In 1530 Portugal began a radical rejection of the decorative wealth of the Manueline style, turning instead to a minimalist aesthetic with roots in military architecture, which for quite some time had become a status symbol in Portugal, one of Europe’s leading colonial powers.

So it was that by the time Philip II of Spain assumed the Portuguese crown (1580), Portugal had had time to develop its own, thoroughly original version of mannerist architecture, a style so austere it was called arquitectura chca (`sober architecture’). The spread of the architectural treatises by De Vries and Dietterlin at the beginning of the 17th century resulted in a solid turn toward the forms of the Flemish baroque. With the restoration of the Portuguese monarchy in 1640, the court and nobility showed off their regained power in iconographic and scenographic projects perfectly in keeping with the celebrative nature of the baroque, such as the splendid Fronteira Palace at Benfica (begun 1667) in which the application of the azule)o tradition reached rare levels of quality.

Early in the 18th century, during the reign of John V, Rome became the model against which all Por?tuguese architecture was measured, up to the point of grotesque levels in the drive to create a second Rome on the banks of the Tagus. An outstanding example of the king’s outlandish programme of self-celebratory building – a programme that led the country toward bankruptcy – is the monastery of Mafra (begun 1717). This pharaonic plan, designed by the German architect Johann Friedrich Ludwig, was never inhabited. The death of John V and the disastrous earthquake of 1755, which razed to the ground nearly two-thirds of the city of Lisbon, led to a sudden change in Portugal’s building policies. The demands made by the reconstruction work presented the opportunity for a complete change and for the undertaking of projects that in some senses anticipate the urban-planning schemes of the 19th century.