Fado has its roots in the bars and bordellos of Lisbon’s docklands and the tightly packed old neighborhoods of Alfama and Mouraria. Maria Severa, the earliest fado great, was a renowned lady of the night in early-19th-century Lisbon. The music’s disreputable origins are summed up in the painting O Fado by José Malhoa, on show in Lisbon’s Fado Museum.
Early in the 20th century, fado went mainstream. Although some maintained a bohemian edge, fado singers moved from backstreet bars to boulevard theaters, radio studios, and movie sets. Many casas de fado—fado houses—became chic restaurants. The Salazar dictatorship sought to sanitize fado, censoring lyrics and seeking to promote conservative values though the music.
Towering above all this was Amália Rodrigues, fado’s biggest name. From a poor background, she began singing as a teenager in the 1930s and became fado’s first global star. She sang lyrics penned by the nation’s greatest poets and popularized the song “April in Portugal,” later covered by the likes of Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, and Eartha Kitt.
Boosted by radio, cinema, and later TV, fado singers became household names. When Amália died in 1999, the government declared 3 days of national mourning. The crowds who packed Lisbon streets for her funeral were calculated in the
hundreds of thousands. The emotion shown for the diva’s passing sparked a revival of interest in fado and thrust a new generation of singers into the limelight.
Young singers like Mariza, Camané, and Ana Moura—who has sung with the Rolling Stones—have gone on to international success. Suddenly fado is sexy again. Alongside the posh, sometimes stuffy fado houses, new hip venues have sprung up. Uninhibited new stars are experimenting, adding piano, bass, and saxophone to the traditional guitars, blending elements of jazz, tango, and bossa nova. Current sensations include Carminho, Aldina Duarte, Raquel Tavares, and the exuberant Gisela João, hailed by some as the best voice since Amália.
The university city of Coimbra (see p. 294) has its own distinctive form of fado. There, it’s traditionally sung only by men, and the songs tend to have a lighter, more romantic feel, dating back to the days when lovesick students would sing nocturnal serenades beneath the windows of their latest flames.
A number of Portuguese pop bands have used fado and other folk elements to create a modern sound rooted in tradition. The most successful was Madredeus, whose haunting sound has won them an international following.
Portugal’s musical traditions go way beyond fado. From the powerful male-voice choirs formed by miners and farm workers in the southern Alentejo to the Celtic-tinged bagpipe music of the north, each region has a distinctive sound.
Singer-songwriters rooted in the folk tradition, but also taking in outside influences from French chanson to American protest songs, evolved in the 1960s and 1970s to produce a highly politicized sound in opposition to the long dictatorship. The major figure was José “Zeca” Afonso, whose songs range from biting political satire to lyrical evocations of the Portuguese countryside. When revolutionary soldiers seized the state radio station in the early hours of April 25, 1974, they played his banned song “Grândola, Vila Morena” over the airways as a signal to comrades to move to the next phase of the uprising that restored democracy. Zeca died in 1987, but other veterans of that era, like Sérgio Godinho, Vitorino, and Júlio Pereira, remain popular performers.
Portuguese jazz has its spiritual home in Lisbon’s Hot Club de Portugal, an archetypal basement dive that’s been bopping since the 1940s. Portuguese jazz musicians who have made international splashes include vocalist Maria João and pianist Mário Laginha. In 2017, jazz singer Salvador Sobral became a national hero when he became Portugal’s first winner of the Eurovision Song Festival, crooning a soulful ballad in complete contrast to the event’s usual kitsch offerings.
Portugal’s close ties with its former colonies mean that Lisbon nights echo with the sounds of Brazilian samba, Cape Verdean mornas, and Angola’s sensual kizomba music. The riverside B.Leza club is a legendary venue for live African music. Over the past decade, Buraka Som Sistema, a group from Lisbon’s northern suburbs, has found international success with its blend of techno beats and Angolan rhythms.
For classical music, the Lisbon-based Gulbenkian Orchestra is tops. In the north, Porto’s Casa da Música is a major venue. Lisbon’s gilded 18th-century São Carlos theater is the premier opera venue, while the modern Teatro Camões is home to the prestigious National Ballet Company.
A final word should go to pimba, a style scorned by city cool kids but wildly popular at rural festivals. It’s strangely similar to Germany’s Schlager music, involving singers belting out saucily suggestive up-tempo dance numbers backed by electric organ, guitar, and accordion. Performers tend to be curvaceous blondes or middle-aged guys flanked by scantily clad dancing girls.
Film
The good news for film fans heading to Portugal is that theaters there run movies in the original language with subtitles, rather than dubbing them. That means English-speakers are free to enjoy the latest Anglophone flicks in a mega-mall multiplex, in Lisbon’s cool Cinemateca movie museum, or in the capital’s few intimate arthouse theaters.
Portugal’s own movie industry was long dominated by one man, Manoel de Oliveira, who died in 2015 at the age of 106 as the world’s oldest working director. Oliveira’s often slow-moving and melancholic adaptations of literary works were loved by critics, less so by mass audiences. The most accessible of his movies is his first, Aniki-Bóbó, a tale of street urchins in 1940s Porto.
Two of the best recent films that have been hits with both critics and audiences have been Os Maias, João Botelho’s adaptation of the great 19th-century novel, and The Gilded Cage, a heartwarming comedy about Portuguese emigrants in Paris, by the promising young actor/director Ruben Alves.
3
The Lay of
the Land
Portugal is a roughly drawn rectangle on Europe’s southwestern seaboard. It’s about 550km (350 miles) from north to south, 200km (110 miles) from east to west. To the north and east it’s bordered by Spain. On the south and west it’s bathed by the Atlantic Ocean. There are two Atlantic island groups: Madeira lying off the coast of Morocco; and the nine Azores islands, a third of the way to Atlantic City.
As a general rule, the landscape north of the River Tagus is hilly and often rugged, while the south has softly rolling plains. Over 80% of Portugal’s 10.5 million people live in districts bordering the ocean, while the interior is thinly populated.
Within that general picture, regions vary greatly. The Algarve occupies the southern coastal strip. Separated from the rest of the country by low forested hills, it basks in a Mediterranean-type climate that facilitates the growth of orange, lemon, fig, and almond trees and draws tourists to its sheltered, south-facing beaches.
Above it lays the Alentejo, a region that covers a third of the country. Here the endless, sun-soaked grasslands bring to mind the African savannah, but with the baobabs replaced with umbrella pine, cork oak, and olive trees, and, instead of herds of antelope, flocks of sheep or black pigs rooting around for acorns. The Alentejo’s whitewashed towns and villages are among the country’s most beautiful, and the coast here is fringed with wild surfing beaches. Even in the Alentejo there are occasional hill ranges, like the Serra de Grândola overlooking the coast or the Serra de São Mamede topped by the stunning fortified town of Marvão overlooking the Spanish border.
The River Tagus, known in Portugal as the Tejo, cuts the country in half. “Alentejo” means “beyond the Tagus.” The river rises deep in Spain and reaches the Atlantic just downstream of Lisbon. East of the capital, the flat Tagus valley is characteristic of the Ribatejo region. This is cattle country. Local festivals feature bullfights and displays of horsemanship by campinos, the local cowboys, sporting red vests