Lisbon Civil Government and the PSP’s 1st Station

For many years Rua Capelo, in the Chiado, was the address of the Lisbon Civil Government, housed in a building that had belonged to the Convent of São Francisco.¹ The PSP’s 1st Station operated in the same building: after the reorganisation of 1922, Lisbon had 30 numbered police stations, from the 1st, in the Civil Government, to the 30th, in Caminho Novo, next to Parliament.²

Until the PVDE headquarters, on Rua António Maria Cardoso, became fully operational, in 1938, some PSP stations provided, in the words of the Memória Comum project, “the real logistics of repression”: it was in them that prisoners were held, almost always incommunicado, and it was in them that much of the police violence and torture took place.² The General Register of Prisoners often does not even record the station, but the 1st, in the Civil Government, is the main exception: its cells could hold many prisoners and were used to keep them on the eve of the trials of the Special Military Courts, which were often held in the building itself.²

In the records that Memória Comum devotes to those who died at the hands of the repression, the 1st Station appears again and again. The tradesman Adelino Marques de Andrade was brought from Santarém to Lisbon on 12 January 1937 and, his record says, “is taken to the 1st Station”; on the 18th he was tried by the Special Military Court. The driver António Guedes Oliveira Silva, arrested on 7 November 1937, was moved between the 1st Station, the Aljube and Caxias until he was sentenced to eleven years of penal exile; he died at Tarrafal in 1941.³ António Gato Pinto, arrested in 1934 for taking part in the general strike of 18 January, left handwritten notes on his capture and on his time in the Trafaria Detention House, the cells of the Civil Government and the Aljube, between April and June that year.⁴

After the police broke up the Capela do Rato vigil, on the night of 31 December 1972, the fourteen detainees who were not released at the Largo do Rato police station were brought to the cells of the Civil Government; in the early hours, they were taken on to Caxias. Among them were the architect Nuno Teotónio Pereira and only one woman, the librarian Maria Benedita Galamba de Oliveira.⁷⁸

In 2011, the civil governments were abolished in all but name: a decree-law approved by the Council of Ministers on 8 September and published on 30 November transferred their powers to other public administration bodies and regulated the winding-up of their assets.⁵⁹