My Escapes Portugal Another Lovely Trip to Portugal! Belém Belém Day Trip Belém Tower

Belém Tower

The Belém Tower appears on a plethora of brochures and ads about Portugal and Lisbon... I'd say it's the most famous Portuguese building.
A small fortification, referred to by locals as "the fortress", used to guard the entrance to Lisbon through Rio Tejo from the Atlantic Ocean.
Oddly, everything inside is so tiny, I thought it was built by the Smurfs.

The Belém Tower is located on a tiny island, which used to be much further in the water, but land was reclaimed and it's now right near the river bank.

A bit further west, the vast Rio Tejo's mouth meets the Atlantic Ocean...

Visitors enter the fort through a wooden bridge (modern), which connects it with the land area.

It cost me 6 EUR to enter the fortress.

This is one of those places where mainstream tourism thrives. A bunch of foreign tourists were roaming everywhere.

No wonder, it's one of Portugal's top attractions, you don't have to do much discovery work to get here...

Now, let's find out a about its history...

Its construction began in 1513 and it was finalized by 1519, ordered by King João II.

The style of the building is Portuguese Manueline, which is an in-between style, which followed Late Gothic, but preceding Renaissance.

The Portuguese Manueline style incorporates maritime elements and representations, bearing also Spanish and Italian, as well as Flemish influences.

As a matter of fact, the Belém Tower is one of the best representatives of the Portuguese Manueline architecture.

For a fortress, it looks too beautiful. It could have been an aristocratic residence.

As I said earlier, the fort used to be deeper in the water - somewhere around the middle of the river.

This is partly because the river changed its course after the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake. Also, because some land was reclaimed to bring it closer.

I was told that 500 years ago, Rio Tejo's northern bank was in the immediate proximity of the Jerónimos Monastery.

The Torre de Belém is also called "São Vicente Castle" - named after the town's patron saint.

One of the strange things about this building is that just about everything in it is small... very small cannons, but plenty of them... tight staircase, narrow doorways and claustrophobic observation cabins.

In fact, visitors had to wait in line for their turn to descend or ascend in the staircase.
An LCD screen showed us when we had green to go up or down. Lethargic...

The staircase too was tiny. Even for a grown "modern man". People were a lot smaller 500 years ago.

It felt like the "dwarfs' castle", it just didn't feel normal.

There were many cannons, but they were all very small. No match for a Spanish galleon's bombards or the famous Culverin battleship cannons used by the English warships.

At most, this could have been a guard tower.
Quite asymmetrical - with a bunch of cannons pointed towards the southern bank of River Tagus, the east and the west, but nothing on the northern bank.

But it wasn't intended to be a major stronghold...

The Torre de Belém was supposed to complement the other fortresses in the area - found at Cascais and Estoril.

From the crowded rooftop of the Torre de Belém, I caught a glimpse of another fortification, just a bit further, where the Museu do Combatente is found.

It's a military museum that almost no-one visits. A very short walk away, it's partly covered by trees around it, so mainstream tourists don't even notice it.

I suggest you don't miss out on the Museu do Combatente, just about 5 minutes walking distance away from Torre de Belém.

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