Largo do Rato (formerly Praça do Brasil)

On 7 February 1927, when the revolt against the Military Dictatorship was already collapsing in Porto, the uprising reached Lisbon. Sailors, GNR companies and armed civilians, under the command of men such as Mendes dos Reis and Agatão Lança, put up barricades on Rua Alexandre Herculano, in Largo do Rato and on Rua de São Filipe Néri, and occupied strategic points in the city. They surrendered late in the afternoon of the 9th.¹² That day the threat to shoot civilians caught with weapons in their hands was carried out: beside the fountain in Largo do Rato, several civilians and sailors were executed. The fighting is said to have left at least 90 dead and more than 400 wounded in Lisbon.²

Four years later, on 26 August 1931, the square — then called Praça do Brasil — was a battlefront once more. The rebels took up positions from the top of Parque Eduardo VII and the Rotunda down to here; from the Carmo Barracks, a GNR cavalry squadron advanced as far as São Mamede and Largo do Rato, and it was from the square and from Campolide that, at around 11 o’clock, the Government infantry launched the counter-attack. By nightfall, the Government controlled the city: there were around 40 dead, nearly 200 wounded and more than 600 arrested, of whom 358 were deported to Timor without trial.³

On the night of 31 December 1972, the police brought the people they had removed from the vigil against the colonial war in the nearby Capela do Rato — ninety-one, according to the historian António de Araújo — in two vans to the police station on the square, in the former Convent of the Trinas do Rato. Once identified, they were released, except for fourteen, who were taken to the Civil Government and, in the early hours, to Caxias.⁶ Among the fourteen was one woman, the librarian Maria Benedita Galamba de Oliveira.⁵