This Gulf of Fire

A captivating and definitive account of the greatest natural disaster ever to hit the modern Western world. On All Saints' Day 1755, tremors from an earthquake measuring perhaps 9.0 or higher on the moment magnitude scale swept furiously from their origin along the Atlantic seabed toward the Iberian and African coasts. Directly in their path was Lisbon, then one of the wealthiest cities in the world and the capital of a vast global empire. Within minutes, much of the city lay in ruins.