History
The present-day Areeiro civil parish was formed by joining the former parishes of Alto do Pina and São João de Deus. Lisbon’s administrative reorganisation was approved in 2012, and the merger was formalised after the 2013 local elections. Both earlier parishes had been created on 7 February 1959.
Long before the avenues, this was a landscape of estates, farmland, country lanes and small settlements. In Alto do Pina, communities connected with agriculture are recorded from at least the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; the name itself relates to a former local estate. After the 1755 earthquake, middle-class and noble families sought out this area to build estates and country houses.
During the twentieth century, the city moved across that landscape. The extension of Avenida Almirante Reis, chiefly from the late 1920s to the 1940s, drove the development of Alameda Dom Afonso Henriques and Bairro do Areeiro. The scheme introduced broader blocks and open spaces, including Praça João do Rio. The square now named Praça Francisco Sá Carneiro was conceived as the monumental end point of the avenue and an entrance to Lisbon for arrivals from the then recent Portela Airport; its architectural design is associated with Luís Cristino da Silva within Duarte Pacheco’s urban programme.
In the former parish of São João de Deus, today’s urban form began to emerge in the 1930s through a plan associated with Faria da Costa. From 1940, buildings appeared on Avenida de Paris and Praça Pasteur, followed by developments on Avenida João XXI and Rua Presidente Wilson. An outlying landscape of estates became a planned extension of the city — without entirely losing the names and clues of what came before.