The history of Viseu

The houses, of stone, wood and clay, were almost all round and thatched; some leaned against the boulders. Around them the vissaiegi, the people who lived here, cut dozens of silos into the rock to store food, and the ditch reached three metres deep. For its time this was a big place, and it ran the territory around it.

From this period come two gold pieces found in Viseu, a lunula and a torc, now in the National Museum of Archaeology in Lisbon. By then the potter's wheel, the rotary mill, glass and, in goldsmithing, filigree and soldering were all mastered.

The ancient sources (Appian, and Livy in later echoes) place the Lusitanian war in the 2nd century BC. Viriatus emerges as a guerrilla strategist: he knew the terrain, avoided pitched battles and forced Rome to negotiate. He was killed around 139 BC, tradition says, by bribed companions.

A Cava de Viriato is an octagon of more than 30 hectares, with eight earth ramparts and a ditch up to 16 metres wide. It is held to be the largest earthwork on the Iberian Peninsula. Despite the name, it is not the work of Viriatus: the most recent readings point to the first half of the 10th century. The statue of the warrior, by Mariano Benlliure, dates from 1940.

The Romans did not raze the hillfort: they adapted their city to it. They raised the forum at the top of the hill and spread the houses westwards, onto the flatter ground. In 2009, during a dig on Travessa da Misericórdia, an altar appeared dedicated «to the vissaieigenses goddesses and gods». That is where the city's name comes from.

That Viseu headed a territory is proved by a milestone ordered by Hadrian around 120, found beside the Porta dos Cavaleiros: it marks mile I, meaning distances were counted from here. The digs on Praça D. Duarte turned up coins from across the Empire: a sestertius of Claudius, a nummus of Magnentius struck in Rome between 350 and 352, and a gold solidus of Honorius, minted in Milan around the year 400.

Around the year 350, with the Empire under pressure, the city closed itself inside a wall four metres thick and some nine metres high, with semicircular towers. Beside one of those towers, graves of children between two and seven years old were identified.

In 380 the emperor Theodosius made Christianity the official religion of the Empire. In Viseu, that would eventually change what the hill was for: where the Roman civic centre stood, the religious centre would take over.

The diocese of Viseu is first recorded in 569, and in 572 Bishop Remissol signed the acts of the Second Council of Braga. It is not just a name in a record: the digs on Praça D. Duarte revealed a building of the 5th and 6th centuries, probably episcopal, with an apse and two side apses, an opus signinum floor and walls painted yellow, black, blue and ochre, built from reused Roman stone.

After 714 and the fall of the Visigothic kingdom, the city became borderland. Ramiro I attacked it in 845, Alfonso III of Asturias took it in 872, and in 1989 a hoard of 286 silver dirhams turned up nearby, hidden in wartime by someone who never came back for it.

In 926, Ramiro II moved his court to Viseu and made it the capital of the Portucalense land, almost two centuries before Afonso Henriques. He left in 931 to take the crown of León, and the project was left half done. The citadel on top of the hill and the Cava de Viriato probably date from this phase. Decades later, it was from Viseu that Almanzor planned his campaigns against León, Astorga and Santiago de Compostela.

On 25 July 1058, Ferdinand the Great captured the city for good: Viseu would not return to Muslim rule. Counts Henrique and Teresa, who held court here between 1109 and 1128, later shaped the medieval city with its castle, palace and cathedral. According to an old and still disputed theory, Afonso Henriques was born in a tower of that palace in 1109.

Work on today's cathedral began in the 12th and 13th centuries, as the kingdom and the diocese took shape. At the end of the 13th century, Bishops Mateus Martins and Egas launched the campaign that gave it Gothic form: a new cathedral, the canons' cloister to the south and a door opened onto the forecourt. The old citadel had to be remodelled and houses against the fortification pulled down. There was no more room inside the castle walls, and so the cathedral never grew as large as those of the kingdom's great cities.

From that phase remain the Portal dos Cónegos, from the second half of the 13th century, with a Virgin and Child still in the Romanesque tradition, the columns and capitals of the nave and the south tower. On the stones you can see the marks of the master masons who cut them.

The greatest building campaign came later, in the 15th and 16th centuries: the knotted vault that still covers the nave, and the Renaissance cloister. In 1635 a storm brought down the Manueline façade; the present Mannerist one was drawn by the Salamanca architect Juan Moreno and completed around 1647. On the forecourt, the stone cross was raised in 1760 by Bishop Júlio Francisco de Oliveira. Next door stands the Paço dos Três Escalões, which Bishop Nuno de Noronha began building in 1593 as a seminary.

The Misericórdia Church, facing the cathedral, was rebuilt from 1775 onwards and adds a Rococo façade to the square, its white and blue set against the dark granite. The Adro and the streets around it brought together trade, processions and centres of power. You can follow Rua Direita to walk from the cathedral to the Rossio.

In 19th-century engravings and in postcards from the early 20th century the towers have the same outline they have today. What changed is everything around them: the traffic, the lighting, the tourism.

The wars with Castile and the dynastic crisis of 1383-1385 caught Viseu in the middle of the peninsular fight for the crown. Castilian troops came in three times, sacked and burned, and the urban space was left in ruins. Unlike most Portuguese medieval cities, Viseu had no ring of walls: defence rested entirely on the cathedral hill, between church and castle, where the population sheltered in wartime.

The loyalty of the people of Viseu to the House of Avis was rewarded by King João I with two decisions. First, the fair charter of 10 January 1392, which gave rise to the Feira de São Mateus. Second, permission to build the long-wanted wall, slow work that would only be finished in 1472, under King Afonso V, which is where the name Afonsine wall comes from. It had seven gates; the Porta do Soar and the Porta dos Cavaleiros remain.

Inside the new ring, the city recovered. Rua das Tendas, the main medieval commercial axis, came to be called Rua Direita and concentrated economic life. In 1415, returning from the conquest of Ceuta, Prince Henry received the title of first Duke of Viseu.

Vasco Fernandes was born around 1475 and little is known of him until he appears in the Viseu records in 1501-1502, already married and working as a painter. He worked here until his death, around 1542, leaving work from Lamego to Coimbra. His workshop and the artists who worked with him made Viseu one of the centres of Portuguese Renaissance painting.

None of this would have happened without someone paying. In 1526 the diocese received D. Miguel da Silva, one of the most learned men in the kingdom, trained in Italy and formerly King Manuel I's representative at the papal court. It was he who commissioned «St Peter», painted around 1529 for a chapel in the cathedral and today the master's best-known work. In 1540, at odds with King João III over the Inquisition, the bishop fled to Rome.

O Grão Vasco National Museum was created in 1916, by decree, with Francisco de Almeida Moreira as its first director. It started out in annexes of the cathedral; only in 1923 did Almeida Moreira begin occupying the Paço dos Três Escalões next door, and the move was completed in 1938. Between 2001 and 2003, Souto de Moura reshaped its interior.

The 19th century brings liberal administration, new roads, schools and a local bourgeoisie investing in buildings, gardens and social life. The Rossio gains weight as civic space; the Afonsine wall, ordered by King João I and completed in 1472 under King Afonso V, marks the old perimeter as the city spreads: of its seven gates, the Porta do Soar and the Porta dos Cavaleiros remain.

The city's centre of gravity moves: it leaves Praça D. Duarte, the medieval square beside the cathedral, for the Rossio, which becomes the new political and administrative hub. Against the medieval street pattern stand the straight lines of Rua do Comércio and Rua Formosa and the Mercado 2 de Maio. In 1796 a violent fire had destroyed the old town hall, the court and the gaol on Praça D. Duarte; the first stone of the new town hall, on the Rossio, was laid in 1877. The Paço dos Três Escalões, before becoming a museum, was court, civil government, library, Bank of Portugal and police station.

In November 1890 the Linha do Dão opened, the railway that linked Viseu to the Beira Alta line at Santa Comba Dão. Now closed, it is today the Ecopista do Dão, 49 km long.

In the 20th century Viseu gains industry on a regional scale and public facilities, and starts selling itself as a tidy, green city. The name «garden city» took hold in a 1935 poster by the Viseu Initiative and Tourism Commission and was borne out over decades of investment in parks and woodland, above all at the Fontelo and the Parque Aquilino Ribeiro.

It was also a century of intervention in the old town. The national buildings and monuments directorate restored the cathedral with the values of the Estado Novo in mind: the forecourt was rearranged, the stone cross moved back to the middle and some houses against the Misericórdia church pulled down to open up the square. In 1931 the Rossio tile panel by Joaquim Lopes was unveiled, an allegory of the Beira country people that is now an emblem of the city; in 1955 the statue of King Duarte, by Álvaro de Brée, reached Praça D. Duarte, where the pillory once stood.

The Feira de São Mateus grew out of the religious and commercial calendar: King João I granted it a fair charter on 10 January 1392, making it the oldest free fair on the Iberian Peninsula. Every year it brings together trade, shows and food, between August and September.

In one morning you can go from the Cava de Viriato to the cathedral, the Grão Vasco museum, the Rossio and the Fontelo. Perhaps the odd thing is this: the street you go shopping on is the cardo of the Roman city.

If you only have a day, that is enough to see the essentials without taking any transport.