Portuguese Guitar

The Portuguese guitar is a plucked chordophone with a pear-shaped body and twelve metal strings, recognisable by its crystalline sonority and deeply associated with fado. More than an instrument, it has become a national symbol: its bright voice accompanies and answers the singing, weaving the countermelodies and variations that give fado its characteristic expressiveness.

Origin and construction

Despite its name, the Portuguese guitar does not descend from the classical guitar, but from the European Renaissance cittern — a family of plucked metal-string instruments, present in courtly music from the mid-sixteenth century to the late eighteenth. It was in Portugal that this lineage found continuity and a form of its own, fixing, over the course of the nineteenth century, the pear-shaped silhouette recognised today.

The twelve strings are organised into six courses — six pairs tuned in unison or in octaves. The number of frets varied between twelve and seventeen in the oldest examples, reaching twenty-two in modern instruments. The most distinctive feature is the fan-shaped tuning mechanism (sometimes called the preferatura), a set of worm screws housed in the head of the instrument, which allows fine and stable tuning of the steel strings.

The construction of the Portuguese guitar is itself heritage: each instrument is the result of dozens of manual operations — from the choice of woods to the shaping of the sides and the assembly of the fan — handed down through workshop lineages.

The art of lutherie is concentrated above all in two traditional schools: that of Óscar Cardoso, heir to the Ericeira workshop, and that of the Grácio family, whose last great name, Gilberto Grácio (1936–2021), built instruments for leading fado singers and guitarists. The continuity of this knowledge is today supported by institutions such as the Guitar Building Workshop of the Museu do Fado.

The two models: Lisbon and Coimbra

The Portuguese guitar crystallised into two regional models. The Lisbon guitar is the most widespread; it is tuned, from high to low, as B–A–E–B–A–D and finishes its head in a scroll volute. The Coimbra guitar, linked to fado de Coimbra, is larger, with a sharper body and a longer scale, suited to the ballad character of the academic repertoire; it is tuned a tone lower (A–G–D–A–G–C) and is distinguished by the teardrop inlaid in the head, rather than the scroll.

This difference is not merely decorative: size and tuning shape the timbre. The Coimbra guitar tends towards a deeper, broader sonority, the Lisbon guitar towards a more agile and ornamental brilliance, proper to the lively dialogue with authentic fado.

Musical function and legacy

In fado, the Portuguese guitar rarely plays alone. It forms an ensemble with the viola de fado — a classical guitar that provides harmonic and rhythmic accompaniment — and, in the fado of Lisbon, with the bass viola. To the Portuguese guitar falls the melodic role of countermelody: it punctuates the singer’s silences, underlines the verses and opens the characteristic instrumental preludes.

As a solo instrument, it attained concert status at the hands of guitarists such as Carlos Paredes, who brought its repertoire to international prominence. It belongs, in its own right, to the family of traditional Portuguese chordophones and forms part of the Portuguese intangible cultural heritage, inseparable from fado, which UNESCO inscribed in 2011 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.