Switch Opens Next Weekend at the Old Swing Site in Porto's Boavista — Ruben Domingues Brings Electronic Music Back to Rua Júlio Dinis With a Sérgio Rebelo Redesign

Switch, a new electronic-music-rooted nightclub project that explicitly does not want to limit itself to one genre, opens next weekend on Rua Júlio Dinis in Porto's Boavista neighbourhood — on the exact site that housed Swing, the iconic 1980s-and-1990s portuense club whose dance floor formed a generation of the city's nightlife. The reopening is led by Ruben Domingues, a veteran of the Porto club scene previously responsible for twelve years (2010-2022) at Indústria and for the Elétrico festival, alongside other projects.

The architectural redesign is signed by Sérgio Rebelo, who has worked the brief as a deliberate dialogue between memory and reinvention. The first floor is configured as a bar, mirrored throughout, with explicit visual references to the original Swing layout. The descent to the dance floor is via the restored original staircase, with a parallel lift for reduced-mobility access leading to a separate entrance. Dark woods, period colours in the bengaleiro and gender-neutral bathrooms anchor the lower level. The dance floor itself preserves a recombination of the original Swing's signature resin-and-light patterned floor, broken into squares and intercalated with wood to soften the original industrial-underground feel into something Rebelo describes as "more like being at a friend's house".

Operationally, Switch breaks with several conventions of the Porto club scene. There are no VIP zones and no areas accessible only via paid upgrade — the entire space puts every guest on the same footing. The artist's booth sits in the centre of the dance floor, flanked by bars on both sides, in a configuration the design team describes as "a temple of dance". Programmable individual lighting cells across the floor allow real-time zoning, designed to create multiple simultaneous atmospheres in a single physical envelope. A ramp on the elevated section secures wheelchair access to the only raised area on the floor; acoustic immersion was treated as a primary design constraint, not an after-thought.

Domingues frames the venue's positioning sharply. He wants Switch to be "comfortable, inclusive, safe" and to actively push back against "the stigma that nightclubs are already a thing of the past" — a reaction in part to the post-pandemic erosion of mid-sized venue economics and the gravitation of younger audiences toward open-air festival formats. The mutability of the space is the answer: Switch is built to host concerts, presentations and other cultural events in addition to its core electronic-music programme, positioning itself as another cultural pole at the city's disposal rather than a single-format dance club.

The siting on Rua Júlio Dinis matters in three ways. The street sits in the Boavista corridor, walking distance from Casa da Música, the Rotunda da Boavista and the new boutique-hotel cluster that has opened along the corridor since 2022. It is well served by the STCP 200, 201 and 502 lines and a short walk from the Casa da Música metro station on the A and B lines. And it carries a cultural memory — anyone over 45 in the portuense scene will recognise the address as the original Swing — that the project explicitly seeks to honour rather than overwrite.

For foreign residents in the city, Switch slots into a Porto cultural calendar that has been densifying since 2023. The opening weekend programme will be announced through the venue's social channels in the coming days; advance ticketing is expected to go through the standard Porto-club partner platforms. Doors open Friday.

Sources: Lusa report (2 May 2026, Porto, by Simão Freitas with photos by José Coelho).