Lagos, Portugal: Its Interesting History

I’ve written quite a bit about what Carla and I love about Lagos - its coastline, its easygoing rhythm, its friendly people, and that wonderfully comfortable feeling we had almost from the moment we arrived.

But places don’t simply appear fully formed.

Every town has layers beneath what we see today, and Lagos has quite a few of them.

Long before cafés spilled onto its pedestrian streets and travelers arrived carrying beach bags and cameras, Lagos was a fishing harbor. Its history reaches back thousands of years, and over time Celts, Carthaginians, Romans, Moors, and eventually the Portuguese all passed through this part of the Algarve, each leaving something behind.

I love thinking about that when I’m walking through an old European town.

We tend to experience a place in the present tense. We notice the restaurant on the corner, the couple drinking coffee, the shopkeeper opening the door in the morning. But beneath all of that are centuries of other mornings, other conversations, other people walking more or less where we’re walking now.

Lagos has been watching people come and go for a very long time.

Its location along the Atlantic made it an important center for fishing, maritime trade, and exploration, and over the centuries that brought considerable wealth to the town. By the 16th century, Lagos had become important enough to serve as the administrative capital of the Algarve.

And then, on November 1, 1755, everything changed.

That was the day of the great Lisbon earthquake, one of the most devastating natural disasters in European history.

Although the earthquake is remembered primarily for the destruction of Lisbon, its impact reached far beyond the Portuguese capital. The Algarve was struck terribly hard as well. After the earth shook, a massive tsunami swept into the coastline.

Lagos was devastated.

Much of the old town was destroyed. Homes, churches, and other buildings collapsed, and portions of the defensive walls surrounding the city were badly damaged. The Lagos people knew before the earthquake was suddenly, violently altered.

It’s strange to think about while walking these streets today.

Carla and I stayed in the old part of town, surrounded by buildings, restaurants, shops, and homes that feel as though they’ve simply always been there. But much of what we were looking at came from the rebuilding that followed the earthquake. History has a way of doing that.

A town survives something unimaginable, rebuilds itself, generations pass, and eventually people arrive hundreds of years later eating gelato and taking photographs without giving much thought to the catastrophe that once unfolded beneath their feet. I’m certainly guilty of that.

After the earthquake and tsunami, Lagos lost its position as the regional capital to Faro, which had suffered considerably less destruction. Lagos rebuilt, but the center of political and administrative importance in the Algarve had shifted.

For much of the 19th century, life here became considerably quieter.

Fishing remained central to the local economy, along with other maritime industries, and Lagos settled into life as a relatively small coastal community.

Then another force arrived that would transform the Algarve once again.

Tourism.

The opening of Faro Airport in 1965 made southern Portugal far more accessible to travelers from northern Europe and beyond. Suddenly, the Algarve’s sunshine, beaches, dramatic cliffs, and mild climate were only a relatively short flight away.

People came. Then more people came. And, apparently, some of them decided there was very little reason to leave. It isn’t difficult to understand.

Over the following decades, improved roads and infrastructure connected the Algarve more easily with Lisbon, Spain, and the rest of Europe. By the 1990s, increasing numbers of people from other parts of Europe were settling here permanently or spending large parts of the year along Portugal’s southern coast.

Lagos gradually became the international little city we encountered.

You can hear it simply by walking down the street. Portuguese mixes with English, German, Dutch, Spanish, French, and languages I can’t identify. People arrive from throughout Europe and well beyond it, drawn by many of the same things that have attracted people to this coast for centuries - the climate, the sea, the natural beauty, and that wonderfully uncomplicated rhythm of daily life.

Of course, every period of history leaves both gifts and complications behind. Tourism brings jobs, restaurants, businesses, and economic opportunity, but it also changes communities. More people arrive. Housing becomes more expensive. Streets become busier. Places once known primarily to the people who lived there become destinations.

That story is playing out in beautiful places all over the world. But one of the things I appreciate about Lagos is that, despite all the visitors, there still seems to be a real town underneath the tourism.

People live here. They walk their dogs. They stop to talk with neighbors.

They buy bread. They sit over coffee considerably longer than seems economically sensible. Life continues.

And that may be what history really is - not simply kings, earthquakes, invasions, and dates printed in guidebooks, but ordinary people continuing to live their lives while the world around them keeps changing.

The Romans came and went. The Moors came and went. Ships sailed in and out of the harbor. An earthquake nearly destroyed the town. Fishing sustained it. Tourism transformed it. And Lagos kept going.

Today, Carla and I get to wander its streets, walk above its magnificent cliffs, sit outside over a meal, listen to half a dozen languages around us, and enjoy the particular version of Lagos that exists right now.

It won’t remain exactly this way. No place does. But perhaps that’s part of what makes travel so interesting.

We don’t simply visit places. We visit them at a particular moment in their very long story. And for a little while, we become part of it.

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