My Portugal, the one I imagined in preparing for my party, turned from a whim into a dream. Portugal was a place whose territories occupied the strangest realms of the world: the places where other countries failed to show interest or failed to see any worth. As the sea race to control trade with India and the Spice Islands heated up over the centuries, Portugal's dominance of the seas dwindled to a secondary power, and yet they still coaxed a fair portion of the world into their grasp. The Portuguese world was a sleepy backwater; multilingual, steamy, a dozen lands and a thousand islands.
In 1755, an Earthquake rumbled in Portugal's Algarve lands to the south. Half the city collapsed and fifteen thousand perished. Much of Lisbon's history fell with the Earthquake. Except one area.
Before the earthquake, this area, the Alfama District, was the hottest wealthy neighborhood in Portugal. Hip and wealthy, it also carried a Moorish architectural past.
Roman and Arab are literally painted and constructed on top of and over each other, making the whole place a mash of centuries.
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