Largo do Chafariz de Dentro: The Fountain Inside the Walls
Why is it significant?
Catch your breath in this open square at the foot of Alfama, with the stone fountain on one side and the lanes of the old quarter climbing away behind it. After the tight streets by the river, it feels like a room with the windows thrown open. The name tells you where you are.
Key Facts
| Place | Largo do Chafariz de Dentro: The Fountain Inside the Walls |
|---|---|
| Address | Largo do Chafariz de Dentro, 1100 Lisboa, Portugal |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.71120, -9.12790 |
| Part of Walk | Saints, Sieges and Stairways: Alfama and the Castelo de São Jorge in Lisbon |
| Generated | Generated |
Catch your breath in this open square at the foot of Alfama, with the stone fountain on one side and the lanes of the old quarter climbing away behind it. After the tight streets by the river, it feels like a room with the windows thrown open.
The name tells you where you are. Chafariz de Dentro means the fountain inside... inside the walls, that is, the great ring of fortifications King Fernando built around Lisbon in the 1370s. There has been a fountain here since the Middle Ages, and the structure you see dates largely from a rebuilding in 1622. For centuries this was one of the places where the neighbourhood came for water, and where gossip, quarrels and courtships began.
The water was the whole reason Alfama existed. The name comes from the Arabic al-hamma, the baths or the hot springs, because warm, mineral water rises from the ground in this part of the hill. In the Moorish city and long afterwards, people bathed, washed and drank from these springs, and the district grew around them.
The fountain you passed on the way, Chafariz d'El-Rei, is one of the oldest in the city, and its story has a harder edge. A rule from the 1500s is said to have divided its spouts by sex and by status, and enslaved Africans, of whom there were many thousands in Renaissance Lisbon, had a spout of their own. Water carriers, many of them poor migrants from Galicia, then hauled barrels up these hills for anyone who could pay.
The big building on the square was once a water pumping station, and today it is the Museu do Fado, because this square also belongs to music. Fado grew up in the nineteenth century in neighbourhoods exactly like this one, in taverns full of sailors and fishwives. Now take Rua de São Pedro, the narrow shopping street leading west out of the square, and turn uphill to the white church of São Miguel.