Moorish Quarter

This guide to the Moorish Quarter in Lisbon follows Maria Severa, a fado singer born to a Romani father and a mother known locally as A Barbuda, and the count who walked into a Mouraria tavern in the 1840s and heard her sing. It traces the neighborhood back to 1147, when Lisbon's Muslim population was confined here outside the city walls, and the mix of migrants and outsiders whose friction gave rise to fado itself. The count took Severa to bullfights around the city as aristocratic Lisbon watched a singer from these streets cross a line it had never crossed.