Santa Cruz Cafe
The Café Santa Cruz is a café in the Portuguese city of Coimbra . It is located in the central square of Praça 8 de Maio , in the middle of the pedestrian zone of the historic old town, at the entrance to the traditional shopping street Rua Ferreira Borges .
It owes its international, tourist fame to its construction as a former church right next to the Santa Cruz Monastery . In Coimbra itself, however, the café is best known as a traditional café for the bohemians and intellectuals .
history
The current building of the Augustinian Canons Monastery, founded in 1124, was rebuilt around 1530, with its own, separate, small parish church in order not to disturb the monks in the monastery with everyday parish life.
With the dissolution of all religious orders in Portugal in 1834, as a result of the Liberal Revolution in 1822 , the parish church moved to the larger monastery church. From then on, the smaller building was no longer a religious building.
The building now alternated between a horseshoe shop, a police station, a sewerage warehouse, a funeral home, a carpentry, a fire station and, at the beginning of the 20th century, a car repair shop, until the building was rented out as a café for the first time in 1919.
On May 8, 1923, the luxurious Café Santa Cruz reopened with the attention of the national press. Initial protests against a neo-Manueline coffee house right next to the Santa Cruz monastery were counteracted by a toned down plan by the architect Jaime Inácio dos Santos for the facade. From then on, the café was an established meeting place for writers, journalists and sports enthusiasts from the community of União de Coimbra . The academic supporters of the local rival Académica de Coimbra met in the Café Arcádia at the other end of the adjacent Rua Ferreira Borges.
After the Carnation Revolution from 1974 to 1985, the café was run by a single operator named Alexandre Marques, who has continued to run it with two partners ever since. The clientele changed from a mixed clientele with a focus on female students to a clientele that is today also influenced by tourism.
Web links
- Official website of Café Santa Cruz (Portuguese)
Individual evidence
- ^ Lydia Hohenberger , Jürgen Strohmaier: Portugal. 2nd edition, DuMont Reiseverlag, Ostfildern 2009, page 200 ( ISBN 978-3-7701-7658-8 )
- ↑ a b Short portrait of Café Santa Cruz on its official website, accessed on April 23, 2016
- ↑ Information under Cronologia in the entry of the monastery and the café in the Portuguese list of monuments SIPA, accessed on April 23, 2016
Coordinates: 40 ° 12 ′ 38.9 " N , 8 ° 25 ′ 43.8" W.