Cafés in Portugal Lisbon and Porto

From Brazil to Timor: how coffee reached Portugal

Portuguese coffee history runs through the empire. In 1727 Francisco de Melo Palheta planted Brazil's first coffee bush in Pará, reputedly from seeds smuggled out of French Guiana; by the 1840s Brazil grew about 40% of the world's coffee.⁵ Today Portugal's beans come mainly from Vietnam, mostly robusta, from Brazil and from Uganda, according to the AICC.²

In Africa, coffee was Angola's leading export under colonial rule, grown on about 2,500 commercial farms and by 250,000 smallholders. After owners and workers left the estates in 1975–76, exports fell to 8% of their 1973 level by 1985.⁶

In Timor, the Portuguese introduced coffee in the early 1800s. The Híbrido de Timor, an unplanned cross of arabica and robusta, is grown there, and coffee made up 24% of Timor-Leste's exports in 2017.⁷

Delta, Nicola and Sical

Three names cover most Portuguese counters. Delta Cafés began in 1961 in a 50 m² warehouse in Campo Maior, in the Alentejo, where Rui Nabeiro started with three workers. It became market leader in 1994 with 42% and held 38% in the 2000s, and launched its Delta Q capsules in 2007.⁸

Nicola traces its coffee to 1779 and to Lisbon's Café Nicola, a meeting place for writers and the poet Bocage; it has had its own factory in Venda Nova since 1950 and belongs to Massimo Zanetti Beverage Ibéria, formed in 2017.⁹ Sical was founded in Porto in 1947 by Vicente Peres, became the first Portuguese coffee brand to advertise in 1956, and has belonged to Nestlé since 1987.¹⁰

The pastelaria and the old café

The everyday setting is the pastelaria, a pastry shop that is also a café, and the oldest are still open. Confeitaria Nacional on Lisbon's Praça da Figueira has traded since 1829.¹¹ Porto's Café Progresso opened in 1899 and was among the first in the city with a Cimbali espresso machine, the Italian brand behind the word cimbalino.⁴

The counter has long been cheap. In 2018 the AICC said a café had cost about 60–70 cents for several years because roasters absorbed rising bean prices.² That ended with the bean-price records of 2024 and 2025:¹ in December 2024, Expresso reported that cafés planned to charge €0.90–0.95 from January 2025.¹²

Lisbon and Porto: bica and cimbalino

Lisbon's literary café is in Chiado. A Brasileira opened at Rua Garrett 120/122 on 19 November 1905, created by Adriano Telles, a former emigrant to Brazil.¹³ It has been classified a property of public interest since 1997, and Lagoa Henriques's bronze of Fernando Pessoa, unveiled in the 1980s, sits at one of its terrace tables.¹³ Down the hill on Praça da Figueira, the founder's son brought the bolo-rei recipe from France to Confeitaria Nacional in 1875, and the house still supplies the Presidency of the Republic.¹¹

Porto's counterpart is on Rua de Santa Catarina, now a pedestrian shopping street. Café Majestic opened there on 17 December 1921, with Art Nouveau decoration by the architect João Queiroz.¹⁴ By 2017 the Majestic and Café Guarany had both joined Porto de Tradição, the city program that protects historic shops.⁴

Café Progresso, on Rua Actor João Guedes, changed hands in 2017. Its new owners served an espresso of 60% Brazilian and 40% Guatemalan beans for €0.80 that year, alongside coffees from Ethiopia, Peru and Costa Rica.⁴ At any of the three, as anywhere in the north, an espresso is um cimbalino.³