Just one month before fado was declared an intangible heritage of humanity, fado singers Sara Tavares and Ricardo Ribeiro performed at Largo da Severa, in the heart of Mouraria, to offer a concert that would signal the start of urban redevelopment works in one of Lisbon’s most traditional neighborhoods. In fact, that cool October night in 2011 would also signal the «return» of fado sounds to the neighborhood that saw its birth. Elevated to an «unmistakable identity mark of the Mouraria neighborhood» within the QREN-Mouraria action plan, fado and the social and cultural practices associated with it became a fundamental agent in the urban regeneration process.
Over the last five years, Iñigo Sánchez, researcher at the Institute of Ethnomusicology of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities (Universidade Nova de Lisboa), has documented this fado revival in the public and semi-public spaces of the Mouraria neighborhood, a process that has occurred in parallel with broader dynamics of urban transformation, patrimonialization of expressive practices, and touristification of urban spaces in the city of Lisbon.