Qualla: 1356 Lisbon Earthquake

1356 Lisbon Earthquake: Introduction

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For more than six hundred years, almost no one remembered. On the afternoon of Wednesday, August 24, 1356 -- Saint Bartholomew's Day -- the ground beneath Lisbon began to move and did not stop for a quarter of an hour. Buildings crumbled. The city's four bread ovens, essential infrastructure in a medieval capital, were destroyed. Aftershocks rattled Lisbon for a full year afterward. Then the earthquake faded from memory, overshadowed by the far more famous catastrophe that would strike the same city in 1755.

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1356 Lisbon Earthquake: A Tremor from the Deep

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The earthquake probably originated along the Gorringe Ridge, a submarine mountain range lying off Cape St. Vincent in the Atlantic Ocean. This underwater geological formation sits along the Azores-Gibraltar Transform Fault, one of the most seismically active zones in the eastern ...

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1356 Lisbon Earthquake: Written in Stone and Parchment

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What little we know of the 1356 earthquake comes from scattered medieval sources. The Livro da Noa, a chronicle belonging to the library of the Monastery of the Holy Cross in Coimbra, recorded the event. But over the centuries, the earthquake slipped from collective awareness. Po...

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1356 Lisbon Earthquake: Portugal's Restless Ground

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 1356 earthquake is part of a long pattern of seismic activity that has shaped Portugal's history and architecture. The Iberian Peninsula sits near the boundary where the African and Eurasian tectonic plates converge, making it one of Europe's most earthquake-prone regions. Li...

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1356 Lisbon Earthquake: Shadows Before the Storm

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In hindsight, the 1356 earthquake reads like a warning that went unheeded for four centuries. When the great 1755 earthquake and tsunami devastated Lisbon -- killing tens of thousands, leveling the city center, and sparking fires that burned for days -- it shocked Enlightenment E...

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