SINGING THE CITY: A LITERARY GEOGRAPHY OF LISBON THROUGH FADO TOPONYMS

Fado is not only music – it is a cartography of emotion, memory, and belonging that transforms the city into a living archive of cultural identity. From its consolidation in Lisbon to its global projection through figures such as Amália Rodrigues, the genre has continuously negotiated the relationship between place, language, and identity. For the listener and reader alike, fado offers an intimate encounter with the city: its streets, neighbourhoods, and riverbanks become emotional anchors that allow individuals to situate personal and collective narratives within shared symbolic landscapes. Through references to neighbourhoods such as Mouraria, Alfama and Bairro Alto, listeners are invited to experience an affective geography where urban space is remembered, imagined, and emotionally inhabited. In this sense, fado operates as what Richard Elliott conceptualises as an “affective geography,” where place names function as repositories of memory and identity. This article reveals, however, something deeper: through systematic toponymic analysis, fado lyrics construct a structured literary geography that can be interpreted through geocriticism, as theorised by Bertrand Westphal. The findings demonstrate that spatial references in fado are not randomly distributed but follow historically grounded spatial patterns centred on neighbourhoods associated with the genre’s origins and performance circuits.