Park Necessidades

This guide to the Necessidades Palace grounds in Lisbon opens before dawn on October 5th, 1910, with a Portuguese warship anchored off this hillside and its guns trained on the palace ahead of you. It introduces Manuel the Second, a twenty-year-old king who never wanted the throne after his father and brother were assassinated two years earlier, going about an ordinary night inside those walls as the shelling begins. The guide also traces what became of the palace afterward, from decades of silence to its present life as the Foreign Ministry. Stand at the garden's edge and picture the flagpole that once stood here.