Martinho da Arcada: The Snow House and Pessoa's Table
Why is it significant?
Walk under the arcades in the north-east corner of the great riverside square until you reach a café with an old wooden front and the name Martinho da Arcada above the door. Inside, beyond the counter, there is a small table with a marble top that nobody quite treats like any other table.
Key Facts
| Place | Martinho da Arcada: The Snow House and Pessoa's Table |
|---|---|
| Address | Praça do Comércio 3, 1100-148 Lisboa, Portugal |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.70870, -9.13580 |
| Part of Walk | Ginjinha, Salt Cod and Custard Tarts: A Lisbon Food Walk from the Baixa to Cais do Sodré |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk under the arcades in the north-east corner of the great riverside square until you reach a café with an old wooden front and the name Martinho da Arcada above the door. Inside, beyond the counter, there is a small table with a marble top that nobody quite treats like any other table.
This café opened in 1782, and it is often called the oldest in Lisbon. At first it was the Casa da Neve, the Snow House, because what it sold was cold: iced drinks and sorbets, a real luxury in a hot city with no refrigerators. In winter, snow was packed into pits in the hills north of the city and brought down later in the year, wrapped in straw. Later the café took the name of one of its owners, a man called Martinho, and of the arcade it sits under.
That table belonged, in a sense, to Fernando Pessoa, Portugal's greatest modern poet. Pessoa earned his living writing business letters in English and French for trading firms in the Baixa, and for years he came here almost every day to drink coffee, smoke, write and argue with friends. He wrote not only as himself but as a whole crowd of invented poets with their own lives and styles: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos. You could say several of them drank here.
Pessoa died in November 1935, at forty-seven, still little known to the public. Only one book of his Portuguese poems, Mensagem, had come out in his lifetime. The trunk he left behind held more than twenty-five thousand pages, and scholars are still working through them. The café kept his table and his photograph on the wall, a small shrine for the readers who come looking for him.
Order a bica at the counter, which is what Lisboetas call a short, strong espresso. Legend says the word comes from a sign in a Chiado café, beba isto com açúcar, drink this with sugar... a story nobody can prove and everybody repeats. Then cross the square diagonally toward the river and turn right along the waterfront, toward the old royal shipyard.