chief learned societies are the Society of Medical Sciences, the Geographical Society, the Royal Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Fine Arts, the Royal Conservatory of Music and the Propaganda de Portugal. The museum of the Academy of Fine Arts contains the largest collection of pictures and statues by native and foreign artists in Portugal. The Geographical Society has gained an international reputation; it possesses a valuable library and museum. The National Library, founded in 1796, contains over 400,000 printed books, and upwards of 9000 MSS. There are also colonial, naval, artillery, natural history and commercial museums, meteorological and astronomical observatories, zoological gardens and an aquarium. Purely educational institutions include the medical, polytechnic, military and naval schools, commercial, agricultural and industrial institutes, a school of art, a central lyceum, a school for teachers, &c. The English college for British Roman Catholics dates from 1628. The Irish Dominicans have a seminary, and Portuguese ecclesiastical schools are numerous. There are hospitals for women, and for contagious diseases, almshouses, orphanages, a foundling hospital and a very large quarantine station on the south bank of the Tagus, founded in 1857 after an outbreak of yellow fever had devastated the city. Foremost among the theatres, circuses and other places of amusement is the royal opera-house of São Carlos, built in 1792-1793 on the model of the Scala at Milan.
Population.—The population of Lisbon, 187,404[1] in 1878, rose to 301,206 in 1890 and 356,009 in 1900. It includes a large foreign colony, composed chiefly of Spaniards, British, Germans, French, Brazilians and immigrants from the Portuguese colonies, among whom are many half-castes. The majority of the Spaniards are domestic servants and labourers from Galicia, whose industry and easily gained knowledge of the kindred Portuguese language enables them to earn a better livelihood here than in their own homes. The British, German and French communities control a large share of the foreign trade. The Brazilians and colonial immigrants are often merchants and landowners who come to the mother-country to spend their fortunes in a congenial social environment.
The street life of the city is full of interest. The bare-footed, ungainly fishwives, dressed in black and bearing flat trays of fish on their heads; the Galician water-carriers, with their casks; the bakers, bending beneath a hundredweight of bread slung in a huge basket from their shoulders; the countrymen, with their sombreros, sashes and hardwood quarter-staves, give colour and animation to their surroundings; while the bag-pipes played by peasants from the north, the whistles of the knife-grinders, and the distinctive calls of the vendors of fruit, lottery tickets, or oil and vinegar, contribute a babel of sound. For church festivals and holidays the country-folk come to town, the women riding on pillions behind the men, adorned in shawls, aprons and handkerchiefs of scarlet or other vivid hues, and wearing the strings of coins and ornaments of exquisite gold and silver filigree which represent their savings or dowries. The costumes and manners of all classes may be seen at their best in the great bull-ring of Campo Pequeno, a Mauresque building which holds many thousands of spectators. A Lisbon bullfight is a really brilliant exhibition of athletic skill and horsemanship, in which amateurs often take part, and neither horses nor bulls are killed. There is a Tauromachic Club solely for amateurs.
History.—The name Lisbon is a modification of the ancient name Olisipo, also written Ulyssippo under the influence of a mythical story of a city founded by Odysseus (Ulysses) in Iberia, which, however, according to Strabo, was placed by ancient tradition rather in the mountains of Turdetania (the extreme south of Spain). Under the Romans Olisipo became a municipium with the epithet of Felicitas Julia, but was inferior in importance to the less ancient Emerita Augusta (Mérida). From 407 to 585 it was occupied by Alaric, and thenceforward by the Visigoths until 711, when it was taken by the Moors. Under the Moors the town bore in Arabic the name of Al Oshbūna or Lashbūna. It was the first point of Moslem Spain attacked by the Normans in 844. When Alphonso I. of Portugal took advantage of the decline and fall of the Almoravid dynasty to incorporate the provinces of Estremadura and Alemtejo in his new kingdom, Lisbon was the last city of Portugal to fall into his hands, and yielded only after a siege of several months (21st October 1147), in which he was aided by English and Flemish crusaders on their way to Syria. In 1184 the city was again attacked by the Moslems under the powerful caliph Abu Yakub, but the enterprise failed. In the reign of Ferdinand I., the greater part of the town was burned by the Castilian army under Henry II. (1373), and in 1384 the Castilians again besieged Lisbon, but without success. Lisbon became the seat of an archbishop in 1390, the seat of government in 1422. During the 16th century it gained much in wealth and splendour from the establishment of a Portuguese empire in India and Africa. From 1580 to 1640 Lisbon was a provincial town under Spanish rule, and it was from this port that the Spanish Armada sailed in 1588. In 1640 the town was captured by the duke of Braganza, and the independence of the kingdom restored.
For many centuries the city had suffered from earthquakes, and on the 1st of November 1755 the greater part of it was reduced almost in an instant to a heap of ruins. A tidal wave at the same time broke over the quays and wrecked the shipping in the Tagus; fire broke out to complete the work of destruction; between 30,000 and 40,000 persons lost their lives; and the value of the property destroyed was about £20,000,000. The shock was felt from Scotland to Asia Minor. Careful investigation by Daniel Sharpe, an English geologist, has delimited the area in and near Lisbon to which its full force was confined. Lisbon is built in a geological basin of Tertiary formation, the upper portion of which is loose sand and gravel destitute of organic remains, while below these are the so-called Almada beds of yellow sand, calcareous sandstone and blue clay rich in organic remains. The Tertiary deposits, which altogether cover an area of more than 2000 sq. m., are separated near Lisbon from rocks of the Secondary epoch by a great sheet of basalt. The uppermost of these Secondary rocks is the hippurite limestone. It was found that no building on the blue clay escaped destruction, none on any of the Tertiary deposits escaped serious injury, and all on the hippurite limestone and basalt were undamaged. The line at which the earthquake ceased to be destructive thus corresponded exactly with the boundary of the Tertiary deposits.
At the beginning of the 19th century the French invasion, followed by the removal of the court to Rio de Janeiro, the Peninsular War, the loss of Brazil and a period of revolution and dynastic trouble, resulted in the utter decadence of Lisbon, from which the city only recovered after 1850 (see [Portugal]: History).
Bibliography.—Every book which deals with the topography, trade or history of Portugal as a whole necessarily devotes a portion of its space to the capital; see [Portugal]: Bibliography. The following treat more exclusively of Lisbon: A. Dayot, Lisbonne (No. ix. of the “Capitales du monde” series) (Paris, 1892); Freire de Oliveira, Elementos para a historia do municipio de Lisboa (9 vols., Lisbon, 1885-1898); J. de Castilho, Lisboa antiga (7 vols., Lisbon, 1890), and (by the same author) A Ribeira de Lisboa (Lisbon, 1893).