THE SOUND OF FADO
The Guitarra Portuguesa and Viola: Fado's Two Guitars
A fado trio is built on two different guitars, not one. Here's how the shimmering guitarra portuguesa and the steadier viola divide the work behind the voice.
See fado shows on GetYourGuide ↗Two guitars, two different jobs
A fado trio is almost always the same shape: one voice, one guitarra portuguesa, and one viola. It's tempting to assume the two instruments are interchangeable guitars playing the same part, but they're not — the viola lays down the harmonic and rhythmic foundation, picking or strumming chords that keep time and outline the song's structure, while the guitarra portuguesa plays a more melodic, ornamental role, weaving bright figures around the singer's voice and filling the gaps between vocal phrases. Think of the viola as the ground the song stands on and the guitarra as the commentary running alongside it — together they do the work a full band would do in most other genres, with nothing else needed on stage.
The guitarra portuguesa's distinctive shape and sound
The guitarra portuguesa is immediately recognisable by its shape — a rounded, teardrop or pear-like body quite unlike a standard guitar's waist — and by its stringing: twelve steel strings arranged in six paired courses, tuned in a way that gives it a bright, shimmering, almost bell-like ring. It's usually played with fingerpicks rather than bare fingers, which sharpens its attack and lets a single note cut clearly through a quiet room. Its ancestry is generally traced to guitar-family instruments that reached Portugal from England in the 18th century and then developed along their own path; by the 19th century it had become fado's signature instrument, and its sound alone is often enough to identify the music.
Lisbon-style and Coimbra-style instruments differ
Not every guitarra portuguesa looks or sounds the same. Two regional builds developed alongside Lisbon and Coimbra's separate fado traditions, distinguished mainly by the headstock: the Lisbon instrument typically ends in an open, fan-like scroll of tuning pegs, while the Coimbra version curls into a tighter, snail-like scroll reminiscent of a violin's. The two are usually tuned to somewhat different pitches as well, contributing to a noticeably different character — generally brighter in the Lisbon style, mellower in the Coimbra style. A player trained on one can normally manage the other, but houses and luthiers treat the two as genuinely distinct instruments, not cosmetic variants of a single design.
Guitarra portuguesa: Lisbon style vs Coimbra style
| Lisbon style | Coimbra style | |
|---|---|---|
| Headstock | Open, fan-shaped scroll ("leque") | Tight, spiral scroll ("caracol") |
| Tuning | Higher, brighter register | Generally lower, mellower register |
| Associated tradition | Lisbon casas de fado | University of Coimbra fado |
The viola — Portugal's word for the classical guitar
Confusingly for English speakers, 'viola' in Portuguese doesn't mean the orchestral viola — it's simply the standard six-string acoustic guitar, close in shape and tuning to what most visitors would call a classical or folk guitar. In a fado trio it provides the chordal backbone, strummed or picked in a steady rhythm that gives the singer and guitarra room to be expressive on top of something stable. Larger ensembles sometimes add a viola baixo, a bass-guitar variant that thickens the low end further, but the essential three-part texture — voice, guitarra, viola — is what most casas de fado still build a show around, much as they have for well over a century.
How the two guitars talk to each other in performance
Watch a good guitarra player during a live fado and you'll notice they're rarely strumming continuously — instead they wait for gaps in the vocal line and fill them with a short, ornamented phrase, sometimes called a resposta, or 'response,' before dropping back so the singer can re-enter. It functions almost like a second conversational voice, echoing or answering the emotional shape of what was just sung. The viola, meanwhile, holds the rhythm steady underneath so that dialogue doesn't lose its footing. That interplay — one instrument keeping time, the other commenting on the emotion — is a big part of why fado trios sound complete with only three performers and no other instrumentation.
More things to do nearby
Still choosing a night, or which fado house?
Leave your email and roughly when you're travelling — we'll send a short rundown of how a fado evening works, which intimate houses feel most authentic, whether to book the port-wine or the dinner option, and how Porto's fado compares with Lisbon's.