You can walk past a 500-year-old house in Lisbon and have no idea.
Some of the city’s oldest surviving homes have no plaques, ticket desks or grand entrances. They’re simply part of the street, wedged between later buildings.
There is one detail that can help you notice them.
Look at the upper floors.
On some old Lisbon houses, the façade doesn’t rise in a straight line. The upper storeys project beyond the floors below, so the building gets slightly wider as it goes up.
In Portuguese, these are projection floors.
The logic was simple. Medieval Lisbon had narrow streets and small plots. If there was no room to make the house wider at ground level, builders could gain a little more space upstairs by extending the next floor over the street.
Sometimes the projection is barely noticeable. Sometimes you can stand underneath the house and see the upper floors hanging over your head.
It isn’t a foolproof way to date a building. Lisbon houses have been repaired, enlarged and rebuilt for centuries. But it can be a clue that part of what you’re looking at belongs to the city that existed before 1755.
That city largely disappeared on 1 November, when a huge earthquake was followed by fires and a tsunami. The reconstruction that came afterwards reshaped central Lisbon.
A few residential buildings made it through — although “survived” doesn’t always mean “remained untouched”.
Rua dos Cegos, 20–22
This small house in Alfama dates from the 16th century.
By 1755, it may already have been around two hundred years old.
Its upper floor projects over the street, but otherwise the house is remarkably easy to overlook: small, narrow and surrounded by the ordinary clutter of a lived-in neighbourhood.
Look closer, though, and there’s another layer. The devotional azulejo panel on the façade has its own history. The original dated from the 17th century; it was removed in the early 20th century, and the panel there today is a later copy.
Rua dos Bacalhoeiros, 8
Casa das Varandas, close to Casa dos Bicos, survived in a much less simple way.
Parts of the building predate the earthquake, but it was damaged in 1755 and reconstructed afterwards. A fire damaged it again in 1781, and further changes followed in the early 19th century.
So the façade in front of you is several centuries folded into one wall: older fabric, post-earthquake reconstruction, repairs after the 1781 fire and later alterations.
“Survived” doesn’t always mean “remained untouched.” Sometimes survival is much messier.
São Miguel Alley
Beside the Church of São Miguel, a five-storey house rises from one of Alfama’s narrow lanes.
Here the projection is hard to miss. The upper part pushes out beyond the lower floors, and some of the supports can still be seen underneath.
Stand close to the wall and the medieval logic becomes almost physical: there is hardly any room left at street level, while the rooms above are borrowing space from the air over the lane.
Rua da Atalaia
In the Alto neighborhood, a 17th-century house rises on Rua da Atalaia six storeys.
It is narrow and unusually tall, capped by a pitched roof that gives the façade its pointed shape.
Less like the small, picturesque house people tend to imagine when they think of pre-earthquake Lisbon, it feels closer to an old urban apartment block forced to make the most of every metre available.
Largo do Chafariz de Dentro, 32–33
At Largo do Chafariz de Dentro in Alfama, another four-storey house still shows projecting upper floors.
It probably dates from the 17th century.
There is no dramatic ruin here, no archaeological enclosure, no separation between the old building and the city around it.
It is still just a house on a Lisbon square.
They’re not ruins.
They haven’t all been turned into museums.
They’re still part of ordinary streets.
And once you know what projection floors look like, it becomes difficult not to search for them.
Lisbon has another layer: not only the city rebuilt after 1755, but fragments of the one that was already there when the earthquake happened.
Next time you’re walking through Alfama, Mouraria or Bairro Alto, look above the shopfronts and balconies.
If the upper floors start creeping out over the street, stop for a second.
You may have found a piece of pre-1755 Lisbon.
If you know another one, add it in the comments.
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Posted by annawanders