Between 1943 and 1975, the Estado Novo dictatorship razed the top of Coimbra’s Alta to put the University City there: more than two hundred houses, four colleges, a church and what was left of the castle. Two to three thousand people had to leave.
The hilltop in three old plans — 1873, 1934 and 1960 — laid over today’s city. The demolished houses, one by one.
In 1873 and 1874, two French brothers, Francisque and César Goullard, survey the plan of the city for the Council. The sheet covering the hilltop shows in carmine what was built there: the colleges, the Sé Nova, the hospital — and, between them, blocks of houses.
On the plan the middle street is called Rua do Infante D. Augusto. Everyone called it Rua Larga, the Broad Street.
In the summer of 1932 a plane photographs Coimbra for the first plan of the city made from the air. It comes out in 1934, at a scale of 1:1000, with every roof drawn. It is the last survey of the whole Alta.
Sixty years after the Goullards, the street pattern is the same. The Rua Larga is 10.1 m wide between façades.
In October 1941 the Government sets up the commission that is to build the University City. The architect is Cottinelli Telmo; the minister, Duarte Pacheco. In February 1942 the first letters reach the owners; on 7 September the plan is approved by the Council of Ministers.
In tile red, one by one, the private houses that were to be expropriated and demolished; darker, the four colleges and the church. In August 1942 the plan was to pull down 255 houses.
The church of S. Pedro starts coming down in June 1943. The Colégio dos Lóios burns one November night and is demolished the following year. In January 1947, what was left of the castle tower is blown up with explosives, in front of a crowd.
In December 1949 the demolitions on the Rua Larga end. The last to fall are the colleges of S. Boaventura and S. Paulo Eremita — the latter, until that summer, the seat of the Associação Académica, the students’ union.
On the cleared ground the first blocks go up: the Archive in 1948, Letras (the Arts faculty) in 1951, Medicine and the General Library in 1956. From 1949, the Escadaria Monumental runs down to the east.
In 1957 a plane photographs the city again. The site of the Faculty of Sciences is an empty lot. Next to it, between the Rua dos Militares and the Arco da Traição, houses are still standing: those of the last phase of expropriations. The last arch of the aqueduct is cut in November 1958; the Colégio dos Militares falls around 1961.
Laying the houses of 1942 over today’s city, 45% of the ground they occupied has a new building on it. The rest, 55%, is square, street and courtyard.
More than half of what was demolished made way for no building at all: it went to widen the streets and squares.
From the Porta Férrea to the foot of the Escadaria Monumental, along the middle of the street. Today’s ground, measured; above it, the levels from before the works.
4.7 mThat is how far the ground came down at the old Largo do Castelo. To make the new street straight and level, the top of the hill was cut away. In August 1949, the Diário de Coimbra spoke of “uns três metros” — some three metres — of lowering and, two days later, of about four near the Largo do Castelo; on the Praça da Porta Férrea, of little more than two.Documented[1]Measured[6]
19 – 27 mThat is how high the roofs of the new blocks stand above the Rua Larga, from Letras to Matemática. The University tower, measured the same way, is 34 m. Of the demolished houses we know the number of storeys, not the height.Measured[6]
44%Of today’s axis, between the Porta Férrea and the top of the stairway, was rooftop in 1934. The old Rua Larga curved; the new one runs straight, through the blocks. Then it goes down 125 steps, in 5 flights.Measured[2]Documented[1]
Three numbers for the houses, one for the people. None is a final count, and they do not all say the same.
What was planned in August 1942, before the first house fell.
Documented[1]Those described in the expropriation records. Missing are the three blocks of the last phase, for which there is no data.
Documented[1]The expropriations “atingem cerca de trezentas casas da Alta” — affect some three hundred houses in the Alta — Maximino Correia told the papers in March 1948.
Documented[1]Nobody counted them. The number is that of the rector Maximino Correia, who chaired the works commission, and he gave it in 1952: in a small city, it was not possible to “desalojar duas a três mil pessoas” — evict two to three thousand people — and house them properly elsewhere.
The 1940 census gave the city 35,437 inhabitants. By the rector’s reckoning, between 6 and 8 in every hundred left the Alta.
Documented[1]Documented[5]The 202 houses on record, by number of storeys. Attics count; cellars do not. No record of height in metres survives: two neighbouring houses with the same four storeys could differ by a whole floor.
Documented[1]The businesses expropriated in 1942 and 1943, spread across the ground floors of the houses. In 1944, a city newspaper counted twenty-three streets and lanes about to disappear.
Documented[1]The housing estates the City Council and the State built between 1945 and 1963, largely for those who left the Alta. All of them beyond what was then the city.
The first to arrive were 135 people, from 39 families, from the Largo do Castelo, the Largo da Feira and the Rua Larga.
In 1950 it took in a hundred families evicted from the Alta: 62 single-storey houses and 38 two-storey ones.
The largest rehousing estate in the city. In 1951 nearly five hundred families lived there.
On the Quinta de S. Jerónimo.
On the Quinta da Misericórdia.
On the Quinta da Esperança, across the river.
Thirty were for families still living in the Alta, fifteen of them on the Rua dos Militares.
The town planner Étienne de Groër, then working on the city plan, found the streets of the Alta “almost always picturesque, pleasant and even hygienic” and proposed keeping the quarter “preciously for future times”. In 1953, a vice-rector hailed “o camartelo que reduziu a poeira aquelas pocilgas” — the wrecking hammer that ground those pigsties to dust.
Documented[1]In September 1943, of a whole block between the Rua das Parreiras and the Rua da Trindade one house was left. One newspaper called it a hovel; another explained the hold-up: it had a Manueline window, which it was decided to take to the Machado de Castro National Museum.
Documented[1]In the middle of the Bairro de Celas, in a round square, stands a statue of St John the Evangelist. It came from the rubble of the Colégio dos Lóios. It seems it was the rehoused families themselves, not the State, who rescued it from the contractor.
Documented[1]In February 1966 an exhibition of photographs of the vanished Alta opened at the Portagem, with the cries of the market women and the toll of the cabra, the university bell, over loudspeakers. Six days later, a newspaper counted more than four thousand visitors. The photographs later came out as a book: A Velha Alta… Desaparecida.
Documented[1]The axis can be walked.From the Porta Férrea to the foot of the Escadaria Monumental it is 340 metres in a straight line.
The 1934 plan, sheet by sheet, in the Municipal Archive →