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The anniversary was still being celebrated: November 20 marked the 11th anniversary that A Vida Portuguesa arrived in Porto. But the store did not withstand the “terrible year 2020.” Two years after the brand changed its space, now on Rua Cândido dos Reis, the pandemic came to dictate the definitive closure at the end of the year. “The sadness is immense,” laments Catarina Portas in a Facebook post. “Goodbye Porto!”
The announcement, made on social networks, comes a little over a month after the closure of another space in the group: the “newest store in Lisbon”, inaugurated in 2016 on Rua Ivens and especially dedicated to “products for the home. ”, Closed on November 7.
“It was a long and difficult decision, considered and taken calmly and rationally, ‘resizing’ the business when the entire Portuguese economy is going through a critical moment,” the company announced on Facebook. The publication, however, left a note of optimism: “the furniture and decoration are carefully collected waiting for new adventures that are sure to come.”
In July, in an interview with PUBLIC, Catarina Portas revealed that the Porto store was the one that, “at this moment”, “was suffering the most.” “It is in Clérigos, an area that in recent years, with the explosion of tourism in Porto, has become an area for nightlife and tourists. […] The fact is that the people of Porto today do not go to Clérigos. Everything is local accommodation, there are no longer people living in Baixa ”.
After two and a half years looking for an address in Porto, A Vida Portuguesa arrived in the city in 2009, with a store on the first floor of the extinct Fernandes, Mattos & Cia building, on the corner of Galeria de Paris and Carmelitas streets. . . In 2018, it moved to this space on Rua Cândido dos Reis, which previously belonged to the warehouse of the Camões & Moreira fabric store, founded in 1947.
“Thank you all, partners, owners, suppliers, clients, friends. And more than anything, a sincere thanks to a committed and knowledgeable team like few others “, comments the businesswoman on Facebook.
Rejecting the idea that A Vida Portuguesa had become “a tourist shop” (“I never considered it a souvenirs. It is a store for the Portuguese, but it is accessible and foreigners find it interesting because they discover things they have never seen, ”he told Público in July), the truth is that the pandemic and the absence of tourism have dictated difficult days for the project.
“We had hordes of Asian tourists entering the store on Rua Anchieta, we had shelves full of products, because it disappeared, and we had numbers at 60 percent of the tourists. The fact is that they disappeared and now we are all very upset. Without revealing the magnitude of the losses, the businesswoman pointed to figures for 2019: “almost four million results”, an average of sales of “300 thousand per month”, 50 employees and 400 suppliers.
The project was born in 2007, with the opening of the first store, in Chiado, Lisbon, after Catarina Portas carried out a journalistic investigation on Portuguese daily life starting in the 1930s. On the shelves of recovered antique furniture, revives embroidery, crockery, handmade blankets, toys, preserves, soaps and a variety of other traditional and nationally made products, rescuing many Portuguese brands from oblivion.
In addition to the store in Porto, which will remain open until the end of the month, A Vida Portuguesa maintains the spaces on Rua Anchieta (Chiado) and Largo do Intendente in Lisbon in operation. The Mercado da Ribeira store is temporarily closed. It is also possible to purchase products sold by the brand in the online store.
