Jardim Amália Rodrigues: A Garden for the Voice of Fado
Why is it significant?
Walk into the Jardim Amália Rodrigues at the very top of the hill and follow the path to the edge of its small lake. The traffic noise drops away, the grass slopes gently, and among it stands a large, gloriously rounded bronze mother and child by the Colombian sculptor Fernando Botero.
Key Facts
| Place | Jardim Amália Rodrigues: A Garden for the Voice of Fado |
|---|---|
| Address | Alameda Cardeal Cerejeira, 1070 Lisboa, Portugal |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.73220, -9.15470 |
| Part of Walk | Up the Avenida da Liberdade: Lisbon's Grand Boulevard from Restauradores to Parque Eduardo VII |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk into the Jardim Amália Rodrigues at the very top of the hill and follow the path to the edge of its small lake. The traffic noise drops away, the grass slopes gently, and among it stands a large, gloriously rounded bronze mother and child by the Colombian sculptor Fernando Botero.
The garden is named after Amália Rodrigues, the great voice of fado, born in Lisbon in 1920. She grew up poor, sold fruit on the quays as a girl, and went on to carry fado to stages from Paris to New York and Tokyo. Her voice made a song of the Lisbon backstreets into something the whole world recognised as Portuguese.
Her life was not simple. Under the dictatorship the regime held her up as a national symbol, and after 1974 some resented her for it, and for a while she was treated coldly in her own country. Time softened that judgement. When she died in 1999, Portugal declared national mourning, and in 2001 she became the first woman laid to rest in the National Pantheon.
Fado itself was born in the poor waterfront quarters of Lisbon in the nineteenth century, sung in taverns by sailors, laundresses and night birds. In 2011 UNESCO added it to the list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. Its key word is saudade, which has no exact translation: a longing for something absent and loved, perhaps lost, perhaps never had.
So the walk ends here, high above the city. You began at a square named for a restoration of independence, passed a funicular that carries a fresh grief, climbed a boulevard of cinemas to a ruthless rebuilder on his column, a park named for an old ally, and a monument to a revolution of flowers. Lisbon has a habit of putting its history in plain sight... and then planting a garden around it. Sit by the water for a while. After that climb, you have earned it.