The Centro de Ciência do Café is perhaps a little off the beaten tourist track, located in the Alentejo at the height of Lisbon near the Spanish border in Campo Maior. But it’s worth it. And even children won’t be bored at this coffee museum in Portugal, I promise.
Since 2014, this place, financed by Delta Cafés and European funding, has been entirely dedicated to the magical drink that prepares us for the day in the morning or closes our stomachs after an extended meal. Delta Cafés, founded in 1961 by Rui Nabeiro in Campo Maior, where its headquarters are still located today, has gradually worked its way up to become the market leader in cafés in Portugal. The Delta logo can really be found at every snack bar in Portugal,just like the typical red plastic chairs. Presumably, the café-museum is primarily a status symbol for this company. At least we didn’t see many other guests on the day of our visit and concluded that it is heavily subsidized by the corporation.
The CCC is open every day: from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. during the week and from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on weekends. According to the website, you should plan about 90 minutes for the visit, we even spent 3 hours there.
Already the welcome was extremely warm: We had read online something about coffee tasting, but were not sure whether we want to invest the 5, – € in addition to the 8, – € regular admission. The cashier exuberantly promised us that we would not regret our decision to do so. And that’s exactly what happened.
The exhibition at the Coffee Museum in Portugal
But we still had an hour before the tasting, which takes place four times a day during the week and once a day on weekends, so we first explored the museum. For this, another staff member first briefed us on the layout and structure of the museum and gave us a language card to use during the interactive parts of the exhibition to set the playback to English. The tour started with the greenhouse, where coffee plants and other tropical plants were growing. There were also all kinds of information boards: pests of coffee plants, growing areas, and information about the three different types of coffee beans: Robusta and Arabica, I’m sure many know, but did you know that there is also a third type, Moka? Not us, anyway.
After that, it was off at a whiz to an outline of the early and more recent history of coffee cultivation. Former smugglers who transported the valuable goods to Spain on foot and by car during the dictatorships in Portugal and Spain also had their say. Children who might be bored can pass the time with a computer game in which they have to be smugglers and transport the goods in such a way that they are not discovered by the police.
The “Tasting
After viewing this part of the exhibition, it was time for our tasting. Everyone who visits the museum has an espresso with the in-house blend included anyway, so did we. It was a bit too sour for us, but very full-bodied. Tasting sounds a bit misleading for what came next: it was more like a demonstration, where the barista prepared and explained 3 coffee drinks before our eyes, the fourth, a kind of coffee slushie was already ready (and delicious!). We then enjoyed our drinks on the terrace at the entrance with the sun on our noses before looking at the rest of the exhibition, vibrating half a meter above the ground from all the caffeine: there were, after all, things to learn about coffee roasting and aromas as well as transport routes. The little ones are not neglected in the second part of the exhibition. There is an extra play and play area including a ball pool just for them.
Criticism
The only downer is that, like all European countries, Portugal has a dark colonial past, without which coffee cultivation and trade would not have come about in the way it did, and even today, of course, the country still benefits from these historically grown structures. The information boards in the historical part of the exhibition talk about colonies and slaves, whose work was necessary for coffee cultivation and transport, but do not critically classify this at any point (or at least we did not find any).
Conclusion
We have rarely experienced a museum where the content is presented in such an interesting and catchy way as it is here. The Centro de Ciência do Café in Campo Maior, Portugal is worth a visit for anyone who is as fond of this wonderful brown swill as we are, and even children shouldn’t get bored during a visit. So if you’re in the area on your trip through Portugal, be sure to make a stop. And even a detour is worth it.
