Hard Club, Porto

Hard Club fills a nineteenth-century market building created for a job it never got to do. Built in 1885 to replace the ageing Mercado da Ribeira, Mercado Ferreira Borges was intended as Porto’s new market. Traders, however, would not leave the earlier market, so this building never served the purpose for which it was made.

Its name honours José Ferreira Borges, a Porto lawyer and politician who helped bring Portugal’s liberal regime into being. The design is credited to João Carlos Machado and Companhia Aliança, the Massarelos foundry. Since 1982, the building has held the designation of Property of Public Interest.

Today it is no longer a municipal market. Privately operated as Hard Club, it has become a cultural venue for concerts, exhibitions, book fairs and music fairs, and it also works as a studio. That reinvention suits the setting: above Ribeira, beside the Jardim do Infante and near the Palácio da Bolsa, an unrealised market has found a second life through Porto’s cultural scene.