Teatro Nacional de São Carlos

A horseshoe of five tiers in cream and gold, seating just over a thousand

Lisbon lost its opera house in the 1755 earthquake and did not replace it for nearly forty years. When it did, the new São Carlos went up in six months in 1793, modelled on San Carlo in Naples and La Scala, and it has survived intact ever since, which makes it one of the few unaltered late eighteenth-century theatres in Europe.

It seats just over a thousand across five tiers, the Portuguese national orchestra plays in the pit and the ticket prices are roughly half what the same production would cost in Madrid.