Just a few miles from the center of Lisbon—where millions of tourists a year are helping to fuel rapid gentrification—the city's 6 de Maio neighborhood is slowly dying out.

For decades, 6 de Maio has been mythicized as a place so dangerous and ungovernable that even the police wouldn't dare set foot in it. In reality, the community was built mainly by Cape Verdeans who arrived in the late 1970s, after the nation gained independence from Portugal. Fast forward to 2016, which saw the local government actively breaking up the neighborhood to make room for a new urban development project through a series of forced evictions and police raids.