Aljube Museum – Resistance and Freedom

Museum · AlfamaLisbon,Portugal

A prison opposite Lisbon Cathedral where the political police held writers, students and soldiers, now the museum of Portugal's forty-one years of dictatorship.

The Aljube stands opposite Lisbon Cathedral and was a prison for most of the time there has been a city around it. Under the Estado Novo the political police held people here: writers, students, trade unionists, communists, soldiers and priests. It stopped being a prison in 1965 and opened as a museum in 2015, and it is now the place in Lisbon where the forty-one years of dictatorship are set out in one building. The exhibition fills four floors and is built in two halves. The first sets out how the machine worked. The second is the people it was used on, with their files, their photographs and their recorded voices, so the higher you climb the less abstract it becomes. Two men ran the country across those forty-one years: António de Oliveira Salazar, and Marcelo Caetano after him. The Aljube had been a church prison and then a women's prison before it was a political one, and the museum keeps the four floors in the shape the prison used them.

Worth knowing

Good to know

It is reading-heavy — four floors of documents, photographs and testimony with English translation throughout; this is not a museum you skim on the way to the castle.
The prison is opposite the cathedral — the political police worked in the middle of the tourist route, on a street thousands of people ride the tram along every day.
Not a stop for young children — the subject is torture, imprisonment and a colonial war, and the museum does not soften it.

Things to do

1
Go into a standing-only cell
On the prison floor, step into one of the rebuilt curros and let the door close as far as it goes. About a square metre, no window, too small to sit. People were held in these for days before questioning. Half a minute in one explains the regime more directly than any document upstairs.
2
Listen to the recorded voices
Work through the testimony stations rather than only the panels. Former prisoners describe arrest, interrogation and release in their own words, in ordinary tones. The museum is built around those recordings, and they are the reason it takes ninety minutes rather than thirty.
3
Finish on the revolution floor and go outside
End at the top floor with 25 April 1974, then step out onto the street. The cathedral stands opposite and the tram goes past, and the door you have just come out of was the entrance to a political prison that many people now walking by can still remember.