Montepio “Sinks” La Gondola on Avenida De Berna

29 July 2017

The building that has housed the renowned restaurant La Gondola since 1943, is now scheduled to close its doors on August 6.  It will then be demolished, giving way to Montepio’s new headquarters in Lisbon. The redevelopment came about after a land swap between the Lisbon city council and the financial institution.

The property was originally built in 1928 by Julio Salustiano Rodrigues, and was owned by the physician and archaeologist Fernando António de Almeida e Silva Saldanha.  The spectre of demolition has hung over the building since 1939, even before the restaurant La Gondola, on Avenida de Berna, near Praça de Espanha, opened its doors.

In that year, while the Second World War was first rumbling at the heart of Europe, the Portuguese capital’s city council decided to acquire the building, as an alternative to expropriation, with the intent of demolishing it as a part of an urban planning project for the area around the Praça de Espanha.

But the urban reform plan never went forward. The result: instead of being demolished, the building was leased to a restaurant, La Gondola, which has been operating there since 1943.

August 6, 2017: Instead of celebrating its diamond anniversary, La Gondola will be counting down its last days of existence. In order to go ahead with a new urban renewal project for the area, the Lisbon city council arranged for a land swap with Montepio Geral, which will demolish the restaurant, subsequently erecting its new headquarters in its place.

The demolition is thus the result of the deal between the two entities, which was negotiated and approved in December 2014 by the Lisbon city council in conjunction with Montepio and its insurer Lusitânia.  The deal included an area encompassing more than 6,200 square meters, including the property where the restaurant, La Gondola, now stands.

In exchange, the municipality received the land where the Praça de Espanha market operated until September 2015.

“This is not the outcome we wanted, we’d like to stay.  We have been here for decades, the location and the building are unique. We resisted the plan as far as humanly possible, but we couldn’t stand up to the Lisbon city council and Montepio,” lamented Júlia Ribeiro, La Gondola’s manager, in a statement to Diário de Notícias. “We are unhappy with the situation, but we are required to close,” said the restaurant’s manager.

However, a petition launched by the ” Neighbours of Avenidas Novas” movement, which has already garnered more than 800 signatures, argues that the demolition of La Gondola “should not authorized until an assessment is carried out on whether it should be classified as a Property of Municipal Interest” and “along with its application for inclusion within Lisbon’s traditional shops program.”

Titled “Against the Demolition of the Gondola Restaurant Building and for Saving the Traditional Character of Avenidas Novas,” the petition states that the property “has the added value of incorporating a part of Lisbon’s urban memory, a memory which shouldn’t be erased without at least discussion and technical analysis of its relevance to the parish of Avenidas Novas, since construction of the building was contemporaneous with the beginnings of urbanization plans for the area.”

Original Story: Jornal de Negócios – Rui Neves

Translation: Richard Turner