The Lisbon floods of November 1967: a night of rain and a censored toll

Quintas was a farming village in the parish of Castanheira do Ribatejo, in the municipality of Vila Franca de Xira, on the flat valley floor of a small river called the Rio Grande da Pipa. On the night of Saturday 25 November 1967 the rain swelled the river until trees and crops it had torn up blocked the Ponte do Cano bridge, and the water began to rise across the whole valley floor.2 sources2 sources

The noise of the rain woke some of the villagers in the early hours. Then they heard screams from the houses lower down. It was too dark to reach them. Some people escaped over roofs, others climbed trees and clung on, soaked, until daylight.1 source1 source

Luísa Silva Fajardo was 13. That night she lost her older sister, her grandparents and 27 cousins, uncles and aunts. Her father spent the whole night trying to get down to them in the lower part of the village. When morning came the valley was, in the words of the Vila Franca de Xira municipal museum, a sea of silver made of water, mud and sunlight.2 sources2 sources

Nobody agrees on exactly how many people Quintas lost. The geographer Ilídio do Amaral, writing in 1968, said about 90 were reported dead, and the Lisbon medical faculty's newsletter gives 90 of 156 inhabitants. Diário de Notícias put it at about 100, more than a third of the village. The municipal museum says about two-thirds, and a 2023 flood-modelling study counts more than 100 dead, close to two-thirds of the population. No other place lost so many.5 sources5 sources

The same night, in a ring of shanty towns, villages and suburbs around Lisbon, streams that ran dry for most of the year turned into torrents within hours.2 sources2 sources

Scientists call it the deadliest storm to strike Portugal since at least the early nineteenth century. The Vila Franca de Xira museum and Diário de Notícias go further, calling it the worst natural disaster in Portugal since the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. The geographer Fernando Rebelo ranked it with that earthquake and the 1803 flood in Funchal, on Madeira, as the country's three great catastrophes of recent centuries.5 sources5 sources

In 1967 Portugal was a single-party dictatorship, the Estado Novo or “New State”, led by António de Oliveira Salazar. Newspapers could print nothing that had not first passed the censors. Since 1961 a colonial war in Africa had been taking ever more young men into the army. Less than a year after the floods, in September 1968, Salazar was replaced as head of government by Marcelo Caetano.3 sources3 sources

Lisbon was also growing fast. From the 1960s thousands of people moved from the interior of the country to the capital, and its outskirts spread without planning. Many newcomers built their own shacks beside the streams, for access to water, in shanty towns such as Urmeira, Olival de Basto, Romeira and Silvado.2 sources2 sources

Portugal had no national civil protection service. When disaster came, the first help came from neighbours and from the fire brigades, many of them volunteer corps. Many lost their own vehicles and equipment that night.3 sources3 sources

The storm began with a pool of cold air high over the Atlantic near Madeira, where a low-pressure system formed. A very active cold front coming from the Azores and a flow of warm air from the south-west converged on it, and from 24 November the low drifted north-east towards Lisbon. When it reached the coast the air pressure fell by about 5 millibars, and the rain was heaviest between 7 pm on the 25th and 1 am on the 26th.2 sources2 sources

In those six hours the weather station at Lisbon airport measured 77.5 mm of rain, Monte Estoril 129.7 mm and São Julião do Tojal, in Loures, 115.3 mm. Lisbon's normal rainfall for the whole of November was 92.6 mm. At Monte Estoril 60 mm fell in a single hour that evening.2 sources2 sources

At Monte Estoril the 24-hour total was about a fifth of a normal year's rain, and one study put its return period at 500 years. A 2016 study led by Ricardo Trigo, of the University of Lisbon, found the rain most exceptional over periods of 4 to 9 hours, with return periods of 100 years or more. Those durations matched the time water took to run through the small river basins around the city.2 sources2 sources

The rain alone does not explain the deaths. The wettest places, Sassoeiros with 170 mm and Estoril with 158 mm, suffered the least damage. The killing happened where people lived in the stream beds. The flood also met a high tide of about 4 metres, and it struck at night, when most of its victims were asleep at home.2 sources2 sources

Neither the natural stream network nor the sewers could carry the water away. Amaral described how sheets of runoff poured off bare hillsides, abandoned farmland and newly paved ground, picked up mud and debris and gathered in the main stream beds into a fast-moving wave. It knocked down houses and bridges, rolled cars along for tens of metres and left enough mud to bury cars and fill ground floors.1 source1 source

Among the most violent floods were those on the Jamor, the Odivelas stream, the Trancão and the Alenquer river. The rise lasted less than 12 hours. Where buildings hemmed in the streams, at Olival de Basto, lower Odivelas and Póvoa de Santo Adrião, the water stood 2 metres deep. The Trancão basin acted as a funnel: about 350 square kilometres of branching valleys drained into a single narrow outlet.1 source1 source

In Odivelas the water poured down from Caneças and Arroja, turned the market gardens out to Senhor Roubado into a lake and swept through the shacks of Silvado. A firefighter, Jaime Assunção, pulled 35 people out of one house in Silvado. Another, Guilherme Duarte Esteves, remembered that by the following night there were more than 200 dead lying in the Odivelas fire station.1 source1 source

In Alenquer a weir gave way upstream of a paper and cardboard factory, and a third of the factory building collapsed into the river. According to Alberto Santos, a local historian, ten people died in the town and 37 more along another stream, in villages across the valley from Quintas. In Alverca a 14-year-old firefighter was killed by a bare electric wire as he ran to answer the siren. At Alhandra a goods train standing outside the town held back a mass of mud with cars caught in it like toys.2 sources2 sources

Lisbon itself flooded. Avenida de Ceuta went under water, and in Praça de Espanha and on Avenida da Liberdade people could only get around by boat. At about 7.30 the next morning, water seeping into a gunpowder magazine at Linda-a-Velha set off an explosion that blew out windows in houses and factories nearby.2 sources2 sources

By 11 am on the 26th about 176 bodies had been found. The government's count then climbed: 250 on 26 and 27 November, 316 on the 28th, 427 on the 29th. On 5 December it reached 462, and the government made that the final official figure.3 sources3 sources

The dead kept coming. Flood victims, some never identified, were buried in Vila Franca de Xira on 9 and 16 December, on 4 January and on 1 February 1968. The official count never moved. Diário de Notícias later wrote that the censors had ordered the counting of bodies stopped at 462.2 sources2 sources

The censors did not try to erase the disaster, the museum's researchers concluded, only to shrink it. On 27 November the Directorate of Censorship telegraphed its local offices.2 sources2 sources

Two days later the instructions were tighter: headlines on the floods could be no wider than half a page and had to go to the censor, the smell of the corpses was not to be mentioned, and the charitable activities of students were to be cut. Photographs cut from the magazine Século Ilustrado survive in the national archive at the Torre do Tombo. Within about six weeks the floods had gone from the papers.3 sources3 sources

Alice Vieira, then a reporter on the Diário de Lisboa, later recalled that an official phoned João Paulo Guerra, a journalist at Rádio Clube Português, with an order: “From this hour on, nobody else dies.” On 30 November Salazar gave a speech in the library of the National Assembly. Several newspapers had asked for national mourning. He spoke about the war in Africa and said nothing about the floods.2 sources2 sources

The political police, the PIDE, questioned the United Press International correspondent Edouard Khavessian over a report of student protests against the government's handling of the relief. According to the Vila Franca de Xira exhibition, foreign journalists were expelled and students arrested.2 sources2 sources

On the morning of 27 November members of the Juventude Universitária Católica (JUC), the Catholic university youth movement, went to the students' association of the Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon's engineering school, and proposed a joint relief effort. Helena Roseta, then a 19-year-old architecture student in the JUC, described it as the only organisation that was not banned. That day the university student associations of Lisbon met, and on the 28th the first 15 mobile brigades, with about 60 students, went out to survey the damage.2 sources2 sources

Técnico became the headquarters for two weeks. The students set up a command post with a planning service that read the field brigades' reports and set the next day's tasks, a transport service that arranged lifts to the shanty towns with companies and town halls, a dispatch service for supplies, and a bank of medicines run mostly by medical and veterinary students. Students in Coimbra and Porto collected money and sent volunteers.2 sources2 sources

About 400 university students were in the disaster areas on 29 November and about 1,000 on 1 December, joined by secondary school pupils from the Liceu Camões and the German School. A student publication later counted more than 6,000 volunteers in all, and the medical school estimates they worked about 44,000 hours.3 sources3 sources

They cleared roads and shovelled mud out of houses and shacks, helped dig out the bodies of people and animals, handed out food and clothes, helped at funerals and sat up at night with children and old people. Medical students set up field clinics and vaccination posts against typhoid. Técnico's own students worked for the people of Vala do Carregado.3 sources3 sources

The students also wrote down what they saw. Their bulletin, Solidariedade Estudantil (Student Solidarity), came out in two issues, reached a print run of 10,000 copies and was one of the few bulletins of the time to escape the censors. Diana Andringa, a second-year medical student who wrote for it, later left medicine for journalism.3 sources3 sources

Roseta did not go out with the brigades; she stayed in Lisbon gathering their reports. Three months after the floods that work became a longer report, the Caderno de Reflexão, published with the JUC's newspaper and signed by Helena Roseta, António Cavaco, João Duarte Cunha and Pedro Roseta. It too went out without passing the censors. After that, Roseta said, the JUC's newspaper had to be submitted to censorship.2 sources2 sources

Most of the students came from comfortable families. In the shacks of Fanhões, Odivelas and the Tagus valley many met, for the first time, the poverty in which a large part of the country lived, and the slowness of the authorities in the face of it.3 sources3 sources

Their Caderno de Reflexão listed among the causes of the disaster an “urbanistically marginal population, living largely in shacks”. On 29 November the central board of Portuguese Catholic Action told its members in an internal circular that poverty had magnified the calamity and that society had to be reformed to stop it happening again. In the Caderno the landscape architect Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles and the architect Nuno Portas blamed the disorderly use of land; the Aljube resistance museum also names the architect Nuno Teotónio Pereira among those who did.4 sources4 sources

Geographers agreed. Amaral listed cleared woods, abandoned fields, walls and embankments built across streams so that they acted as dams, debris from quarries, badly cut roads, streams forced into culverts, inadequate sewers, and large groups of buildings put up on unsuitable ground, some of them on top of watercourses. Ramos and Reis later wrote that most of the dead had lived in illegal housing on the flood beds, but that some licensed blocks of flats on the stream banks had also collapsed.2 sources2 sources

The flood also broke the water supply. Water poured into the Águas Livres aqueduct and muddied the reservoir at Campo de Ourique, sewers burst, and dead livestock lay in the fields. The health authorities feared typhoid and ran a mass vaccination campaign; Spain flew in 100,000 doses of typhoid vaccine. Leptospirosis, a disease caught from animal urine or from water and soil it has contaminated, did appear: eight male patients aged 14 to 59 with a severe form of it were admitted to hospital 17 to 26 days after the flood.1 source1 source

A year later the Diário de Lisboa counted more than 1,000 houses destroyed, as many damaged and 400 kilometres of road affected. Other accounts put the houses destroyed at more than 20,000. The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation built housing estates for the homeless with the state and the Vila Franca de Xira council, among them one at Quintas.4 sources4 sources

Flash floods came back. On 18 and 19 November 1983 another storm hit Lisbon and Cascais, where the lower town is built over a stream running in a culvert, and 10 people died. In 2008 a third storm of similar intensity struck the Lisbon area. Both caused far fewer deaths and evacuations than 1967.2 sources2 sources

In 2001 Ramos and Reis warned that the unplanned building around Lisbon had continued as if nothing had been learned in 1967. Small streams can stay dry for years, they noted, so people living beside them do not see the danger. In 2012 José Luís Zêzere's DISASTER project at the University of Lisbon, which combed newspapers back to 1865 for deadly floods and landslides in mainland Portugal, found 1967 the deadliest flood in 149 years. Zêzere added that it was the only one of those floods in which censorship stepped in.2 sources2 sources

For a generation of students the floods were a political education. Silva Costa and his colleagues call them a landmark in the history of the Portuguese student movement. Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues, who cleaned houses in Fanhões at 18 and was President of the Assembly of the Republic when he told the story in 2017, called it “a kind of baptism of fire for my political activity”. The Vila Franca de Xira exhibition went further, linking the anger of those weeks to the revolution of 25 April 1974.3 sources3 sources