A Pérola do Bolhão

A small grocery shop by Mercado do Bolhão displays its goods from the street with a tiled facade. Above the entrance, you can read tea and coffee, while the figures with tea leaves in their hair and a necklace of coffee berries recall where these products were brought from. Food is still sold inside, and the owners’ family once lived above the shop.

On May twenty-third, nineteen seventeen, António Rodrigues Reis opened a shop here with four partners. He had come from Santa Maria da Feira intending to become a successful merchant, but he did not have enough money of his own for the whole venture. The five owners began with tea, coffee, and spices: at the time, few people in Porto dealt in such goods.

Reis lived on the sales and invested the profits in his partners’ shares. One by one, he bought them all out, then bought the building itself. His son later joked that his father had gradually “got rid of the partners,” but behind that phrase were years of trade in premises of about forty square meters. Customers were sold products on credit, with records kept in a special ledger. Two coffee grinders in the windows ground the beans right in the shop.

The name above the door translates as “The Pearl of Bolhão”: Bolhão is the neighboring market and commercial district. For the opening, Reis commissioned a facade that immediately showed what was sold inside. Above one figure is written “tea,” and above the other, “coffee.” The first has tea leaves in her hair, the second a necklace of coffee berries. This showed customers the overseas origin of the two main goods even before they went inside.

The shop also became the family home. Reis married, and his four children were born on the floor above. One of them, also António Reis, delivered orders around Porto while still at school. When his father grew old and fell ill, António Reis returned after a year and a half of military service and took his place behind the counter. Later, he said that military service had been the only vacation of his life.

To keep the small shop supporting the family, António Reis expanded the trade: he added cheeses, sausages, ham, preserves, wines, and dried fruit. The old coffee grinders disappeared from the windows, but tea and coffee remained. At ninety-two, António Reis still lived above the shop and came down every day to the old cash register; his son was already running the business.

In early two thousand twenty-five, a retail group acquired the shop. After a short renovation, it retained the employees and the shop’s former layout. Products that António Reis added to his father’s tea and coffee are still sold behind the door. And in the lower right corner of the facade, the mark of Fábrica de Cerâmica do Carvalhinho and the date the tiles were made—nineteen seventeen—remain.