Almost sheer over the district of the Mouraria towers the hill upon which the fortress of St. Jorge stands, and if you care to climb it you may see Lisbon, and beyond from the point opposite to that from which you have just descended. The cathedral stands upon a hill nearer the river, and may best be reached by following the tram-lines up the Rua da Conceição. The sturdy old church fronts a triangular space, from which picturesque glimpses of the roofs of the old town and river-bank may be caught. Two square Romanesque towers, which, like the rest of the cathedral, are now in course of restoration from the vandalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, stand on each side of and connect with a large square porch before the west door. Cupolas and a railed parapet formerly surmounted these towers, but battlements in accordance with the original design are in future to replace them, and the lavish additions of carved wood capitals to the pillars and coats of stucco over ancient decorations are being cleared away, thanks largely to the encouragement of the present Queen of Portugal, who is interested in the work. Here on this hill stood the mosque of the Moslem kings, and here, when in 1147 Affonso Henriques, the first King of Portugal, captured the city, the first Christian church was built by the conqueror, who nominated an English warrior-monk, Gilbert, to be the first bishop of the new See. Upon a stone within the porch of the west door, the carved legend tells how the Moors were vanquished by the Christian king, and the cross set up in this place, and the twelfth-century round-arched doorway with the grotesque capitals of its pillars demonstrate that this part of the edifice at least dates from the earliest years of the Portuguese monarchy. The interior presents six round arches on clustered marble columns, now stripped of the stucco that disfigured them for centuries, though the Corinthian capitals which were added in the eighteenth century still remain. When Lord Strathmore saw the church in 1760, five years after the earthquake, he referred to these Corinthian capitals in a sketch he drew of the church: “I have left out,” he says, “the large Corinthian capitals and marble pedestals which have been added to the pillars within memory. The fire has burnt most of the capitals off, both of the ambulatory and the nave arches, and the other capitals have been so much impaired that you can only see remains of basket-work, foliage, and flowers.” The intention referred to by Lord Strathmore to restore the church to its original simplicity was so far from being carried out that new gilt wood acanthus leaf capitals were added to these fine old Romanesque pillars. At last, however, the church is really being judiciously treated, and is rapidly assuming the grave, devotional appearance of the early Christian temples raised after the victories of Affonso Henriques.