Fado, urban popular song of Portugal Inscribed in 2011 (6.COM)
on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage
of Humanity - Fado, urban popular song of Portugal - © Argentina
Santos 2009 by Luis Carvalhal Fado is a performance genre
incorporating music and poetry widely practised by various
communities in Lisbon. It represents a Portuguese multicultural
synthesis of Afro-Brazilian sung dances, local traditional
genres of song and dance, musical traditions from rural areas of
the country brought by successive waves of internal immigration,
and the cosmopolitan urban song patterns of the early nineteenth
century. Fado songs are usually performed by a solo singer, male
or female, traditionally accompanied by a wire-strung acoustic
guitar and the Portuguese guitarra – a pear-shaped cittern with
twelve wire strings, unique to Portugal, which also has an
extensive solo repertoire. The past few decades have witnessed
this instrumental accompaniment expanded to two Portuguese
guitars, a guitar and a b