There Is Always Someone Who Resists

Timely lessons from Portugal’s “untamed and untameable opposition” to a fascist regime

Political prisoners of the Estado Novo. Photo taken by author at Museu do Aljube.

When you google “Museum of Resistance,” you’ll find the Museu do Aljube in Lisbon. The small three-story building sits just across Rua Augusto Rosa from the Sé Cathedral. Hordes of tourists pass by it daily in search of a ceramic bauble or scenic overlook. They don’t really notice the plain white building.

In previous lives it was a prison: Cadeia do Aljube. Cadeia as in prison. Aljube as in hole.*

It is said that the building, or some prior incarnation of it, has been a prison all the way back to the 12th century. Once the Muslims were driven out of Lisbon and the Catholics took over, they kept imprisoning people there. Until 1820, Cadeia do Aljube held prisoners of the Catholic church, convicted through the Ecclesiastical Forum — clerics accused of lying under oath, monks who misbehaved, women who used contraceptives. For the next 100 years it caged women who committed common crimes like public intoxication or disturbing the peace.

But the museum doesn’t feature those women or the prisoners who came before them, probably because there isn’t much documentation. But there is plenty of evidence of the stories that the museum does recount — the imprisonment, torture…