Praça de Touros do Campo Pequeno

With its red-brick silhouette and neo-Moorish domes, Campo Pequeno seems to bring an unexpected imaginary world into Lisbon, yet its real strength lies in the way it gathers more than a century of urban life into one place. Opened in 1892 and designed by Dias da Silva, it was created as a bullring and soon became one of the city’s social stages, hosting a royal bullfight at the start of the twentieth century, rallies under the Estado Novo and, after the Carnation Revolution, major democratic gatherings. The renovation completed in 2006 preserved the building’s character and gave it a new life as a multi-purpose venue. It is worth noticing the arches, the exposed brick and the turrets, restored to their original turquoise blue. Today, between memory, tradition and reinvention, Campo Pequeno still shows how Lisbon changes without completely erasing its earlier traces.