Lessons from the Earth: Earthquakes, Gardens, and Public Health
Around 9:40am, on Saturday November 1st, 1755, the earth shook in Lisbon. Likely a 8.5 magnitude on the Richter scale, the offshore earthquake was felt from North Africa to Finland. Eyewitness accounts describe a chaos of masonry collapsing, killing and maiming thousands in their homes and on the streets of Lisbon’s busy downtown and waterfront quarters. Dozens of candlelit churches, crowded with Catholic devotees celebrating All Saints’ Day, caught fire, many burning to death where they prayed.
In the hour between mainshock and violent aftershock, the Tagus river mysteriously receded. Those along Lisbon’s coastline described the tsunami as “the Sea was pouring in and would certainly overwhelm the City.”[1]An observer said that “this astonishing phenomenon […] appeared more shocking to me than even the very operations of the earthquake.” Around him “gatherings of crowds, priests and friars, all fe[ll] on their knees, kissing the Earth.” It was noon; structure fires were about to take over. Helped by “piercing winds” and some “incendiaries,” the flames would rage for days.[2]
Many times retold, the history of Lisbon’s earthquake is a history of calamitous natural destruction, of earth, water, and fire conspiring to raze a bustling European metropolis fattened on two and a half centuries of Portuguese colonial expansion. In addition to extensive infrastructural loss, 10% of Lisbon’s population is estimated to have perished in the earthquake. An English merchant gauged that, at the time, the Portuguese capital housed about 350,000 people. The total death toll remains uncertain, but likely claimed between 30,000 to 60,000 victims – death so abundant, Lisboetas turned the river into a mass grave to expediently curtail the risk of rot and epidemic disease. Public health further unravelled in the following days, with “women big with child deliver[ing] in the open fields, amid the groans and cries of […an] infinite number of poor broken-limbed persons.”
Surveying the “dreadful” wreckage, that English merchant saw it as a sign of divine punishment, stating that “I believe so complete a destruction has hardly befallen any place on Earth since the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah.”[3] A Protestant writer, Francisco Xavier de Oliveira, also attributed the earthquake to divine wrath, though he speculated that “the main cause for Lisbon’s ruin was all the innocent blood that the Inquisition had spilled over the city’s streets.”[4]
When, one hundred and fifty years later, San Francisco – a city with a climate, topography, and coastal location similar to Lisbon’s – suffered its own great earthquake and fire, views of natural disaster as divine judgment returned. On April 18, 1906, explorer Newton Chittenden pondered if the catastrophe he had just witnessed resulted from “a direct intervention of an offended god” against “the criminal elements” and “anarchist forces” that ruled San Francisco “with almost incredible stupidity.” Chittenden “hope[d] fervently” that the Californian city managed to “be rebuilt, not only upon a new enduring foundation of improved physical structures, but especially upon the basis of a higher moral plane.”[5]
These testimonies from Lisbon and San Francisco are what historian Deborah Coen calls “felt reports”: first-person accounts recorded by ordinary bystanders who lived to tell the tales of natural calamity and subsequent disaster relief.[6] Felt reports show that natural catastrophes disrupt an enduring understanding of the Earth as a fertile ecosystem subsidiary to anthrocentric needs, whose structural elements – soil, land, sunlight, water, tides – must be tamed into efficient stability that services human progress.[7]
However, natural disasters can also encourage societies to reevaluate human relations with the natural world. The Lisbon earthquake, with its momentous challenge to human life, opened way for including plant life as part of public health in the reconstructed urban space.
The scientific understanding that plant life – in the shape of trees, shrubs, and flowers – provided fresh oxygen to populations and an antidote to the unhealthy drawbacks of urban living underpinned the proliferation of public green spaces in post-earthquake Lisbon. Contributors to The Portuguese Journal of Horticulture championed that “the planting of trees [in Lisbon] is important not only due to urban beautification, which should not be dismissed for it does much to lift up our spirits, but also because it increases the salubrity of the capital, which sadly is one of the least healthy in Europe.”[8] Advocating for urban afforestation, a municipal officer declared that “the trees represent a significant role in the hygiene of a city, for they are a powerful sanitation agent.”[9]
Concerns with public health and wellbeing thus directed the planning of urban green spaces in the wake of the earthquake. Royal leaders, architects, and engineers saw disaster as an opportunity to erect an Enlightened, arboreal capital. Under the leadership of the Marquis of Pombal, Lisbon’s rehabilitation included the first Portuguese botanical garden (Ajuda 1768) and the Passeio Público (Public Promenade), a forested boulevard north of the earthquake’s worst damage, gated and dedicated to pedestrians. The Passeio Público was the first of its kind in Europe. Unlike London and Paris, whose municipal gardens began as royal properties later opened to the masses, Lisbon’s Passeio was designed as a public work from its construction in 1764 and until its retrofitting into the Avenida da Liberdade one hundred years later.
Spanning over a century, Lisbon’s reconstruction offers insight into early trial-and-error efforts to “greenify” urban spaces. For example, admittance to the Passeio was paid, drawing criticisms that access to “the light of progress” was “selfishly and unwisely” granted to the wealthy but denied to the “working people, those in most need of such resource.”[10] Likewise, many of the municipal parks and gardens projected after the earthquake only came to fruition in the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Lack of resources, the weakening of the Portuguese colonial empire, and ongoing political instability delayed their implementation.
Lisbon’s Jardim da Estrela – whose creation only happened because the earthquake destroyed the convent of Nossa Senhora da Estrela occupying the land – was a particular success. Opening its gates in 1852 and remaining a vibrant community site to this day, the Jardim da Estrela exemplifies the marriage of urban plant life and public health advocacy emerging after the earthquake.
Free to all, the picturesque garden showcased labeled trees from all over the empire, visitable greenhouses, a wrought-iron bandstand for public amusements, and the country’s first kindergarten, modeled after Friedrich Froebel’s theories on child development. The German pedagogue argued that young children benefited from experiential learning in the natural world. Nestled in the Jardim, the kindergarten’s horticultural activities ran alongside standard curriculum, with female gardeners doubling as teachers. In 1882, the Jardim da Estrela became a local vaccination spot, spatially wedding plant life with human health through the notion of preventive care: vaccination fortified the human immune system against viral infections, whereas public gardens invigorated the taxed urban body through botanical immersion and physical exercise.
The emphasis on public hygiene that launched the proliferation of arboreal public spaces and botanical greenhouses in post-earthquake Lisbon cannot be decoupled from a curiosity for visual spectacle and colonial exoticism. To this day, palm trees festoon Lisbon’s public parks, cemeteries, and gardens. Monocots, these tropical angiosperms do not possess secondary woody growth, which means they are structurally unsound for construction. Perennially ornamental, the large number of palm trees in Lisbon’s current landscape evinces how urban plans for tree-planting strayed from a utilitarian enterprise as the nineteenth century progressed. Leggy and scarcely leafed, palm trees did not provide pedestrians with much oxygen or shade either. But, as commercial postcards of the period show, they did supply intriguing beauty and didactic spectacle to Lisbon’s wandering residents and visitors, aspects that became crucial for a national cultivation of public wellbeing. As the popular Portuguese aphorism asserts, “The eyes also eat,” meaning sight can be as nourishing as food.
At their core, natural disasters expose the anthropocentric impulse to manipulate the Earth for human benefit: parks and gardens grew from the ruins of Lisbon’s catastrophe to filter the urban air and enhance public health. In San Francisco, earthquake survivors used the shaking earth to protect beloved heirlooms. When a brutal conflagration succeeded the mainshock, “Lenore and Albert buried the plate that Helena Blackwell painted for her in the back yard,” a letter writer informed his family on April 22, 1906. “The day after the fire, they dug it up and it was perfect.” However, belongings kept outside the earth did not fare as well: “the glass ware [sic] was all melted and the crockery cracked and broken.”[11]
The duality of the Earth as a sheltering and destructive planetary structure ultimately shapes human responses to natural disasters: from private felt reports from California or governmental rehabilitation projects, like the one that transformed post-earthquake Lisbon into a germinal “green city.” On the one hand, these examples show that, across time and place, natural calamities can propel reevaluations of the relationship between human health and the environment. On the other hand, reactions to these seminal Western earthquakes help historicize current anthropogenic views that defend exploiting the planet as a capricious but versatile resource: from the toxic “petro-masculity” of authoritarian regimes that treat the Earth as a feminized ecosystem needing to be “tamed” through fossil fuel plundering;[12] to the deceptive “green extractivism” of oligopolistic corporations which, in their mining for rare earths and minerals, create environmental depletion and public illness under the veneer of transitioning to clean energy.[13]
Notes
- An Account of the Late Dreadful Earthquake and Fire which Destroyed the City of Lisbon (London: J. Payne, 1755), 12. ↑
- An Account, 13, 15.↑
- An Account, 21-22. ↑
- Francisco Xavier de Oliveira, Discurso patético sobre as calamidades presentes sucedidas em Portugal (1756), 53. All Portuguese translations are my own. ↑
- Newton H. Chittenden. Personal Papers. New York Public Library, Rare Books Collection, NYC. ↑
- Deborah Coen, The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter (University of Chicago Press, 2012). ↑
- The Lisbon earthquake would become central for Western reappraisals of industrialization, civilization, science, theology, and disaster preparedness. Kant, Voltaire, and other European luminaries all discussed it. ↑
- Journal de Horticultura Portuguesa, 1873, 60. ↑
- Eduardo Sequeira, Journal de Horticultura Portuguesa, 1889, 42. ↑
- Duarte Oliveira Júnior, Journal de Horticultura Portuguesa, 1872, 33-34. ↑
- Edmund [no last name]. The California Papers. American Antiquarian Society, Worcester MA. ↑
- Cara Daggett, “Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47.1 (2018): 25-44. ↑
- Eric Post & Phillipe Le Billon, “The ‘Green War’: Geopolitical Metabolism and Green Extractivisms,” Geopolitics 30.2 (2024): 760–800. ↑
Featured image caption: Jardim da Estrela, December 20, 1905. (Personal postcard, courtesy of the author)
Diana W. Anselmo's work focuses on queer film reception in the Progressive Era and affective labor in US media history. She is currently working on the Portuguese history of lithium, thermal waters, and public health in the long nineteenth century, as well as a history of fire and early film exhibition in Europe and the US. She is currently a Nursing Clio Writer in Residence.
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