Largo dos Trigueiros & Beco das Farinhas
Why is it significant?
In this tiny square and the stepped alley beside it, faces look down at you from the walls: old men and women of Mouraria, photographed close up and printed onto the very walls of the houses where they live. Some of them may be watching you from their real windows at the same time.
Key Facts
| Place | Largo dos Trigueiros & Beco das Farinhas |
|---|---|
| Address | Largo dos Trigueiros, 1100-610 Lisboa, Portugal |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.71390, -9.13570 |
| Part of Walk | Mouraria, Cradle of Fado: From Maria Severa to Amália in Lisbon |
| Generated | Generated |
In this tiny square and the stepped alley beside it, faces look down at you from the walls: old men and women of Mouraria, photographed close up and printed onto the very walls of the houses where they live. Some of them may be watching you from their real windows at the same time.
The portraits are the work of Camilla Watson, a British photographer who settled in Mouraria and began photographing her elderly neighbours. Instead of putting them in a gallery, she gave them back to the street. The project turned residents who had spent their whole lives here into the public face of the neighbourhood, at a moment when tourism was starting to change it.
Mouraria has always been small, and its fado has always been personal. Here people knew the singers as neighbours, as the daughter of the woman downstairs, the barber who sang on Saturdays. That is fado vadio, vagabond fado: amateur singing in taverns, where anyone may stand up, if the guitarists agree. Many professional fadistas started exactly that way.
One of them grew up within a few streets of here. Mariza was born in Mozambique in 1973 and came to Lisbon as a small child. Her parents ran a tavern in Mouraria, and she sang fado there as a little girl, standing among the customers. Decades later she was filling concert halls around the world, with her cropped platinum hair and her enormous voice, one of the singers who carried fado into the twenty-first century.
Listen to the sounds of the square: a radio through an open window, a television, a canary in a cage, a conversation shouted from one balcony to another. That is the acoustic world fado came out of, a street where nothing is private and everything is sung. Now go just a few steps south and down to Largo de São Cristóvão, where a church stands over a stairway painted with the whole history of fado.