Diogo Alves: Is That Really the Aqueduct Murderer's Head in the Jar?
Updated: 17 minutes ago
In the old anatomical theatre at the University of Lisbon's Faculty of Medicine, a human head floats in a jar on a shelf. It's pale, puffy and oddly calm, with its eyes half open. The writer who made it world famous in 2017 described it as "somewhat akin to a potato." The label, the tour guides and about a thousand websites will all tell you the same thing. That's Diogo Alves, the Aqueduct Murderer, a Galician immigrant who threw around 70 people to their deaths from Lisbon's great aqueduct in the 1830s.
It's a brilliant story. The trouble is that almost every part of it gets shakier the harder you look. The court never tried him for a single aqueduct death. The famous head only turns up in the records long after he died. And even the medical school's own catalogue won't commit to saying it's definitely him.
So here's the full story of Diogo Alves, what he actually did, what he probably didn't do, and whether that's really his head staring back at you.
Quick Answers
• Is the head in the jar really Diogo Alves? Nobody can prove it. A 2005 museum catalogue calls it "probably" his head, and the older records describe a skull, not a head in liquid.
• Did he really kill 70 people at the aqueduct? There's no legal proof. His trial records don't mention the aqueduct at all. The 70 figure seems to have grown out of a spate of suicides there.
• What was he actually executed for? A robbery at a doctor's house on Rua das Flores in September 1839, in which four people were killed. A fifth man was murdered days later.
• Was he the last person executed in Portugal? No. Francisco Mattos Lobo was hanged in 1842 and at least one more execution followed in 1846. Portugal abolished the death penalty for civil crimes in 1867.
Who Was Diogo Alves?
Diogo Alves was born in 1810 in Galicia, in the north-west of Spain. According to Diário de Notícias, he came from a small village in the parish of Samos, in the province of Lugo. Like thousands of young Galicians at the time, he headed south to Lisbon as a teenager to find work.
He started out as a household servant for wealthy families, then worked as a coach driver, according to a summary of historian Graça Pacheco's research published by NOVA University Lisbon's +Lisboa project. It was steady, respectable work. But somewhere along the way he fell in with a woman who ran a tavern and went by the nickname A Parreirinha (roughly "the little vine"). Most retellings blame her for dragging him into drink, gambling and crime, though that's the kind of detail that's very hard to check nearly two centuries later.
What's certain is that by the late 1830s Alves was at the centre of a gang of thieves in Lisbon. What's much less certain is what they got up to on the aqueduct.
A Galician in a City of Galicians
Alves wasn't unusual for being a Galician in Lisbon. At their peak, Galicians made up more than a tenth of the city's population, according to a 2018 study by Ana Claudia Pérez Coelho in the Galician studies journal Madrygal. They did the heavy, badly paid jobs Lisbon didn't want to do itself: porters, dockers, servants and, above all, water carriers.
Before piped water, most of Lisbon got its water from public fountains, and the aguadeiros carried it door to door in barrels. By the middle of the 19th century there were around 3,000 of them, almost all Galician. Pérez Coelho's figures for 1851 list 2,112 water carriers organised into 64 companies, every one of them working fountains fed by the Águas Livres Aqueduct. In other words, the aqueduct wasn't just a place where a Galician was accused of murder. It was the thing that put bread on the table for thousands of his countrymen.
The Galicians had a mixed reputation. Portuguese writers of the period painted them as hard-working, honest and trustworthy enough to carry private letters, but also as penny-pinchers who overcharged for water and did well out of fires. Nobody has shown that this prejudice shaped the Alves legend, and it would be wrong to claim it did. But when a story casts a Galician immigrant as a monster lurking on the aqueduct, it's worth knowing who Lisbon already thought of when it pictured a Galician.
The Aqueduct Legend
The Águas Livres Aqueduct is one of Lisbon's great landmarks. Built between 1731 and 1799, it carries water into the city over the Alcântara valley on 35 arches stretching 941 metres. Its tallest arch stands 65.29 metres high, which the water company EPAL says makes it the biggest pointed stone arch in the world. It even survived the 1755 earthquake that flattened much of the city.
There was a public walkway along the top, and in the 1830s that walkway was used by the saloios, the farmers and traders from the countryside outside Lisbon, who crossed it with money in their pockets from selling goods in town.
The legend says that's where Alves did his worst. Between 1836 and 1839, so the story goes, he'd wait for lone travellers on the walkway, rob them and then throw them off. From that height nobody survived, and because the aqueduct already had a grim reputation for suicides, the authorities didn't look too closely. By the time he stopped, around 70 people were dead. Some versions, like the one in Diário de Notícias, add that he forged keys to get into the aqueduct's underground galleries and that the walkway was shut to the public in 1837 because of all the deaths.
It's a terrifying story. The problem is proving any of it.
What the Court Records Actually Say
The writer who did more than anyone to make Alves famous abroad is also the one who's done the most to pull his story apart. In 2017 Rafaela Ferraz, a criminology graduate with a master's in forensic science, wrote the short Atlas Obscura piece on the head that went viral around the world. Five years later she went back and fact-checked her own article.
What she found was pretty damning for the legend. Alves's trial records, held at Portugal's national archive at Torre do Tombo, contain no reference to the aqueduct at all. He was convicted of five killings, none of which happened there. The historian at História LX makes the same point, quoting the 1890s reference work Galeria de Criminosos Célebres em Portugal: "prova jurídica de tais crimes não existe", or "legal proof of such crimes doesn't exist."
So where did the 70 come from? Ferraz points to a figure from the journalist Matos Sequeira, who wrote in 1916 that by June 1839 there had already been 76 suicides at the arches. That number lines up almost perfectly with the period Alves was supposedly active, and it looks very much like a count of suicides slowly turned into a count of murders as the story was retold. She also found an 1842 report in the Revista Universal Lisbonense describing more deaths at the aqueduct, over a year after Alves had been hanged. Whatever was happening up there, it didn't stop when he did.
None of that proves he never pushed anyone off the aqueduct. It's possible he did. It's just that the evidence for it is folklore, not a courtroom.
How the Legend Was Written
So how did folklore beat the court record? A big part of the answer is cheap print. The Brazilian researcher Nilce Camila de Carvalho has traced how Alves's story spread through Portuguese popular literature, the cheap pamphlets sold on the street for people who couldn't afford books, in a 2014 paper in the journal Boitatá.
The first of them came out almost immediately. Vida, e Morte de Diogo Alves ("The Life and Death of Diogo Alves"), by Francisco António Martins Bastos, was published in 1841, the year he was hanged. More followed over the next 80 years, with titles like História Verdadeira e Completa do Célebre Ladrão e Assassino Diogo Alves ("The True and Complete Story of the Famous Thief and Murderer Diogo Alves"), Diogo Alves e a Sua Quadrilha ("Diogo Alves and His Gang") and, in 1922, Os Crimes de Diogo Alves e da Sua Quadrilha ("The Crimes of Diogo Alves and His Gang").
These weren't meant as history. They were meant as warnings. Carvalho quotes the 1841 pamphlet telling readers that the wicked are "o exemplo que nos faça abominar o caminho do crime", or "the example that makes us abhor the path of crime." A killer throwing victims off Lisbon's most famous landmark made a far better warning than a burglary that went wrong.
Interestingly, Carvalho found that even these pamphlets admit he was tried for the Rua das Flores killings, not the aqueduct. The confident modern version, with its "at least 70" victims, is newer still. She tracked that figure to a 2012 Time Out article and judged it very probably false.
The Robbery on Rua das Flores
The crime Alves was actually hanged for happened on the night of 26 September 1839, at the home of a doctor called Pedro de Andrade on Rua das Flores, in the Chiado area of central Lisbon. (At least one account places it on neighbouring Rua do Alecrim, but most sources, including Ferraz, give Rua das Flores.)
According to Ferraz's later piece for The Order of the Good Death, the doctor was out that night on a social call. The gang got in with help from inside. The household's footman, a man called Manuel Alves (no relation), had agreed to unlock the doors in return for a cut of the money.
What was meant to be a burglary turned into a massacre. The gang killed the doctor's housekeeper, Maria da Conceição Correia Mourão, along with her two daughters, Emília, 19, and Vicência, 17. Her son José Elias, a 25-year-old sailor, died with them. Some retellings call them the doctor's family, but they were his housekeeper and her children.
The footman survived the night but not for long. Unsure whether they could trust him to keep his mouth shut, the gang killed him days later and got rid of his body. That's the fifth death Alves was convicted of.
Caught, Tried and Hanged
Unlike a body at the foot of the aqueduct, four people murdered in a doctor's house couldn't be written off as suicide. The investigation that followed brought the whole gang down. História LX names his accomplices as António Palhares, a soldier, Manuel Joaquim da Silva, known as Beiço Rachado ("Split Lip"), João das Pedras, known as O Enterrador ("the Gravedigger"), and Claudino Coelho, known as Pé de Dança ("Dancing Foot").
How exactly they were caught depends on who you read. According to Transições, the Gravedigger was arrested during another robbery and confessed, and A Parreirinha's own daughter also turned Alves in. It's a good twist, but it rests on local histories rather than a document anyone has published, so treat it with some caution.
Alves was arrested and tried in 1840. One strange detail from the trial, which Ferraz mentions, is that someone stood up in court and read an extract from Cesare Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments, the 1764 book that argued against torture and the death penalty. It didn't save him. He was sentenced to hang, and the sentence was carried out on 19 February 1841 at Cais do Tojo, on Lisbon's riverside, according to Jornal Económico.
Was He the Last Person Executed in Portugal?
You'll often read that Alves was the last man executed in Portugal. He wasn't. Francisco Mattos Lobo, who murdered a family of four and threw their dog out of a window, was hanged on 16 April 1842, over a year later. Ferraz also found a record of a man called José Joaquim "Grande" being executed in 1846.
That lines up with Portugal's parliament, which says the country's last execution took place in Lagos in 1846. Political crimes had already been taken off the list of capital offences in 1852, and a law of 1 July 1867 abolished the death penalty for civil crimes. Military crimes stayed capital until 1911.
The 1867 law made headlines across Europe. Only Tuscany and San Marino had got there first, and Victor Hugo, living in exile on Guernsey, wrote from Hauteville House the very next day to congratulate the country. His letter was addressed to Eduardo Coelho, founder of Diário de Notícias, and the paper printed it on 10 July 1867. Hugo called Portugal a small nation with a great history, and summed it up in one line: "Portugal dá o exemplo à Europa" ("Portugal sets Europe an example").
In 2017 the head attributed to Alves was loaned to an exhibition in Coimbra marking 150 years since abolition, which is a pretty strange afterlife for a man who was never the last of anything.
How a Killer's Head Ended Up in a Medical School
To understand why anyone would want Alves's head at all, you have to understand phrenology. In the early 1800s it was one of the hottest ideas in science. Phrenologists believed the brain was made up of separate "organs" for things like greed, aggression and kindness, and that you could read someone's character from the bumps on their skull. A murderer's skull, in theory, should show a murderer's bumps. It's the same urge to classify criminals by their features that later drove Alphonse Bertillon's charts of criminal faces in Paris.
In Lisbon, the man behind all this was José Lourenço da Luz Gomes (1800 to 1882), who set up a phrenology collection at the city's Medical-Surgical School. His 1882 obituary and an 1883 almanac both mention it holding the skulls of executed criminals. The skull of Mattos Lobo was examined by phrenologists in April 1842, just after his hanging, and reported in the press at the time.
Here's the odd thing. There's no equivalent record of anyone examining Alves straight after his execution in 1841. The best evidence that his remains were studied comes much later, in 1896, when the anthropologist Francisco Ferraz de Macedo published detailed studies of the skulls of both Alves and Mattos Lobo in Galeria de Criminosos Célebres em Portugal. His conclusion wasn't what the phrenologists would have wanted. Compared with "normal" people, he found, Portuguese murderers had nothing special about their skulls at all.
Alves wasn't the last killer whose head was kept in the hope of finding what made him different. When the German serial killer Peter Kürten, the "Vampire of Düsseldorf", was guillotined in 1931, scientists cut his head in half and mummified it to study his brain. According to Ripley's, which now displays it at its museum in Wisconsin Dells, they came up empty. Ninety years after Lisbon's phrenologists, the answer was the same: there was nothing to find.
A Skull, a Head or Both?
This is where the story gets really interesting. Every early record of Alves's remains describes a skull, not a head. Ferraz traced a skull catalogued in 1886 as number 3040 and described as belonging to "Diogo Alves, thief and murderer, killed by hanging." That's the one Ferraz de Macedo examined and drew in 1896. It turns up again in a 1933 book, Do Crime e da Loucura, which describes a simple yellowed label reading "Second Section, Normal Anatomy, No. 3040."
The head in the jar, the one everyone photographs, doesn't appear in these records at all. As far as Ferraz could find, it only really enters the story in 2005, when it was shown in an exhibition called Passagens: 100 Peças para o Museu de Medicina. And the catalogue for that exhibition is careful with its wording. It describes the object as the "cabeça provavelmente de Diogo Alves", the head "probably" of Diogo Alves.
That's a big difference. For phrenology, a skull made far more sense than a whole head in liquid, since you need to see and measure the bone. And you can't study someone's bare skull and keep their head whole in a jar at the same time. So either the records got muddled somewhere along the line, or the jar and the skull are two different objects that have both carried his name at different times. Ferraz's honest conclusion is that she can't say which, if either, is really him.
Other Problems With the Jar
A few more things don't sit right. The first is the fluid. The head is usually described as being kept in formaldehyde, but formaldehyde wasn't used to preserve tissue until 1893, when the German doctor Ferdinand Blum noticed it had hardened the skin on his fingers, according to a history of the method in the Journal of Histochemistry and Cytochemistry. A head cut off in 1841 would most likely have gone into alcohol. That doesn't prove anything on its own, because specimens get moved into new jars and fresh fluid all the time. Ferraz noticed the liquid had been changed between two of her visits. But it does mean the head as it looks today isn't exactly how it would have looked in 1841.
The second is the hair. Diário de Notícias describes the head as having fair hair and light eyes. Dangerous Minds points out that the images of Alves that circulate all show him with dark hair, and suggests the whole thing might be "several local legends of Lisbon in a trenchcoat." That's a fair point, but it's not as strong as it sounds. Those images are engravings and illustrations, not photographs, and nobody knows how closely they resemble the real man.
The third is the paperwork, or rather the lack of it. There's no published record showing how the jar came into the collection, and no DNA test has ever been done. Even if someone wanted to try, there's no known descendant to compare it with. Portuguese outlets like Lisboa Secreta have started calling it his "alleged" head for good reason.
Why It Matters Who It Is
It's easy to treat the head as a spooky curiosity, but it was once a person, and so were the five people killed on Rua das Flores. Human remains on display raise hard questions about consent and dignity, the same questions museums like the Mütter in Philadelphia have been wrestling with over skeletons like Harry Eastlack's. And if the head isn't Alves at all, then it belongs to someone else entirely, possibly another executed prisoner or an unclaimed body, whose name has been lost while a killer's name was stuck on him instead.
There's a long history of criminals' bodies being turned into objects after death, from Alves to the American outlaw Big Nose George Parrott, whose skin was made into a pair of shoes. Ferraz herself has written about feeling uneasy that the killer gets all the attention while his victims, both the named ones and the unknown saloios of the aqueduct legend, get none.
Where to See It Today
The head is kept in the anatomical theatre of the Institute of Anatomy at the Faculty of Medicine, on the Santa Maria Hospital campus in Lisbon. It's not a normal museum, and a lot of older articles say only medical students can see it. The faculty has run guided visits to the anatomical theatre, though, and staff there describe the head as the thing most visitors come for. If you want to go, contact the faculty directly to ask about visits.
The aqueduct is much easier. EPAL's Museu da Água runs visits to the Alcântara arches, so you can walk the stretch where the legend says it all happened and make up your own mind.
From Silent Film to Prime Video
Part of the reason the aqueduct version won out is that it's been on screen for over a century. Os Crimes de Diogo Alves, which premiered at Lisbon's Salão Trindade on 26 April 1911, was one of the first Portuguese fiction films ever made, and it's usually counted as the country's first horror film. According to Krino, the film blog of NOVA University Lisbon, a first version directed by Lino Ferreira was abandoned and João Tavares took over to make the 1911 film that survives. It was shown at Lisbon's MOTELX horror festival in 2022 with a live jazz score.
The story's still going. In April 2026, Prime Video and TVI launched the Portuguese crime series Lisbon Noir, starring Pêpê Rapazote as a detective. Its first episode is called "A Cabeça de Diogo Alves", or "The Head of Diogo Alves." Coverage of the show, like this piece in NiT, repeated the 70 aqueduct victims as fact, which shows how firmly the legend has stuck.
So Is It Really His Head?
The short answer is that nobody knows. Here's where the evidence leaves us:
• Diogo Alves was real, and he really was hanged in Lisbon on 19 February 1841 for five murders linked to a robbery on Rua das Flores.
• The aqueduct murders were never proven in court, and the famous figure of 70 seems to have grown out of a count of suicides.
• His skull was catalogued and studied in the 1880s and 1890s. Whether that skull still exists isn't clear.
• The head in the jar only appears in the records much later, and the museum's own catalogue calls it "probably" his.
It might be him. The medical school had his remains at some point, and it's possible the head and skull records got muddled over the years. But it might just as easily be someone else, given a famous name because a famous name makes a better story. Either way, the next time you see that pale face in the jar, it's worth remembering that the most interesting thing about it isn't who it is. It's how little we actually know.
