Cidália Moreira
Eight photographs from one night at Casa de Linhares, scrolling over the actual recording as it plays through. Turn the sound on in the corner, and give it a few quiet minutes.
Casa de Linhares sits in a beco off the Alfama hillside, inside what's left of a 16th-century building that partly gave way in the 1755 earthquake — a corner turret and a stone coat of arms are what survive of it.
The Museu do Fado's own guide to the city's fado houses notes that this same address once held two earlier, well-known casas de fado — Bacalhau de Molho and Tia Ló — long before Casa de Linhares took over the room.
Cidália Moreira is Capítulo V's guest singer — a fadista known for decades as "a Cigana do Fado," who made her Lisbon debut at Viela before a career that carried her as far as Brazil and back.
The song is "Fado da Freira" — the poem by Armando Neves, set to "Fado Três Bairros," one of the classic named melodies composed by Casimiro Ramos.
Like Fado Alexandrino and Fado das Horas before it, Fado Três Bairros is a fixed, decades-old melody that fado poets keep returning to and setting fresh words against — this room, this poem, this one night.
Ângelo Freire is back on guitarra portuguesa tonight, his usual instrument in this series — after trading it for guitarra acústica for a single chapter, Capítulo IV.
João Domingos returns on guitarra acústica, the same pairing with Ângelo Freire first heard together back in Capítulo II. Tiago Correia hosts, as he has every chapter of this project.
Recorded on the 22nd of April 2026 — the room emptying out, one voice still carrying over what's left of a Renaissance house on the Alfama hill.
Eight frames from a house on the Alfama hill that's outlasted two other fado rooms before this one.
Photographed and recorded by Luis Roquette Valdez, Casa de Linhares, Alfama, Lisbon, 22 April 2026.