The Lisbon Earthquake

The shaking began at about half past nine on All Saints' morning, when the churches were full of candles. Forty minutes later a tsunami came up the Tagus, and fires burned for five days. Perhaps thirty to forty thousand people died in the city.

The Marquis of Pombal rebuilt the centre on a grid, with the first buildings in Europe designed to resist earthquakes. The disaster also shook European thought: Voltaire and Rousseau argued over it, and Kant wrote three essays trying to explain it naturally. The roofless Carmo church was left standing as it fell.