The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755

This illustration of the dreadful aftermath of the Lisbon Earthquake is by Daniel Chodowiecki (1909).

At around ten o’clock on November 1, 1755, somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean, an enormous earthquake broke the earth’s crust deep under water. Soon, the buildings of Lisbon began to shake, then came a tsunami. David Chester describes it as “the largest documented seismic event to have struck Europe.”