Belém Tower — fortified tower
Image by oneras from Pixabay

Belém Tower

Torre de Belém

  • 2 min read
  • 38.691° N 9.216° W
  • UNESCO World Heritage

Interesting facts

  • For about 250 years, from 1580 to 1830, the dark vaults of the bastion served as a prison.
  • During the civil war of the 1820s and 1830s King Miguel I held his liberal opponents in the tower's dungeons.
  • A statue of the Virgin known as Our Lady of Safe Homecoming faces the river from the terrace, holding the Christ Child and a bunch of grapes.
  • The tower is about 30 metres tall but only about 12 metres wide, which gives it its slender, upright silhouette.
  • Work began around 1514 and was finished in 1519, just two years before the death of King Manuel I, who commissioned it.
  • In 1845–46 a restoration demolished barracks added during the Spanish period and enhanced the tower with revivalist Manueline details.
  • Between 1865 and 1867 a navigation beacon and a telegraph post were installed on the tower's southeast terrace.
  • On 7 July 2007 the tower was named one of the Seven Wonders of Portugal in a nationwide public vote.

Why it is worth it

The Tower of Saint Vincent, as it was officially named, was built in the 1510s and finished in 1519 to guard the mouth of the Tagus, completing a ring of river defences first planned by King John II and carried out by Manuel I. It stood on a basalt outcrop just off the Lisbon shore, and ships returning from India passed beneath it before reaching the city. The popular story that the 1755 earthquake shifted the river away from it is wrong; the tower was always close to the bank, and land reclaimed over the centuries simply caught up with it.

Its architect, Francisco de Arruda, had built Portuguese fortresses in Morocco, and the tower mixes military purpose with the exuberant ornament of the Manueline style. Carved stone ropes and knots, armillary spheres and the crosses of the Order of Christ cover the limestone, while the domed watchtowers and balconies show Moorish influence. At the base of one turret is a carved rhinoceros, generally taken to be the animal sent to Lisbon from India in 1515, the same one Albrecht Dürer immortalised in his drawings, and considered the first sculpture of a rhinoceros in Western European art.

The building has two parts. A low hexagonal bastion projects into the river, with openings for 17 cannon on its lower level; it was the first Portuguese fortification to mount guns on two levels. Above the bastion's cloister-like terrace rises the four-storey tower, about 30 metres high, with a Governor's Hall, a King's Hall opening onto a loggia over the water, an Audience Hall and a chapel. The dark rooms of the bastion later served as a prison, and the tower was also a customs post for ships entering the port.

Together with the nearby Jerónimos Monastery, the tower was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983, and it has become one of the stock images of Portugal. Inside, the stairs are narrow and spiral, and visitor numbers are limited; the riverside promenade around it is always open and gives the best view of the loggia and the carved south face.

Getting there

The tower stands on the riverfront at the western end of Belém, within Lisbon, about 1.7 km from the centre of neighbouring Algés. Lisbon Humberto Delgado Airport (LIS) is about 12 km away. Tram 15E runs from central Lisbon along the river to Belém, and trains on the Cascais line from Cais do Sodré stop at Belém station, about 1.5 km east of the tower along the waterfront.

Plan your visit

We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.

Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Lisbon 18The Most Beautiful Places in Portugal 63The Most Remarkable Fortified Towers 6The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Castles, Palaces and Fortresses in Portugal 7The Most Beautiful Castles, Palaces and Fortresses in Portugal 15The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Portugal 16The Most Impressive UNESCO-Listed Forts 17The Most Impressive Forts 33The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Castles, Palaces and Fortresses 92The Most Beautiful Castles, Palaces and Fortresses 302The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites 557

From the encyclopaedia

Belém Tower, officially the Tower of Saint Vincent, is a 16th-century fortification located in Lisbon, Portugal, which served as a point of embarkation and disembarkation for Portuguese explorers and as a ceremonial gateway to Lisbon. The tower symbolizes Portugal's maritime and colonial power in early modern Europe. It was built during the height of the Portuguese Renaissance and is a prominent example of the Portuguese Manueline style, but it also incorporates other architectural styles, such as the minarets, which are inspired by Moorish architecture. The structure was built from lioz limestone, a material local to the Lisbon region, and is composed of a bastion and a 30-metre (100 ft) four-storey tower.

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38.69139, -9.21583per Wikidata