Museu do Fado
Why is it significant?
The pale, low building in front of you, with its neat windows and its square full of café tables, was built to pump water, not to hold songs. Since 1998 it has been the Museu do Fado, and it is the right place to finish a walk that began among the taverns of Mouraria.
Key Facts
| Place | Museu do Fado |
|---|---|
| Address | Largo do Chafariz de Dentro 1, 1100-139 Lisboa, Portugal |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.71100, -9.12770 |
| Part of Walk | Mouraria, Cradle of Fado: From Maria Severa to Amália in Lisbon |
| Generated | Generated |
The pale, low building in front of you, with its neat windows and its square full of café tables, was built to pump water, not to hold songs. Since 1998 it has been the Museu do Fado, and it is the right place to finish a walk that began among the taverns of Mouraria.
Inside, the museum tells the story you have been walking through. There are portraits of Maria Severa, posters from the first fado films, old guitars, records and radio sets, and a whole wall of faces of fadistas, hundreds of them, famous and forgotten. You can listen to recordings from the early twentieth century, when fado first went onto shellac discs, and hear how the music changed.
The brightest star in the collection is Amália Rodrigues. Born in Lisbon in 1920 into a poor family, she sold fruit on the quays as a girl, began singing in fado houses around 1939, and within a few years was singing in Paris, New York and Tokyo. She dared what purists hated, singing Camões and contemporary poets to new melodies by the composer Alain Oulman. When she died in 1999, Portugal declared three days of national mourning, and in 2001 she was laid to rest in the National Pantheon, under the white dome on the hill just above Alfama.
In November 2011 UNESCO inscribed fado on its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. A music that grew out of poverty, scandal and back streets, that was censored, recruited by a dictatorship, and then reinvented after 1974, now belongs officially to everyone. Yet it still lives in the same place it always did, in small rooms, among neighbours, late at night.
So here is the end of our walk, and a suggestion. Tonight, find a small fado house in Alfama or Mouraria, where the lights go down and someone says silêncio. When the singer closes her eyes and the guitar starts to tremble, think of Severa on Rua do Capelão, of Amália under her dome... and of that word with no translation, saudade, the longing for something you may never have had. That feeling is what Lisbon has been singing for two hundred years.