A former prison, now a museum

A church prison took its name from an Arabic dungeon

Cadeia do Aljube is a former prison in Lisbon, now a museum called the Museu do Aljube - Resistência e Liberdade. The name comes from the Arabic word "al-jubb," meaning a dry well or dungeon. People have used this building as a prison since at least the 12th century, not long after Lisbon's Christian conquest in 1147.

For centuries it served the Catholic Church. It held clergy and others judged guilty by church courts, under what was called the Ecclesiastical Forum. The ground floor once worked as a stable, with twenty-nine mangers along the walls. Those stalls later became tiny solitary cells, known as "curros."

An archbishop's coat of arms still sits above the main door. It belongs to D. Afonso Furtado de Mendoça, who governed the Lisbon diocese between 1627 and 1630. It marks the building as church property from that time.

The 1755 earthquake that flattened much of Lisbon left the Aljube standing. Afterward, the city widened the street in front of it, pushing the building's front wall back from where it had stood.

Church control over the prison ended in 1820. After that, the Aljube held women accused of ordinary crimes, like public drunkenness or disturbing the peace. That use continued through the late 1920s.

Guards tortured political prisoners in a padded top-floor room

In 1928, two years after a military coup, the Aljube became a prison for men who opposed Portugal's new government. It stayed a political prison until 1965, under the Estado Novo dictatorship led by António de Oliveira Salazar.

Guards tortured prisoners here. They used beatings, electric shocks, and sleep deprivation, often in a room on the top floor lined with blankets to muffle the screams.

Thousands of people passed through its cells. Mário Soares was held here before he became Portugal's prime minister and later its president. Writer Miguel Torga was imprisoned too. So was Álvaro Cunhal, a Communist party leader, who shared a cell with the painter Júlio Pomar.

In January 1965, protests broke out outside the prison. People demanded the release of students arrested days before. The prison closed that August.

Archaeologists found older layers beneath the former political prison

After the political prisoners left, the Aljube held ordinary criminals again. Offices for Portugal's Ministry of Justice moved in too.

The Carnation Revolution overthrew the dictatorship in 1974, but the building stayed in government hands. Workers later stripped out traces of its past as a political prison, including the solitary cells added in the 1940s.

Archaeologists dug through the basement in 2004 and 2005. Their work uncovered older layers of the building's long history as a prison.

In 2009, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Justice, and the City of Lisbon signed an agreement. Together they transferred the building to the city council.

A dictatorship's prison reopened as a museum of freedom

The architects Manuel Graça Dias and Egas José Vieira redesigned the building as a museum. It opened on April 25, 2015, the anniversary of the Carnation Revolution that ended the dictatorship.

The museum spreads across five floors. The lowest two show archaeological traces of the building's past as a prison. The floors above tell the story of resistance to the dictatorship and the colonial wars Portugal fought in Africa.

An inscription on the outside reads: "Here, from the silence of the drawers of the homeland, gnawed of the breasts broken by the tortures of the request, rose the cry of freedom, flowered April."

In July 2020, Rita Rato was named director of the museum. Some critics questioned her lack of formal museum training, though she kept the post.

The name over the door still tells its own story. "Aljube" comes from Arabic, from "al-jubb," meaning a dry well or a dungeon. Arab rule over Lisbon ended in 1147, but the word for this place outlasted it.

One old story about the building has nothing to do with torture. People once said that a condemned prisoner, walking from the Aljube to the gallows, could win a pardon by touching an iron bar on a nearby chapel door before being hanged. The chapel, called Nossa Senhora do Ferro, stood along the route condemned prisoners had to walk. Whether anyone ever reached that bar in time is not something the story says.

Standing at this corner of Rua Augusto Rosa, close by the Lisbon Cathedral, a visitor today sees a quiet museum building. For most of its life, this was one of the harshest addresses in Lisbon, a place where church law and later state power locked people away out of public sight.