Café Gelo

Café Gelo, on the Rossio, had a long-standing reputation for conspiracy: it was from its back room that Alfredo Costa and Manuel Buíça, the regicides, set out on the afternoon of 1 February 1908.³¹

Between 1957 and 1962, the café was the meeting place of a group of writers and artists that at one point had almost thirty members³ — among them Herberto Helder, António José Forte, Manuel de Lima, Natália Correia, António Gancho, Manuel de Castro, Pedro Oom, Mário Cesariny, Manuel Cargaleiro, Carlos Fernandes and Luiz Pacheco.¹ The writer Helder Macedo, who was part of the group, explained in an interview with Público in 2017, quoted by Wikipedia, that its original core was not surrealist: what they had in common was “an attitude of dissent, of refusing to collude”, in political, social, moral or sexual terms.¹

The meetings ended in 1962. On May Day that year, during the demonstration that was violently repressed in the Baixa, the police came into the café and beat up the people inside — “the sugar bowls went flying”, Luiz Pacheco recalled. The manager was summoned to the police station and, a few days later, told the group they could no longer stay there.³ They began meeting instead at the Café Nacional, on Rua 1.º de Dezembro, according to Pacheco, or at the Café Palladium, on Avenida da Liberdade, according to Wikipedia.³¹

The café changed its layout several times; in 2024 it became a seafood restaurant.¹