Igreja de São Domingos

Just off the Rossio, this church was once among the grandest in Lisbon, the setting for royal weddings and the reading of Inquisition sentences. Devastated first by the 1755 earthquake and again by a fire in 1959, its interior was left deliberately unrestored, its scorched and cracked red-ochre columns bearing visible witness to the flames. The raw, haunting atmosphere sets it apart from the city's polished baroque churches, and a memorial outside recalls the 1506 massacre of Lisbon's Jews.