What is the capital of Portugal?

Lisbon commands the mouth of the Tagus, where the river widens into a sheltered natural harbour before meeting the Atlantic, and that harbour made it one of the great launching points of European maritime expansion. Ships left from here for the West African coast, around the Cape and on to India, and the wealth that came back built the Manueline architecture of Belém. The city's modern form was shaped by catastrophe: on All Saints' Day in 1755 an enormous earthquake, followed by fire and a tsunami surging up the river, destroyed much of the centre. The Marquis of Pombal rebuilt the flattened downtown on a rigid grid with wide streets and some of the earliest deliberately earthquake-resistant construction, which is why the Baixa looks so different from the tangled older quarters like Alfama that survived on the hills.

The 1755 disaster prompted some of the first systematic scientific inquiry into earthquakes.