A 16th-century palace near the waterfront with a facade of over a thousand pyramid-shaped stones (bicos means beaks or points), creating a diamond-rusticated surface unique in Portuguese architecture and unlike anything else in Lisbon. The house belonged to the Albuquerque family, one of the great dynasties of the Age of Discovery.
Today it houses the José Saramago Foundation, dedicated to Portugal's Nobel Prize-winning novelist. The ground floor holds rotating exhibitions; the permanent display covers Saramago's life and work and includes the manuscript of Blindness. The Roman fish-salting tanks discovered in the basement during 1980s restoration work are also viewable. The building is a short walk from the Praça do Comércio, near the waterfront.