One of our favorite cultural experiences in Portugal so far was an evening at Fado em Casa.
From the moment we arrived, it felt less like attending a performance and more like being invited into someone’s home, which, essentially, we were. Just a dinner with 20 of your closest new friends.
The evening opened with delicious Portuguese cheese, with bread and wine, of course.
We settled in with wine and a very Portuguese dinner of duck rice with chorizo, bacalhau, and rice pudding.
But the real treat came after dinner when the Fado singers began performing, accompanied by a guitarist and the distinctive 12-string Portuguese guitar.
Even without understanding every word, you could absolutely understand the emotion. Fado songs are filled with love, longing, loss, and sorrow. Our Uber driver later described them much more simply as “crying songs,” which honestly isn’t a bad description.
What made the evening especially memorable was the setting. They welcomed us into their “home” and let us explore the entire house, including the kitchen. The building is around 400 years old and, incredibly, was once a pig farm. One could visit the home 10 times and find different art to explore.
One of its most striking features is the enormous old chimney. We learned that having such a large chimney was once a sign of wealth and status, although ours apparently wasn’t quite on the scale of the Queen’s castle. The chimney is no longer used, but it remains a pretty incredible reminder of the house’s history.
Ask me about the Grandfather’s white port….
Great food, a 400-year-old house and some haunting Portuguese music.
