Lisbon's history is layered like its hills: Phoenician trading post, Moorish Al-Ushbuna, launchpad of Vasco da Gama, rubble after 1755, and the stage of Europe's gentlest revolution. Three days trace all of it, chronologically.
The Roman theatre of Olisipo, built under Augustus around 57 AD and rediscovered when the 1755 earthquake tore away later buildings. The museum shows inscriptions naming its patron Caio Heio Primo, plus the excavated cavea and orchestra. Open Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00.
Begun in 1147 by Afonso Henriques on the site of the city's main mosque, the Sé is a Romanesque fortress-church with crenellations and rose window. Its Gothic cloister exposes Iron Age, Roman and Islamic strata dug since 1990. Cathedral free, cloister ticketed.
Fortified by the Moors in the 11th century, stormed in October 1147 during the Second Crusade, then royal palace until the 1500s. The archaeological area preserves an 11th-century Islamic residential quarter and traces of Iron Age occupation from the 7th century BC.
Sections of the Cerca Moura, the Islamic-era city wall of the 10th–11th century, still stand embedded in Alfama's houses. Around Largo do Menino de Deus and the Costa do Castelo you can trace the rubble-and-lime masonry the crusaders had to breach in 1147.
Manuel I ordered the monastery in 1501, funded by the 5% tax on spices from Africa and the East. Diogo Boitaca and João de Castilho carved rigging, coral and armillary spheres into its stone. Vasco da Gama and Camões lie in the church. Tue–Sun 09:30–18:00.
Built 1514–1519 by Francisco de Arruda as the Tagus's ceremonial gatekeeper, mixing Manueline rope motifs with Moorish watchtowers and the earliest sculpted rhinoceros in European art — modelled on the beast Manuel I received from Gujarat in 1515.
The navy's own collection in the Jerónimos west wing: Vasco da Gama's reputed wooden statue from Malindi, original astrolabes and quadrants, royal barges of 1780, and the Fairey seaplane Santa Cruz that crossed the South Atlantic in 1922.
In a 1509 convent founded by Queen Leonor. Its 23-metre panel shows Lisbon's entire waterfront around 1700 — the single best record of the city the 1755 earthquake destroyed, painted decades before the tsunami and fires erased it.
The Aljube was a PIDE political prison until 1965; the museum occupies the cells. Exhibits cover censorship, the colonial wars and the 25 April 1974 Carnation Revolution, including reconstructed 'curro' isolation cells barely a metre wide.
This quiet square is where the dictatorship ended: on 25 April 1974 Salgueiro Maia's column surrounded the GNR barracks and Marcelo Caetano surrendered here. Carnations from a nearby flower seller went into soldiers' rifle barrels and named the revolution.
Founded in 1389 by Nuno Álvares Pereira, the Gothic nave lost its roof when the 1755 earthquake struck during All Saints' Mass. Left unrestored as a deliberate ruin, it holds the Archaeological Association's collection, including two Andean mummies.
After 1755 the Marquês de Pombal rebuilt central Lisbon on a grid with the gaiola pombalina — a timber cage designed to flex in tremors, the world's first seismic building code. Rua Augusta's arch was finished only in 1875, 120 years later.