By: CHRIS GRAEME
THEY OPEN but once a year and the queues to see them are so long they stretch the entire length of two blocks. They are Lisbon’s ancient Roman Cellars.
Only rediscovered during the rebuilding of Lisbon in 1771 after the Great Lisbon Earthquake, nobody knows for sure what this system of Roman arched underground tunnels beneath the city’s Baixa was used for.
There are several theories. One is that they were used as storage cellars beneath the smart Roman shops that once lined Lisbon’s Roman Forum when it was the busy port of Olisypio.
Alternatively, they formed part of a Roman foundation system used to level undulating ground so that buildings above would be on a flat, if artificial, surface made from an early form of concrete.
They could, too, have been Roman thermal springs used to supply a series of wells for the Roman populace.
Humid
They are certainly damp and humid: water drips from the arched ceilings and runs down the original pillow-shaped stones used to construct the cellars and collects in pools.
What is fascinating, and many people don’t know this, is that there are two underground streams, the Ribeiro dos Anjos and Liberdade which run down beneath what is today Avenida Almirante Reis and Avenida da Liberdade, today Lisbon’s chicest avenue, but in the first half of the 18th century, a stagnant and polluted stream full of rubbish and sewage.
The two streams converge in these dank subterranean passages where crystal clear water wells up from between fissures caused by the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 – cracks caused by the seismic trauma also run the length of the ceiling of the Roman tunnels.
Of course, after the Lisbon Earthquake and the completion of the famous arched Águas Livres Aqueduct from Canecas to Rato and Principe Real, Lisbon had a chronic water shortage problem, relying on a series of streams like these two abovementioned and the Sete Rios (Seven Rivers) which served the local populace from Roman times.
During the 18th century and before, a system of small holes large enough to take a bucket were dug down to these passages, then flooded with water said to have medicinal properties, but served the local shopkeepers, residents and water carriers who sold water to wealthy households who did not have a ready supply in the city.
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 Nobody knows what the galleries beneath Lisbon’s Baixa were used for |
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Whether they were the smart underground shopping galleries beneath the Roman Forum, similar to the ones one finds in Naples, or simply foundations supporting buildings up above, used as cellars for shops, town villas and public buildings, today the visible part consists of a network of perpendicular galleries, all of different heights, leading into small compartments or cells which could very well have been storage areas.
The pillow stone arches, which withstood the earthquake, date from the early part of Imperial Rome, between the Emperors Julius Cesar and Claudius.
It was only in 1859, when Lisbon’s first sewage system was being installed, that archaeologists were able to really study the Roman ruins extensively for the first time, while the first journalists allowed down to photograph and see them at first hand was only in 1909.
Today it was the turn of The Resident to see these architectural marvels that have withstood the test of time, surviving wars, Moorish, Spanish and French invasions, earthquakes, tidal waves, plagues and fires, making our cheaply and flimsily looking buildings today look like, well….a stack of cards.
