Rua do Capelão & Largo da Severa

Why is it significant?

You are on Rua do Capelão, a short, crooked street of small houses, washing lines and doorways painted in bright colours. On this street a monument shaped like a Portuguese guitar salutes the people who made Mouraria famous, because this is holy ground for fado.

Key Facts

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You are on Rua do Capelão, a short, crooked street of small houses, washing lines and doorways painted in bright colours. On this street a monument shaped like a Portuguese guitar salutes the people who made Mouraria famous, because this is holy ground for fado.

Here lived Maria Severa Onofriana, the first great name in the history of fado. She was born in 1820, the daughter of a tavern keeper, and she sang and played the guitar in the taverns of Mouraria. Lisbon talked about her voice, her temper and above all her love affair with the Count of Vimioso, an aristocrat, horseman and bullfighter. A count and a fadista from the alleys: Lisbon has never stopped telling that story.

It ended badly, as fado stories should. Severa died in 1846, here on Rua do Capelão, only twenty-six years old. Legend says that fadistas, women especially, wear a black shawl in mourning for her. It is probably not literally true, but the image of the singer in black has never left fado.

Her life became a myth very quickly. In 1901 the writer Júlio Dantas turned it into a play, A Severa, and in 1931 the director Leitão de Barros made it into a film, the first Portuguese talking picture. Through the screen, the Mouraria girl became a national heroine.

Take a good look at the guitar, too. The Portuguese guitar is pear-shaped, with twelve strings in six pairs and fan-shaped tuning pegs at the head. It descends from the English guitar, a type of cittern popular in the eighteenth century, and Lisbon turned it into the shimmering voice that weeps alongside the singer. Another king of this street was Fernando Maurício, born in Mouraria in 1933, a fadista the neighbourhood still calls its own. Now climb: take the lanes and steps uphill to the south-east, a steep two hundred metres, to Costa do Castelo, the street that runs along the flank of the castle hill.