About the project
Lisbon is full of places where people resisted the dictatorship — and almost none of them say so. Aljube Prison has become a museum, and the political police headquarters has a plaque; but many of the houses, cafés, newsrooms and courts where history happened say nothing to passers-by. This app gathers those places into routes you walk, with the story told where it happened.
The focus is on women’s history. Not to fill a quota, but because it is the part of the history of the resistance that has gone most untold: the suffragists of the First Republic, the women who organised the National Council of Portuguese Women until the regime shut it down, the women political prisoners, the women writers put on trial for what they wrote, the activists who spent years underground. Of the 102 names in this app, 62 are women’s.
Who makes it
Resistência is a project by Onofriana.pt — A Herança Feminina do Fado.
How it was made
Every place, person and date has sources: museums, archives, studies, newspapers, laws published in the Diário da República (the official gazette). The texts are written afresh from them — not copied — and each one says where it comes from; where the sources disagree, the notes on each page say so. The method is set out in Sources and method.
All the photographs have a free licence (public domain or Creative Commons), with the credit alongside. The map is made from OpenStreetMap and served by this site, with no third-party map services. The archive videos — testimonies, reports, recordings — come with the player of the very institutions that hold them, and only load when you press “Watch”. There are 33 videos, from these institutions: Museu do Aljube Resistência e Liberdade, Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, Assembleia da República, Comissão Comemorativa 50 Anos 25 de Abril, Museu Nacional Resistência e Liberdade (Peniche), Museu da Presidência da República, Universidade Aberta and Fundação Mário Soares e Maria Barroso. RTP Arquivos does not allow its videos to be watched outside the RTP website: the 69 listed here appear as links, under “In other archives”, and open there. Documents from other archives appear in the same way: Casa Comum – Fundação Mário Soares e Maria Barroso; Hemeroteca Municipal de Lisboa.
What it does not do
It collects no data about the people who use it. There are no accounts, no advertising and no third-party visitor counters. Your location, when the app asks for it, stays on your phone: distances are calculated there. Your progress on the walks and the walks you save also stay only on your phone.
Take it on your phone
You can install Resistência on your phone’s home screen (in the browser menu, “Add to Home screen”) and, on each walk, download the pages, the photographs and the map of Lisbon before you set out.
Help
Found a mistake, know a story, have a document or a photograph? Tell us. The memory of the resistance was made of testimonies — and it still is.