Cascais Buys the Atlântida Cine in Carcavelos for 600,000 Euros, Pledging to Keep Film at the Heart of the Closed Neighbourhood Cinema

Cascais council has bought the Atlântida Cine in Carcavelos, the last neighbourhood cinema on the Cascais line, for 600,000 euros, and promises that films will stay at the heart of whatever reopens there. The council announced on Monday that the deed was signed on 23 September. No reopening date has been set.

What the council bought

The Atlântida Cine sits in the basement of the Centro Comercial de Carcavelos (Carcavelos Shopping Centre), near the railway station. It was founded by Fausto Semedo, ran for about 40 years and closed in May 2024, officially for holidays and improvement works. It never reopened, and the family put it up for sale that December.

The council told Público in February that the 600,000 euros covers the building and its contents, including the furniture and the projection equipment. One of the owners, Alexandre Semedo, said the deal takes in two screens, one with 211 seats and one with about 80, and the bar. Figures the Instituto do Cinema e do Audiovisual (ICA, Film and Audiovisual Institute) gave the paper show the cinema sold 13,785 tickets across 967 screenings in 2023, and 9,331 across 470 in 2024, when it showed films only until 29 May.

The council executive approved the purchase unanimously on 16 June, but the deed waited three months for paperwork from the owning family, according to the council.

A cinema, or an auditorium?

The question hanging over the purchase has been what the space becomes. In August an open letter from Cinetoscópio, the company that runs Lisbon's Cinema Fernando Lopes, and a fans' group warned that the council seemed to want a multipurpose auditorium. "An auditorium where a film is occasionally shown does not replace a cinema with a regular programme," they wrote. Cinetoscópio said it had agreed with the family in 2024 to take over the cinema and invest about 200,000 euros, before the sale went ahead instead.

Monday's statement goes some way towards them. "With the council's intervention we guarantee that it remains dedicated to culture and to cinema," said the mayor, Nuno Piteira Lopes. The building "may host other cultural initiatives, naturally, but cinema will remain at the centre of its identity and its programming," he said.

How the space will be run, what it will show and who will manage it "will be defined at a later stage", the council said. It is now assessing the building's condition and the works it needs, some of them to regularise parts that are not currently legal, and it is weighing film screenings, training and projects to promote Portuguese cinema. The council says it has received proposals and expressions of interest from people in culture and film, and remains open to more.

For now, Carcavelos keeps its informal substitute: a monthly Cinema no Bairro (Cinema in the Neighbourhood) screening run by the fans' group with a local residents' association, which drew about 100 people to its last session before the summer letter. The Atlântida joins other council projects on the coast this autumn, from two new SNS 24 counters to a proposed toll on the Marginal.