Porto's Shopping Brasilia Turns Fifty in October, and Thirty-Five Beauty Salons Are Part of Why 223 of Its 243 Units Are Trading
It opened in 1976 with six escalators, 242 shops and coaches arriving from Spain to ride them. Since a court shut Lisbon's Apolo 70 in 2021 it has been the oldest shopping centre still trading in Portugal or Spain, and 223 of its 243 units are open.
The draw, in 1976, was the escalators. Six of them, moving, in a country where almost nobody had seen one. When Shopping Brasília opened beside the Rotunda da Boavista in Porto, coaches came from Barcelos, Viana do Castelo, Coimbra, Lisbon and across the border from Spain so that families could ride up and down.
"People went up and down, up and down, they brought the family, they brought their friends," Ana Paula Santos told the Lusa news agency. She is 64, runs the only jeweller left in the building and chairs the Associação de Comerciantes do Brasília (Brasília Traders' Association). Sofia Silva, who has a crystal shop there and was fifteen when it opened, remembers "a sea of people" queueing for the escalators, the chocolate croissants and the ice cream.
The centre turns fifty on 9 October, and the traders will mark it from six in the evening with a mural ten metres long and six metres high by the visual artist Mr. Dheo on the side entrance. A book launch comes two days earlier, a showcooking session with the chef Hélio the day after that.
The first, and now the last
Lusa and the traders bill the Brasília as the first shopping centre in the Iberian Peninsula. The claim needs one footnote: Lisbon's Apolo 70 opened in May 1971 and held the title of Portugal's oldest until a court ordered it shut in July 2021. Since that closure, the Brasília is the oldest shopping centre still trading anywhere in Portugal or Spain, which is the more remarkable fact of the two.
It opened with 242 shops and a 400-seat cinema, the Charlot, and with labels that were exotic for Porto in 1976, Moschino among them. It was also the first place in the country to trade until midnight, which is how retail shift work arrived in Portugal. "If everyone works those hours today and has those opportunities, they owe it to us, because we fought for that boldness," Santos said. The lyricist Carlos Tê took the young saleswomen on those extended shifts as his subject in "A Rapariguinha do Shopping", the song Rui Veloso made famous, and Júlio Rodão's book about the centre borrows its title from the joke that the girl from the shopping centre is a grandmother now.
A third construction phase in 1982 brought pink marble, mirrors and a gym full of women doing aerobics. Both the gym and the Charlot closed during the last decade, and the pandemic finished what the decline had started.
What refilled it
A refurbishment of the common areas completed in 2024, worth about half a million euros, came with a rebrand from Shopping Brasília to "Brasília Faz Parte". Of 243 units, 223 are now open, about 95 percent. Thirty-five of them sell beauty and aesthetics treatments, which the condominium administrator Luís Pinho attributes directly to Brazilian immigration into the city. Other units carry specialist goods from India, Brazil and across Africa.
Gabriela Rodrigues, 33, runs two aesthetics shops there and is about to open a third. She picked the building for its location and its parking. "Clients come a lot because the parking is easy," she said. A physiotherapy clinic in the building reports the same pull. The 700 square metre gym has been bought by the Portuguese chain Lemonfit and reopens this month once Porto's council signs off on installing the machines. The Charlot's 400 seats have gone to Portuguese investors who are studying a multi-purpose use. The old lake where children took out little boats is being turned this month into a small square for the anniversary.
What this means for expats
- Immigration is visibly rebuilding older Portuguese retail. Thirty-five salons in one 1976 building is a small illustration of a national number: foreign workers are close to one in five Segurança Social contributors.
- The people behind the counters have a new pay floor. If you work in a shop or hire staff for one, the sector rules changed last week when Portugal made the large-store pay scale binding, with 75,809 retail workers below it.
- Old centres and new money are two different markets. The Brasília refilled on half a million euros of common-area works and independent tenants, while Faro's Forum Algarve changed hands for 130 million euros this month.
Fifty years on, the escalators are unremarkable and the cinema is a shell waiting for a plan. What kept the building alive was neither nostalgia nor a fund: it was traders who could afford the rent and customers who could park.
