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Résumé

This article explores Lisbon’s Fado Museum as an affective, material, symbolic, and performative site of memory in which different audiences such as tourists and the local fado community converge, without necessarily intersecting. We argue that the Fado Museum has evolved from a mere exhibiting space to become a multivalent “heritage infrastructure” that facilitates new spaces of agency in which novel forms of relating to —and dwelling in— heritage emerge. By recognizing the importance of the Fado Museum in the institutionalization and legimitization of fado as city heritage —and its significance to the social and symbolic production of Alfama as a fado neighborhood—, we ultimately aim to problematize the function of this kind of heritage infrastructures in the complex relationship between tourism, heritagization, and urban regeneration in the era of overtourism.

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Notes de la rédaction

Peer-reviewed article

Notes de l’auteur

This article is one of the results of the SR&TD Project “Sounds of Tourism”, funded by the FCT-Foundation for Science and Technology of Portugal (Grant PTDC/ART-PER/32417/2017) for which Iñigo Sánchez-Fuarros served as Principle Investigator. Iñigo Sánchez-Fuarros also acknowledges the support of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICIN) and the State Research Agency (AEI) through a Ramón & Cajal grant (RYC2018–026083-I) and a project grant (PID2020-118696RB-I00). Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco is grateful for the support of the Strategic Project of the Ethnomusicology Institute – Center for Studies in Music and Dance based at the NOVA University of Lisbon (Grant UIDB/00472/2020). Many thanks to Dr. Sara Pereira, director of the Fado Museum, for generously sharing her outlook about the Museum, and to the Museum’s staff for guiding Salwa through its collections and sharing their experience. Finally, we would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and valuable feedback on this paper.

Texte intégral

Introduction

  • 1 Other instruments or an orchestra are also used in addition to, or in substitution of fado’s standa (...)

1Fado —literally destiny— is a sung poetic genre that is rooted in Lisbon’s historical neighborhoods. A solo singer, male or female, is the central figure in fado performance and is usually accompanied by one or two guitarras (Portuguese guitar), a viola (an acoustic guitar) and a viola baixo (a bass guitar).1 The voice is regarded as the “… supreme medium for conveying the narratives and embodying the meanings and emotions embedded in the lyrics” (Castelo-Branco and Moreno, 2019, p. 65). Fado performance is an aesthetic and an emotional experience. It is a ritualized event that involves musicians and audience in a communicative process using verbal, musical and bodily discourse. Through performance, fadistas construct narratives and evoke emotions using the skillful interplay between words and melodies molded by vocal artistry in dialogue with instrumental accompaniment, and listeners’ response (Castelo-Branco, 1994). In addition, as ethnomusicologist Lila Ellen Gray argues, fado performance can be seen as “…existing on a rich and often intertexual continuum …, with performances of the everyday at one end, … and highly framed, formal or staged performances at the other” (2013, p. 7).

2Constituted as a symbol of Portuguese national cultural identity by the Estado Novo (New State), the authoritarian regime that ruled Portugal from 1933 up to 1974, fado was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2011. Popularly known as the song —and soul— of Lisbon, fado has also become a core component of Portugal’s tourism imaginaries and a central piece of Lisbon’s brand identity. As the popular Lonely Planet Pocket Lisbon travel guide claims, “there is no better way to tune into the Portuguese psyche than by listening to fado” (St Louise and Raub, 2022).

3Fado’s live musical ecosystem includes a diverse network of music institutions, commercial and non-commercial venues, amateur and professional musicians, aficionados, and diverse audiences. Its epicenter is located in Lisbon’s historical neighborhoods, particularly in Alfama —a former fishermen’s quarter well-known for its long legacy of fado practice and where most of the tourism-oriented casas de fado (fado houses) are located. Alfama is also home to the Fado Museum, a publicly funded institution inaugurated in 1998 whose mission is to promote fado, its artefacts and artists through permanent and temporary exhibits, and through myriad fado-related activities that take place on its premises, in other city venues and even abroad.

4This article focuses on the Fado Museum as an “affective, material, symbolic, and performative site of memory” (Cohen et al., 2014, p. 2) in order to explore how museums, tourism and the heritage complex are interrelated (Arrieta, 2012) in urban milieus experiencing increasing levels of tourism pressure. In this sense, the article points in two directions. On the one hand, it seeks to understand the role of the Museum in fado’s heritagization and the ways in which it has contributed to the construction of a particular discourse around this genre of urban song. On the other, it interrogates the role of the Museum (and fado at large) in the recent touristification of Alfama and its surrounding area. We argue that the ambivalent position of the Fado Museum in both processes strikes a balance between meeting the demands of tourist consumption—conditioned by its location, the popularity of fado as a tourist attraction and the tourists' own interests—and catering to the needs and expectations of fado musicians and aficionados, as well as interested Lisbon residents. As such, by focusing on an institution so relevant to the recent changes in the styles and practices of fado and which have not been the subject of scholarly attention, this article is a further contribution to the growing academic interest on this musical genre (Brito, 1994; Colvin, 2008; Costa and Guerreiro, 1984; Elliott, 2010; Gray, 2013; Vieira Nery, 2012; Pereira, 2011). It also represents the continuation of a line of research developed at the Ethnomusicology Institute - Center of Studies in Music and Dance over the past years on the relationship between fado and the processes of heritagization (Castelo-Branco, 1994; Castelo-Branco and Moreno, 2019), urban revitalisation (Sánchez-Fuarros, 2017) and the touristification of Lisbon (Sánchez-Fuarros, 2016; Sánchez-Fuarros and Lacerda, 2022).

5In this article, we tentatively draw on the notion of “social infrastructures” (Larkin, 2013) as a prism through which to observe the Fado Museum as more than just an exhibition space. For Klinenberg (2018), certain places and institutions, such as libraries or sports facilities, play a crucial role for the development of social connections. These social infrastructures are an integral part of the urban fabric. They are spaces where people socialize and make connections. In other words, social infrastructures “create affordances for social connection” (Latham and Layton, 2019, p. 3) which in turn enable the activation of networks of care. Building upon recent conceptualizations of the notion of (social) infrastructure (Corsín-Jiménez, 2014), we propose the notion of “heritage infrastructures” to describe those infrastructures or facilities that are not limited to the transmission and circulation of heritage practices and discourses, but that also facilitate new spaces of agency in which novel forms of relating to —and dwelling in— heritage might emerge. In this regard, we argue that the Fado Museum has evolved from a mere exhibiting space into a multivalent “heritage infrastructure” in which different audiences converge, without necessarily intersecting.

6The first section of the article examines the relationship between heritage infrastructures such as museums and urban renewal projects. The next section provides an overview of the urban development of Alfama, where the Fado Museum is located, from a poor and working-class neighborhood to a tourist destination. The section that follows introduces the Fado Museum as a heritage infrastructure with multiple dimensions, problematizing the relationship between intangible cultural heritage, tourism and its spaces of representation and consumption. We discuss intangible heritage as an object of museum display based on the musealisation of this Portuguese musical genre. We argue that the changes introduced in the permanent exhibit and the overarching mission of the museum as a heritage infrastructure should be seen in articulation with the preparation of the candidacy of fado to UNESCOS’s Representative List of Intangible Heritage that culminated in the genre’s inscription in 2011. The final section situates the museum in current debates about Lisbon's touristification. Our point here is that, despite fado becoming a valuable currency in the city's tourist economy, the Museum has managed to reconcile its original mission as a heritage infrastructure with its new status as a tourist attraction.

I. Heritage infrastructures, tourism and urban renewal

7In an age of uncertainty and insecurity such as the current one, the recovery, preservation and protection of objects, places, and practices “from the past, in the present, for the future” (Harrison, 2015), has gained momentum as tools for building a collective sense of belonging and identity. Heritage practices and discourses permeate the most varied domains of everyday life, from advertising to cultural policies, and grass-roots initiatives that explore different modes of heritage making. This “heritage boom” (Winter, 2013) speaks not only about the commodification of the past, but also about our anxieties regarding precarious future scenarios, as well as our need to build anchor points for collective action.

8Heritage is a contested concept. Critical heritage scholars have moved away from the idea of heritage as a quality that is inherent to things, to instead approach heritage as a social construct characteristic of Western modernity (Campbell and Smith, 2011; Byrne, 2008). Valdimar Haftsein considers heritage “as an active intervention through which things, sites, practices and expressions are incorporated into administrative structures that lend them legitimacy and value” (Hafstein, 2004), a perspective that calls for a critical examination of the logics, characteristics and effects of the dominant heritage regimes (Bendix et al., 2012) upon those objects, places and practices labelled as “heritage”. The ways heritage is used “has consequences for the individual, community, national, and global understanding of self and ‘other’” (Smith, 2012, p. 393). In particular, heritage “also affects the lives of musicians, communities, their expressive practices and location in a globalized world” (Castelo-Branco 2022, p. 71).

9As a mode of “cultural production that adds value to the outmoded” (Kishenblatt-Gimblett, 2004), cultural heritage is becoming increasingly embedded in urban regeneration projects in cities across the world. Tangible and intangible cultural heritage are often invoked —and activated— as levers to intervene in derelict urban areas, restore social pride, and increase the attractiveness of a place. The use of heritage as a strategy for urban renewal responds to its value as a tool for the formation of cultural identities. In the words of Agustín Cócola-Gant, “cultural identity has gone from being a key element in the construction of nation states to a competitive advantage in the international market of cities” (2009, p. 103).

10Tourism, heritage infrastructures —such as the one discussed in this article— and urban regeneration are interrelated phenomena that cannot be understood separately. In fact, bringing the past back to life and adapting it to the present is often the motto of urban interventions, in which heritage might be linked to particular safeguarding programs such as UNESCO’s World Heritage Cities program, or is simply deployed as a bargaining chip in the global capital marketplace in which cities bid to compete to attract visitors and investment. This is particularly the case in historic centers and monumental areas in tourist urban destinations, where museums and other cultural infrastructures might also play a significant role in advancing certain urban development agendas, as the creation in the late 1990s of a museum dedicated to fado in Lisbon’s Alfama neighbourhood exemplifies.

II. The transformation of Alfama into a “destination fado”

  • 2 The initiative to revitalize Alfama was part of a tourist and cultural campaign of the Estado Novo (...)

11Alfama is Lisbon's oldest neighborhood. To the “tourist gaze” (Urry, 1990) it is also its most picturesque one. The prominence of Alfama in the city's urban imaginary is the result of an intricate web of discourses and images, ranging from the exotic to the familiar (Costa, 2008). These narratives often evoke —and highlight— the area’s tangible and intangible heritage as genuine traits of its distinctive cultural identity: The labyrinthine urban mesh of narrow passages, alleyways and stairways that results from the historical urban grid of this former fishermen's quarter located on the banks of the Tagus River; the small palaces on the hillside leading up to the São Jorge Castle which bear witness to the splendor of maritime trade; or fado practice and popular festivities that are living witnesses to the continuity of expressive practices that link the neighborhood to its popular and working-class past. This image of “typicity” that is associated with Alfama is a relatively modern creation: The cultural policies of the Estado Novo turned Alfama into an exemplar of an “urban village”, a close-knit community with its own traditions that structure social life, where certain ideas of authenticity materialized through the careful staging of architectural features and activities that echoed times bygone (Costa, 2008; Melo, 2010).2

12Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, depopulation and the ageing of local residents caused the physical, economic, social and symbolic decline of Lisbon's historic neighborhoods. Alfama, with a ruinous housing stock and without access to many public services, was no exception. In 1986, the first Gabinete Técnico Local (Local Technical Office) was created under the Programa de Reabilitação Urbana (Urban Rehabilitation Program) to counteract the neighborhood’s physical and social degradation. In the 1990s, the area was the object of an ambitious urban rehabilitation plan called Projecto Integrado de Reabilitação Urbana “Chafariz de Dentro” (Integrated Urban Rehabilitation Project “Chafariz de Dentro”). This program targeted Alfama’s most emblematic public square —the Largo do Chafariz de Dentro— and the surrounding area. Whereas previous interventions aimed at renovating derelict buildings and improving residents’ living conditions, the Projecto Integrado “Chafariz de Dentro” represented a slightly different approach: It focused on the embellishment of the built environment, the creation of new cultural infrastructures, and the enhancement of the area’s visibility and attractiveness. As Cócola-Gant and Gago (2019) demonstrate, Alfama moved from a phase of abandonment and decline to a new phase of physical upgrading in a relatively short period, escalating property prices and fueling social change.

  • 3 A Casa de Fado or Restaurante Típico (Fado House or Typical Restaurant) is a professional fado rest (...)

13Simultaneously, Alfama began to be promoted as a “destination fado”, paraphrasing Zukin’s famous formulation in which she describes the construction of unique and recognizable place identities for urban consumption (Zukin, 2009). As a form of popular culture, fado has been deeply ingrained in the everyday practices, representations and discourses about the neighborhood. Writing in the 1980s, sociologists Firmino da Costa and Guerreiro (Costa and Guerreiro, 1984) describe a run-down neighborhood in transformation, where fado practice was alive and structured around different spaces of local sociability along a continuum bounded by notions of formality and informality. At one end, there were the exclusive casas de fado or restaurantes típicos, patronized mostly by tourists and Portuguese upper-middle classes from outside the neighborhood.3 At the other, there were neighborhood civic associations and popular tascas [taverns] where fado used to be occasionally performed and which were patronized mostly by the local population.

14Little remains of the Alfama described by Costa and Guerreiro, and yet this fadista past is still very much alive in the neighbourhood’s tourist imagery. Today Alfama concentrates most of Lisbon’s commercial fado venues. In a 2016 study, Inês Fonseca Rodrigues (2016) identified around 30 establishments that offer fado performances on a regular basis, a number that has undoubtedly increased since then. In addition to the traditional fado houses, there is a proliferation of other types of venues for fado consumption: from bars and restaurants that offer occasional “amateur” fado sessions to Airbnb experiences and private performances in unusual places. Lila Ellen Gray associates this new fado economy of hybrid-venues that flourished around the popularity of Lisbon as a tourist destination to what she calls “low-cost listening” (Gray, 2018).

III. Fado: An Object of Museum Display

  • 4 An annual program launched by the European Union in 1985 which, upon application, confers the title (...)

15The Fado Museum did not emerge in a vacuum. It was conceived, on the one hand, as the centerpiece of the Projecto Integrado “Chafariz de Dentro” discussed above, which was one of the many projects that aimed at modernizing Lisbon by expanding cultural infrastructures and projecting the city in the international arena through large scale events such as Lisbon ‘94 European Capital of Culture4 and the Expo’98 World Fair. On the other hand, the emergence of the Fado Museum also needs to be framed within an institutional strategy of valorization and heritagization of fado at a moment when interest in the genre was at a low point.

16Following the April 25th 1974 coup d’état that overthrew the authoritarian regime that lasted for almost fifty years, fado faced considerable hostility especially from the extreme left political and cultural sectors that, amid revolutionary fervor, associated fado and many of its practitioners (including the celebrated Amália Rodrigues) with the deposed regime’s ideology and strategy (Viera Nery 2012, p. 362). By the mid-1980s, fado slowly regained its pride of place, and by the 1990s new interest in the genre emerged among several young musicians who sought to create a popular music idiom drawing on fado, while at the same time embodying the emerging identity of post-revolutionary Portugal as a “modern” European nation. In the 1990s and 2000s, a new generation of fadistas, instrumentalists, and composers revitalized the genre, providing it with unprecedented visibility abroad, mainly through the world music circuit. The preparation of the application for the inscription of Fado on UNESCO’s Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage, spearheaded by the Fado Museum, was also part of this strategy of valorizing fado as (intangible) cultural heritage (Castelo-Branco and Moreno 2019).

  • 5 This digitalized collection can be accessed online at https://arquivosonoro.museudofado.pt

17The first attempt to showcase fado in a museum space was a temporary exhibition held at Lisbon’s Ethnology Museum curated by anthropologist and fado scholar Joaquim Pais de Brito as part of the celebrations of Lisbon ‘94 - European Capital of Culture. Based on interdisciplinary research by a team of anthropologists and an ethnomusicologist (co-author Castelo-Branco), the exhibition represents Brito’s reading of fado as a “form of urban popular culture produced and reproduced in Lisbon”, as well as its appropriations in rural Portugal (Brito, 1994, p. 13). Anchored on an interpretation of the multiple meanings attributed to the physical and metaphorical fado voices, as ethnographer Kimberly Holton cogently argues, this cutting edge multisensorial exhibition proposed “chronologically ordered displays and auditory stagings of fado … [challenging] museum-goers to decipher ambient audioscapes as they gazed at material documents, melding sights and sounds into dramatized mise-en-scène of fado's historical origins and contemporary life” (Holton, 2002, p. 118). Brito’s curatorial project also catalyzed multidisciplinary research on fado’s history and contemporary practices, audiovisual documentation of selected fado scenes, the reedition of some of the genre’s historical recordings and publications, calling attention to the importance of historical recordings of fado, in anticipation of the acquisition by Lisbon’s Municipal Government and Portugal’s central Government of a collection of historical recordings of fado. Deposited at the Fado Museum, the collection was digitalized and is accessible online.5

18A landmark exhibition, “Fado, Vozes e Sombras” pioneered the musealization and heritagization of fado, a process that would be institutionalized four years later by the opening in 1998 of the Casa do Fado e da Guitarra Portuguesa, the Fado Museum’s initial name, on the doorsteps of Alfama. The initial years were not easy:

“Everything had to be done. It was necessary to gather an exhibition for the museum that was going to open in September. So we were visiting casas de fado every night, and at first it was hard, it really was... from an emotional point of view, so to speak, because the fado milieu was not receptive to this at all... ah, it was horrible!” (Interview with Sara Pereira, February 27, 2020)

19Sara Pereira, the Museum’s current director and principal curator, recalls the resistance of Alfama’s residents in relation to the construction of the Museum, that was perceived back then as superfluous to the real needs of the local population:

“I admit that it was not easy for people who lived in extremely run-down homes, with no bathrooms, to see the museum rehabilitated right in front of them and they continued with their serious dramas. This initially caused some resistance”. (Interview with Sara Pereira, February 27, 2020)

20Moreover, the Museum’s working team, a group of young female workers with no prior connections to the fado scene, had to face the mistrust of the male-dominated local fado community, which, in Pereira’s words, “was a complicated milieu that was quite resistant to the creation of the Museum” (ibid.). To subvert and counteract these dynamics, the Museum set up an advisory board that included well-respected fado artists such as Carlos do Carmo and Argentina Santos whose main role was to mediate the relationship between the Museum and the fado community.

21The first permanent exhibition at the Casa do Fado e da Guitarra Portuguesa combined a museological narrative of the genre’s history with a synchronous recreation of several of fado’s spaces and associated atmospheres (a fado house, a tavern, a workshop for guitar construction), which, in a way, recalled the exhibition curated by Pais de Brito at the Museum of Ethnology a few years earlier. This mimetic gesture symbolically connected this new infrastructure to the “harsh” and “wary” fado neighborhood across the square.

IV. The Refounding of the Fado Museum

22Ten years following the launching of the Casa do Fado e da Guitarra Portuguesa, Lisbon’s museological infrastructure for fado was refounded and renamed the Fado Museum. Drawing on funding from the European Union, the facilities were refurbished and expanded from two rooms to three floors, the Museum’s collection was greatly increased with art works featuring fado performers and different scenarios of fado performance by famous painters, vernacular artifacts, musical instruments, as well as written, sound, and audiovisual documents. In addition, the Museum’s mission was redefined as “collecting and safeguarding documentation, promoting research and instruction on different aspects of fado, and disseminating knowledge about the genre6. In the words of its director and curator, the institution was reconceptualized as a “museum without walls”, an “interpretation center”, a “point of departure for the discovery of fado”. (Interview with Sara Pereira, February 27, 2020)

23Curated by the Museum’s director, art historian Sara Pereira, the permanent exhibition, launched in 2008, proposes a historical narrative of fado, based on musicologist Rui Vieira Nery’s scholarly reading of the genre’s history (Vieira Nery, 2004). An assemblage of material and sonic fragments outline the social and political contexts in which the genre originated and evolved, the multiple dimensions of the world of professional fado and its main stars, and the articulation of fado with the media (the revue theater, fado journals, sound recordings, and film). The museological circuit is anchored on a set of emblematic paintings that were assembled from other museum collections, featuring estheticized readings of fado’s memory (like José Malhoa’s famous 1910 emblematic painting entitled O Fado - The Fado - evoking the supposedly foundational figure of fado, the prostitute Maria Severa and her aristocratic lover the Count of Vimioso), articulated with vernacular artefacts, historical exemplars of the iconic Portuguese guitar, selected documents (record jackets, sheet music, posters, fado journals), iconography, and audiovisual representations of fado in the media (revue theater, film, concerts). The permanent collection privileges individual listening and silence, a key ingredient in the appropriate listening behavior of fado performance. Visitors wander through the museum’s halls holding audio-guides to their ears to listen to the examples of fado and the historical narrative of its trajectory. As a visitor put it, “it [the museum] feels like an art gallery”.

Figure 1. The Fado Museum’s permanent exhibition. Photo: José Frades

Figure 1. The Fado Museum’s permanent exhibition. Photo: José Frades

courtesy of the Fado Museum

24This was not always the case. The sonic ambience of the original museographical project was the subject of contention, as the overlapping of different music tracks produced a cacophonic aural experience for the museum visitors. In Sara Pereira’s words:

“We also had to rethink the sound part of our exhibition circuit, because our museum is quite small, and in the previous exhibition we heard the visitors say ‘I want to hear Fado Mouraria, I press a button, the neighbor next door wants to hear Fado Menor’, and suddenly there is a confusion of sounds. So we decided... let's privilege silence”. (Interview with Sara Pereira, February 27, 2020)

  • 7 Alfama’s fado festival was launched in 2013. It has been organized by the Música no Coração (a comp (...)

25The Museum is not just a repository of artefacts, objects and narratives about Fado. The Museum organizes and sponsors myriad outreach activities, including regular performances by emerging and established fado singers on its premises and in prestigious venues in Lisbon like to the Centro Cultural de Belem, “conversations” with fado musicians, formal instruction in the Portuguese guitar and the writing of fado lyrics, and workshops on guitar construction. The Museum’s activities also extend to other museums and to the streets of historical neighborhoods such as Alfama and Mouraria through the “Guided Singing Tours” and “Sung Visits”, street performances by fado singers. In addition, the Museum organizes fado annual festivals in several European and Latin American capitals and participates in the organization and hosting of an annual fado festival that takes place in several squares and venues in Alfama as well is in the Museum’s patio7.

Figure 2. “Sung visit” in the Fado Museum’s premises

Figure 2. “Sung visit” in the Fado Museum’s premises

Photo: José Frades (courtesy of the Fado Museum)

  • 8 According to the Fado Museum’s website, in 2023 the Museum’s publications include 49 catalogues and (...)

26To complement the permanent exhibition, the Museum regularly launches and organizes temporary exhibits on themes such as: fado in the media (Revue theater, film), key musicians (Alain Oulman, José Pracana, Celeste Rodrigues among others), musical instruments and technologies, representations of fado in paintings, most of which resulted in lushly illustrated catalogues on the featured topics. In addition to the catalogues, the Museum publishes books on the genre’s history and main figures and CDs mostly featuring emergent artists.8 The Museum also houses a documentation center and a gift shop where its publications and other CDs, books and objects relating to fado can be purchased. The Fado Museum is also present in the virtual space through a dedicated website in Portuguese and English, a delocalized archive that reframes fado’s histories and the trajectories of its practitioners, provides access to historical recordings, sheet music, early fado journals, fado lyrics, seminal publications, as well as the documentation pertaining to the application of fado to UNESCO’s Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage. The website also serves as a platform for announcing the Museum’s mission, history, permanent and temporary exhibits, activities, and publications (online editions of books and catalogues, and a list of CDs). It also features an itinerary of Fado Houses that includes a brief history of each venue and the names of the artists who perform there.

27The refounding of the Fado Museum in 2008 and its gradual development into a “heritage infrastructure” should be examined within the context of the discursive construction of fado as intangible cultural heritage through two parallel initiatives with major public visibility in which the fado museum was engaged. The first initiative involved the acquisition by the Ministry of Culture and Lisbon’s Municipal Government of a large collection of 78 rpm recordings of fado, published during the first half of the twentieth century, that was owned by the British collector Bruce Bastin and stored in London, and the subsequent media campaign lasting for almost a decade emphasizing its value as a repository of cultural memory, and mobilizing public opinion to call for its “repatriation” by the Portuguese State (Sardo, 2017). Acquired by the Ministry of Culture and Lisbon’s Municipal government in 2010, the collection was housed at the newly refurbished Fado Museum, digitalized and made accessible through the Museum’s website as previously mentioned. The second initiative was the intention to inscribe fado on UNESCO’s Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, announced by the then President of Lisbon’s Municipal government in 2004 which reinforced the argument for the acquisition of the collection of fado’s historical recordings (Sardo, 2017). The application to UNESCO’s Masterpieces program did not go forward. Instead, the Fado Museum spearheaded a research plan in collaboration with the Nova University of Lisbon Institute for Ethnomusicology, and a mediatized campaign that culminated in Fado’s inscription on UNESCO’s Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2011.

V. Curating Fado for the Tourist Gaze

28In June 2011, five months before fado was inscribed on UNESCOS’s ICH list, the Portuguese government requested a €78 billion bailout package from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union to stabilize its public finances following the financial crisis of 2008, a decision that would lead to years of austerity and cutbacks. Whereas this event undermined the morale of the Portuguese people and plunged the country into uncertainty, UNESCO’s recognition of fado had an opposite effect, triggering a sense of pride not only among fado aficionados but also in the population at large. As Carlos do Carmo, a renowned fadista and ardent supporter of the candidacy9, declared, “this news brought me great happiness… A country that was not always in love with fado, but that I am sure today is proud of it10.

29Tourism is the phenomenon that links these two apparently unconnected events —the economic crisis and the declaration of fado as ICH— with regard to recent developments in fado’s music ecosystem, for the attraction of foreign tourism and investment were the main pathways for economic recovery after the collapse of Portugal’s economy. In this process, fado became a major asset for the promotion of Lisbon as a tourism destination.

30The relationship between fado and tourism is not new. The Estado Novo supported the folklorization of local expressive cultural practices regarded as “traditional” (Castelo-Branco and Freitas Branco, 2003; Silva, 2010), a strategy that was not only profitable in terms of tourism, but also helped to sustain the political regime and its nationalist ideology. Fado and folkloric groups were two of the expressive modes that were mobilized to promote the regime, and to attract tourism, especially following World War II. In democracy, as Alexandra N. Klein and Vera M. Alves argue the economic viability of fado houses depended on the number of tourists they were able to attract (Klein and Alves, 1994, p. 45). They also noted how the weight of this type of clientele partly explains the way these places sell themselves. In their words, “fado appears as part of a package, together with folkloric dances, Portuguese cuisine and exquisite service and hospitality” (ibid.). Gray, for her part, points to the convergence between fado, tourism and the fetishization of Lisbon’s mythic fado neighborhoods as a result of the Estado Novo’s cultural policy (Gray, 2013, p. 113), a long-standing association that persists to this day.

31This association is rooted in the affective qualities fado’s soulful sonority elicits in the local urban environment (Colvin, 2008; Elliott, 2010; Gray, 2013). Lisbon is a common trope in fado lyrics. Lila Ellen Gray refers to this sub-genre of fado that portray the city’s streets, neighborhoods, churches and other lieux de mémoire (Nora, 1989) as “place-name fados” (Gray, 2013, p. 108). These depictions of the urban milieu often present us with a nostalgic image of the city that evokes places frozen in a bygone time. As she observes, “fado's stylized sonic icons of instrumental and vocal weeping affectively shape circulating imaginaries of Lisbon as nostalgia” (Gray, 2013, p. 106). Yet this urban nostalgia embedded in fado’s repertoire is not simply something from a bygone past but rather resonates in the present, for nostalgia —as a quality strongly associated with the city’s character— was used as Lisbon’s “savior” during the 2008 financial crisis (Tucker, 2015). As Tucker argues, nostalgia —and its corollary, authenticity— were important components to lure foreign tourists to Lisbon in the aftermath of the crisis. Actually, some authors have conceptualized certain forms of travel as “nostalgic tourism” (Russell, 2008), and certainly many of those visiting Lisbon could fall into this category. If the ghosts of the Portuguese crisis were exorcised by the local population to the tune of protest songs (Gray, 2016), the soundtrack of the economic recovery following the crisis was made up of new sonic ambiances produced by tourism (Sánchez-Fuarros, 2022; Paiva and Sánchez-Fuarros, 2021), amongst them the pervasiveness of fado as the sonic expression of tourist Lisbon. Listening to a live fado performance in a casa de fado in one of the city’s historical neighborhoods is featured in tourist guides and other promotional materials as an indispensable ingredient of the “Lisbon experience”.

32Parallel to Lisbon's transformation into a tourist city, the popularity of fado grew significantly after the recognition by UNESCO. The new status of fado as sanctioned intangible cultural heritage increased its value as a major tourist asset, playing an active role in the institutional strategies to promote the city as a tourist destination. Moreover, fado increased its presence on Lisbon’s urban landscape, being featured as part of revitalization projects (Sánchez-Fuarros, 2016), urban art interventions, guided tours and all kinds of tourism experiences (Gray, 2018).

Figure 3. A tourist bike tour in front of the Fado Museum.

Figure 3. A tourist bike tour in front of the Fado Museum.

Photo: Iñigo Sánchez-Fuarros

33Although it is difficult to establish a clear correlation of cause and effect between the impact of Fado's status as part of UNESCO’s Representative List of ICH and the increase in cultural tourism in the city, Sara Pereira believes that it has been a positive relationship:

Despite this [opportunism], the impact of the [application to UNESCO’s Representative List of ICH] … I think that fado has been an added value for tourism, a reciprocal relation”. (Interview with Sara Periera, 14 Feb. 2022)

34The Fado Museum has played an ambiguous role in these dynamics of urban transformation. It is undeniable that the construction of the Museum in an abandoned water station at the gateway to Alfama was intented to revitalise the area by creating an outward-facing cultural infrastructure. In this sense, it could be argued that the Fado Museum was an unintentional Trojan horse for the touristification that was to come two decades later. Moreover, the presence of the Fado Museum in a neighborhood with an important symbolic capital linked to this Portuguese musical genre has only helped to fix the image of Alfama as a fado neighborhood. And yet, the development of the Fado Museum as a “heritage infrastructure” has followed a slightly different path, more focused on building a “fado community” outside the tourist circuits.

35Nonetheless, the Fado Museum is a major tourist attraction. In 2022, 80% of the of the Museum’s annual visitors were tourists. It is not only among the city monuments and museums that receive the highest proportion of foreign visitors, but the vast majority of its visitors are also first-time visitors (83%). According to its director, there has been an exponential increase in the number of tourists visiting the permanent exhibition, an observation that can be corroborated by comparing the latest numbers with the findings of a survey carried out by a team of sociologists from ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon between 2012 and 2013, which concluded that international tourists accounted for two thirds of all visitors (Costa, 2014).

36In the absence of in-depth qualitative research on tourists' motivations for visiting the Museum, and drawing on informal conversations with the Museum’s staff and some of its visitors, we can infer that a visit to Fado Museum is often included as part of the basic route of an average "tourist visit" to Lisbon. The Museum is highlighted in the "Heritage & Culture" section of the Lisbon Tourism website as “one of the must-visit places in Lisbon”. It is also located in one of the most touristic hotspots in the city and just 200 meters from the main cruise terminal. In fact, the Fado Museum has proven a popular attraction among cruise passengers. After a strenuous day walking up and down the hills, the Museum’s facilities provide a calm and relaxing environment before returning to the vessel docked nearby. Thus, we can think of the Fado Museum as one of the many "nodes" in the city's complex tourism ecosystem.

37On the other hand, Lisbon’s recent tourist boom compelled many cultural infrastructures to integrate into the complex mechanism of the contemporary tourism industry, adapting their operations to suit the tourist experience and expectations. In the case of the Fado Museum, however, no major changes have been made to the conception of the permanent exhibition. In fact, its museological design has remained virtually unchanged since it opened back in 2008. Only a few small organizational and operational changes were introduced to cater to their mostly tourist public. One of the main changes was the requirement for the museum staff to have a higher education degree and fluency in foreign languages. The other major change was the availability of audio-guides offering pre-recorded commentary on the exhibit in four languages: Portuguese, English, French and Spanish. Included in the ticket price, the audio-guides allow the visitor to conduct their visit according to the suggested circuit and acquire more information on the exhibits. The recorded discourse is scholarly and rigorous. The audio-guide also includes a vast repertoire of commercially recorded fados that are associated to particular objects on display. The Museum also offers guided tours for groups in different languages that need to be booked in advance. The artworks and objects’ labels are both in English and Portuguese.

38The museum's resilience in not succumbing to the siren songs of mass tourism lies in the fact that, unlike other museums and monuments in the city, the viability and financial sustainability of the Fado Museum neither depends exclusively on its foreign visitors, nor on the revenue generated through ticket sales. It receives a generous budget allocation from Lisbon’s Municipality to cover its running costs, and much of its income comes from the outreach activities it organizes outside the Museum’s facilities. As a multivalent heritage infrastructure in which different audiences converge, without intersecting, the Fado Museum is more than an exhibition space: it is simultaneously a heritage infrastructure and a tourist attraction.

Conclusion

39Twenty-five years following its creation and fifteen years since its permanent exhibition was inaugurated, a display that has been largely maintained up to the present, the Fado Museum has developed into one of the most dynamic heritage infrastructures in Lisbon and one of the Portuguese capital’s most visited museums. The suggested itinerary is based on a narrative of Fado’s history, from its origins up to the present, emphasizing emblematic figures, musical instruments, stylistic developments, and the central role of the media. The permanent exhibition combines material objects with art works, and sound and audiovisual recordings that can be accessed through the audio-guide and listening and viewing posts. The Museum space feels like an art gallery, welcoming quiet and contemplative visitors, and promoting individual listening, an experience that contrasts with the affective experience of live performance in fado houses and other fado venues. Throughout its history, the Fado Museum also curated several dozen temporary exhibitions, featuring the legacy of key figures in the genre’s history, the role of the media, among other themes.

40In this paper, we have analyzed the Fado Museum as a heritage infrastructure where the tourism and the heritage industries intersect. We have argued that the Museum, has remained on the fringes of the tourist pressure affecting the city as a whole, thanks to its financial autonomy and rigorous scientific and technical approach to exhibiting fado. Thus, the Fado Museum has managed to strike a balance between meeting the demands of tourist consumption and catering to the needs and expectations of fado musicians and aficionados, as well as Lisbon’s residents who are interested in this musical genre.

41However, the creation of the museum in such an emblematic and well-known neighborhood as Alfama cannot be isolated from the neighborhood’s subsequent transformation into a tourist destination. In fact, the promotion of fado as a distinctive feature of the local cultural identity within a calculated strategy of urban branding illustrates the ambivalent use of heritage in the process of selling places. On the one hand, the decision to locate the Museum in a place with such a significant and long legacy of fado history and practice provided legitimacy to such an institution. On the other, fado-related businesses that flourished in Alfama in the heat of the neighborhood's touristification also capitalized on the prestige that the Museum conferred —and continues to confer— to the neighborhood. In the face of the loss of Alfama’s population under the pressure of transforming local housing into Airbnb, the dwindling of vernacular spaces for the practice of fado and its concentration into the tourist circuit, the Fado Museum faces the challenge of maintaining the balance between its mission as a heritage infrastructure in which the fundamental value is not the object but the subject that confers them with meaning, and its role as one of Lisbon’s tourist sites.

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Notes

1 Other instruments or an orchestra are also used in addition to, or in substitution of fado’s standard accompaniment.

2 The initiative to revitalize Alfama was part of a tourist and cultural campaign of the Estado Novo that included the restoration of landmark monuments, the rehabilitation of public spaces the creation of some facilities and the improvement of infrastructures, all under a discourse of "preserving tradition".

3 A Casa de Fado or Restaurante Típico (Fado House or Typical Restaurant) is a professional fado restaurant that features Portuguese cuisine and regular fado performances by a resident cast of fadistas, usually accompanied by a guitarra and a viola. These professional fado venues were established and regulated in the 1930s by the Estado Novo. Mostly situated in Lisbon’s historical neighborhoods, especially Alfama and Bairro Alto, evenings in these expensive fado restaurants usually consist of performances by the resident fadistas of sets of three or four fados, alternated with food service. The evening usually begins with the less experienced and ends with the most experienced fadistas. Casas de Fado are usually decorated with pictures of famous fadistas and guitarristas, as well as objects associated with bull fighting, or evoking rural areas, and/or Lisbon’s historical neighborhoods. Many well-known fadistas regularly performed in these venues that have been serving as a source of livelihood and a training ground for many professional fadistas (Gray, 2013, pp. 98 - 100; Klein and Alves, 1994; Vieira, Nery, 2010, pp. 444 -446).

4 An annual program launched by the European Union in 1985 which, upon application, confers the title of European Capital of Culture and some funding to one or several European cities. The designated city or cities organize their cultural programs that are often articulated with urban regeneration projects and the construction or renewal of cultural infrastructures (performance venues, museums, etc.) that can vary in scope and scale. As Sassatelli points out, the European Capitals of Culture can be envisaged as a symbolic initiative that contributes to the making of an European ‘imagined community’ (Sassatelli 2002, p. 436).

5 This digitalized collection can be accessed online at https://arquivosonoro.museudofado.pt

6 https://www.museudofado.pt/en/mission-en

7 Alfama’s fado festival was launched in 2013. It has been organized by the Música no Coração (a company that promotes and produces music events and owns several radio stations) and sponsored by the bank Caixa Geral de Depósitos (2013 - 2017 ) and by the lay charity Santa Casa de Misericórdia (since 2018). The Festival features both emergent and well established fadistas and guitarristas.

8 According to the Fado Museum’s website, in 2023 the Museum’s publications include 49 catalogues and other books, and 12 CDs: https://www.museudofado.pt/en/editions/publications.

9 Carlos do Carmo and internationally renowned fadista Mariza were appointed by Lisbon’s municipality as the candidacy’s “ambassadors”.

10 https://www.publico.pt/2011/11/27/culturaipsilon/noticia/reacoes-a-entrada-do-fado-na-lista-da-unesco-1522760

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Table des illustrations

Titre Figure 1. The Fado Museum’s permanent exhibition. Photo: José Frades
Crédits courtesy of the Fado Museum
URL http://journals.openedition.org/viatourism/docannexe/image/9712/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 168k
Titre Figure 2. “Sung visit” in the Fado Museum’s premises
Crédits Photo: José Frades (courtesy of the Fado Museum)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/viatourism/docannexe/image/9712/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 448k
Titre Figure 3. A tourist bike tour in front of the Fado Museum.
Crédits Photo: Iñigo Sánchez-Fuarros
URL http://journals.openedition.org/viatourism/docannexe/image/9712/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 467k
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Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco et Iñigo Sánchez-Fuarros, « The Fado Museum: Heritage Infrastructure or Tourist Attraction? », Via [En ligne], 23 | 2023, mis en ligne le 28 août 2023, consulté le 10 avril 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/viatourism/9712 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/viatourism.9712

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Auteurs

Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco

Nova University of Lisbon. Salwa EL-Shawan Castelo-Branco. Professor Emerita of Ethnomusicology, founder and President Emerita of the Instituto de Etnomusicologia – Centro de Estudos em Música e Dança, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal; former President of the International Council for Traditional Music (2013 – 2021) and Vice President of SEM (2007-2009). She received her doctorate from Columbia University, taught at New York University (1979-1982), was visiting professor at Columbia University, Princeton University; Tinker Professor at Chicago University and Overseas Visiting Scholar at St. John’s College, Cambridge University. Main publications include: Transforming Ethnomusicology (co-editor with Beverly Diamond, Oxford University Press 2021); Portugal and Spain: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture, with Susana Moreno Fernàndez. Global Music Series. New York and London: Oxford University Press 2019); Enciclopédia da Música em Portugal no Século XX (4 vols) (ed.), Lisboa: Círculo de Leitores/Temas e Debates (2010); Music and Conflict. (co-editor with John O’Connell and author of the Epilogue), Urbana: Illinois University Press (2010); Traditional Arts in Southern Arabia: Music and Society in Sohar, Sultante of Oman (with Dieter Christensen), Berlin: VWB Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung (2009).

Iñigo Sánchez-Fuarros

Institute of Heritage Sciences. INCIPIT, CSIC. Iñigo Sánchez-Fuarros is Ramón y Cajal senior postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Heritage Sciences (INCIPIT-CSIC) in Santiago de Compostela (Spain). He holds a PhD in Anthropology (University of Barcelona). Previously, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Ethnomusicology Institute – Center for Studies in Music and Dance of the NOVA University of Lisbon (Portugal)and Queen’s University Belfast (UK). He is the author of Cubaneando en Barcelona: música, migración y experiencia urbana (CSIC, 2012) and co-editor of Amabiance, Tourism and the City (Routledge, 2023). His research interests cover urban sound and music cultures, tourism and urban transformation, critical heritage studies, and the relationship between materiality and expressive cultures.

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