Alfama Survived the Earthquake That Wiped Out Half of Lisbon: You Can Still Tell

The district with a bath in its name

Alfama is one of the few Lisbon districts the 1755 earthquake left standing almost exactly as it was, and that includes something you can't see at a glance but explains itself once you know it: its name isn't Portuguese. It comes from the Arabic al-hamma, "the baths" or "the hot springs." Lisbon was under Islamic rule from the 8th century until 1147, and it was in that period that the district got the name it still carries today, after the mineral-medicinal springs that rise right here, over a geological fault documented on Lisbon's own geological map. Between the 17th and 19th centuries, several named bathhouses operated here — the Baños de Dona Clara, the Águas do Duque — fed by those same springs. It wasn't a passing use: those waters kept being tapped as public baths well into the 20th century, and for generations they fed the chafarizes, the district's public fountains, which still lend their name to several streets in Alfama.

A song with no birth certificate

Fado starts showing up in the historical record in Lisbon around the 1820s, sung in the working-class taverns of the riverside districts, Alfama among them. But unlike the district's name, no one has ever agreed on where it really came from. Portuguese and foreign musicologists have been arguing about it for over a century, and the dispute is still open today: there are at least three serious theories about its origin, and none has managed to fully win out over the others.

The melancholy of those who left by sea

The oldest theory is also the most romantic: the writer Pinto de Carvalho, in his 1903 História do Fado, placed it aboard the caravels of the Age of Discovery, sung by sailors putting separation and waiting into verse. Alfama and neighboring Mouraria, the districts closest to the port those ships sailed from and returned to, are exactly where tradition places the first people to sing it back on dry land.

The mark left by freed slaves

A good number of Portuguese fado historians back a different hypothesis: that it grew out of the songs of freed African slaves, settled in Lisbon's working-class districts in the early 19th century. They would have brought with them the lundum, an Afro-Brazilian song-and-dance form already circulating between Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro thanks to the heavy maritime traffic between the two ports.

What the court brought back from Brazil

A third theory looks upward, at the Portuguese court itself: it fled to Rio de Janeiro in its entirety in late 1807 ahead of the Napoleonic invasion, and didn't return to Lisbon until 1821. The British musicologist Rodney Gallop, one of the first to study fado in depth, recorded in the 1930s that singers themselves described their oldest fados as "of Brazilian origin" — probably because of the modinha, the sentimental song form the court brought back with it.

Three theories, no winner

Today, most specialists no longer look for a single origin: they understand fado as a genuine blend of all three currents — maritime, Afro-Brazilian and courtly — fused together in the same riverside districts between 1820 and 1840, alongside the rural songs that internal migrants themselves carried into the city. Sailors, freed slaves and exiled courtiers would have disagreed on almost everything, but they converged, without knowing it, on the very same handful of streets.