Jazz Returns to the Capitólio Rooftop, Eight Sundays at Sunset

A tenor saxophone unfurls across the Capitólio terrace at sunset, its line drifting over deck chairs toward the canopy of the Jardim Botânico. A decade ago this rooftop sat dark above a Parque Mayer strip synonymous with padlocked doors and municipal hand-wringing. Tonight it holds an audience, each seat €5.

The scene is Há Jazz no Parque Mayer (“Jazz at Parque Mayer”), the first dedicated jazz cycle on the roof of a building that turns 95 this month—inaugurated on 31 July 1931 to a design by architect Luís Cristino da Silva, whose innovations included an escalator to a terrace eleven metres above street level. Eight Sunday-evening concerts, from 12 July to 30 August at 19:30, are curated by Hot Clube de Portugal, the continent’s oldest jazz club, founded in 1948 at Praça da Alegria, a few hundred metres from the Capitólio’s front door.

Double-bassist Alice San Payo, who entered the Hot Clube school in 2022 and debuted as a bandleader at Guimarães Jazz Festival two years later, leads a quartet on 19 July. On 9 August, João Nogueira’s quartet plays Coltrane’s Sound, a tribute marking the global centenary of John Coltrane, born 23 September 1926. Porto trio Bode Wilson (saxophonist João Pedro Brandão, bassist Demian Cabaud, drummer Marcos Cavaleiro) closes the run on 30 August.

The Capitólio once hosted regular “Capitólio Jazz” sessions alongside revue theatre, fado, and cinema. After decades of neglect across Parque Mayer, the building reopened in October 2016 following a renovation by architect Alberto de Souza Oliveira that earned the Prémio Valmor. The jazz cycle continues a geographic reconnection: in 2024, the Assembleia Municipal approved the cession of a Praça da Alegria building to Hot Clube, with the stated aim of coordinating programming with Parque Mayer. The two addresses sit a few minutes’ walk apart and have anchored Lisbon’s jazz life for the better part of a century.

Concerts begin at 19:30; bar service and deck chairs throughout. The terrace catches the sunset—bring sunglasses.

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