Praça Martim Moniz
Why is it significant?
Here the narrow streets stop and the sky opens: a long, wide square with trams rattling past, traffic all around and the walls of the castle high on the hill above you. Everything around you feels too big for Mouraria, and there is a reason for that. First, the name.
Key Facts
| Place | Praça Martim Moniz |
|---|---|
| Address | Praça Martim Moniz, 1100-341 Lisboa, Portugal |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.71700, -9.13720 |
| Part of Walk | Mouraria, Cradle of Fado: From Maria Severa to Amália in Lisbon |
| Generated | Generated |
Here the narrow streets stop and the sky opens: a long, wide square with trams rattling past, traffic all around and the walls of the castle high on the hill above you. Everything around you feels too big for Mouraria, and there is a reason for that.
First, the name. In 1147 Afonso Henriques besieged Lisbon with the help of crusaders from England, Flanders and Germany who were on their way to the Holy Land. Legend says a knight called Martim Moniz saw a gate of the castle half-open during a sortie, and threw himself into the doorway so that it could not be shut. He was crushed to death, the Christians poured in, and the gate still carries his name. Historians doubt the details. Lisbon does not care, and the metro station is named after him too.
Now, the emptiness. Until the twentieth century the lower Mouraria was a dense knot of alleys, chapels and houses running right down to here. Between the 1930s and the 1960s the Estado Novo regime demolished much of it, including the old Igreja do Socorro, in the name of hygiene and modern traffic. Plans for grand avenues came and went, and for years the space was a wound, a car park and a building site. Many of the streets where the first fadistas had sung simply ceased to exist.
Fado has a song for that loss. Several fados mourn the old Mouraria and its lost streets, and fadistas still sing them as a kind of memorial. The regime praised fado on the radio while bulldozing the streets that had made it.
Today the square belongs to the new Mouraria, to food stalls, festivals and the communities who live nearby. Walk to its southern end, where a small white chapel stands at the corner of Rua da Mouraria, one of the few old buildings the demolitions left standing.