Legend has it that Lisbon was founded by Odysseus. It was more likely built first by the Phoenicians. Subsequently it was the scene of battles between Phoenicians, Greeks, and Carthaginians. The Romans took the city during the Second Punic War in 205 BC. Later, Julius Caesar designated the city as the capital of the Roman Province of Further Spain.

After the fall of Rome, the city was taken by the Visigoths, then in the eighth century by the Moors. Four hundred years later, the city fell to the Christians and a hundred years after that, it became the capital of the Kingdom of Portugal.

Lisbon was the place where the Great Age of Exploration began when, in the early 15th Century, Prince Henry the Navigator determined to find an alternate route to the East Indies around the horn of Africa. Prince Henry set up a school with the best sailors, map makers, ship builders and astronomers he could find. Prince Henry’s dream finally became reality when Vasco da Gama rounded the horn of Africa and found the sea route to India. Portugal built a commercial empire that spanned from the Indies, to West Africa, to Brazil, in South America. Unfortunately, King Philip 2nd of Spain conquered Portugal and claimed it and its colonial empire for his own. Even though the Portuguese threw off Spanish rule sixty years later, Portugal never fully recovered.

The twentieth century saw the fall of the monarchy and the imposition of an authoritarian government under António de Oliveira Salazar. An army led rebellion led to the fall of the dictatorship and the eventual rise of a democracy. After years of recovery, financed by European Union subsidies, Portugal is now enjoying a period of prosperity and promise unseen since the 16th Century. Lisbon has become a city that it a graceful fusion of the old and the new.