Café Novelty

The Café Novelty is the oldest existing cafe of the Spanish university city of Salamanca. The coffee shop, founded in 1905 at the main square, Plaza Mayor became famous as the haunt of artists, writers and politicians. The, which meets here Tertulias visited figures such as Miguel de Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Antonio Tovar, Juan Benet, Pedro Laín Entralgo, Francisco Umbral, Carmen Martín Gaite, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester and Víctor García de la Concha.

At its opening, the café was four times as large as today. It provided billiard tables, a restaurant and a dance hall and was for half a century as the "first address". Its founders were the brothers Vicente and Federico García Martín. King Alfonso XIII. dined here. During the Spanish Civil War, it was renamed in National Café (up to 1964). For dictator Francisco Franco was a banquet on the occasion of the award of an honorary doctorate of the University of Salamanca here aligned in the 1950s

After a period of decline and short-term closure in the 1960s it came to 1964 on the rebirth of the cafés under its old name, since the 1980s it came to the test of a partial reconstruction of his old splendid interior decoration

Today, the café is considered again as a flagship institution in the town, and literary and artistic Treffpunkt.Victor Garcia de la Concha, Juan Manuel de Prada, Jorge Volpy and Paco Novelty operate here and foreign guests of honor such as Jimmy Carter, François Mitterrand and Jacques Delors were entertained here.

Gallery

Plaza Mayor, City Hall and Café Novelty.