St. Michael's Church

In St. Michael’s Church, what you would have been witnessing was not just Baroque piety, but the work of identifiable hands—architects, sculptors, and craftsmen—reshaped by Lisbon’s most catastrophic natural event of the century.

A church rebuilt by human decisions

St. Michael’s Church, or Igreja de Santo Estêvão in Portuguese, began as a 12th-century temple. The decisive transformation came in 1733, when the older structure was reconstructed in Baroque style. The architect credited for this first Baroque rebuilding was Manuel da Costa Negreiros—a name that matters here because he set the church’s overall logic: a compact, centralized plan that still needed to carry a clear liturgical axis. That plan was continued under later direction after major damage. In the wake of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, the church suffered enough harm that it required renovation and then a full reopening. Mateus Vicente de Oliveira is later named as the guiding authority during that post-earthquake work, and the renovated church reopened in 1773. Yet this is where the human story becomes darker. Although the building achieved official recognition as a National Monument, it later was destroyed, meaning it no longer physically stands as it once did.