Costa do Castelo & Teatro Taborda
Why is it significant?
Catch your breath on Costa do Castelo, a street that clings to the flank of the castle hill like a long balcony. Below you lie the roofs of Mouraria, the open rectangle of Martim Moniz and, beyond them, the hills of the newer city.
Key Facts
| Place | Costa do Castelo & Teatro Taborda |
|---|---|
| Address | Costa do Castelo 75, 1100-178 Lisboa, Portugal |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.71480, -9.13280 |
| Part of Walk | Mouraria, Cradle of Fado: From Maria Severa to Amália in Lisbon |
| Generated | Generated |
Catch your breath on Costa do Castelo, a street that clings to the flank of the castle hill like a long balcony. Below you lie the roofs of Mouraria, the open rectangle of Martim Moniz and, beyond them, the hills of the newer city. Along the street stands a small theatre with a modest façade, the Teatro Taborda.
It carries the name of Francisco Alves da Silva Taborda, one of the most popular comic actors of nineteenth century Lisbon, who kept audiences laughing for half a century. The building has had more than one life, as a theatre, as a cinema, as an empty shell, and it was later restored as a stage for contemporary theatre. Lisbon tends to give its old stages second chances.
The street itself became a film star. In 1943 the director Arthur Duarte made a comedy called O Costa do Castelo, starring the great comic actor António Silva. It belongs to the golden age of Portuguese comedies of the 1930s and 1940s, films full of Lisbon neighbourhoods, landlords, gossiping neighbours, love stories... and songs. Those films, and the radio, carried fado and its lighter cousin, the fado-canção, to people all over the country who had never set foot in a Mouraria tavern.
Cinema had already made Severa a national heroine in 1931. In 1947 Amália Rodrigues made her own screen debut in Capas Negras, and the film was a huge popular success. From then on the voice of the alleys was also a face on posters, and fado was no longer the song of one neighbourhood but of a whole nation, and soon of the world.
From up here, Mouraria looks like a stage set, every window a box at the theatre and every alley a wing. That is no accident: fado has always been part music, part theatre, part gossip. Now go down the steps and lanes past Largo da Rosa, heading south-west and downhill about three hundred metres, to a tiny square where the residents themselves look down from the walls.