Venue: Jordão Theatre
Town: Urgezes, PT

The Jordão Theatre (Portuguese: Teatro Jordão) was inaugurated in the city of Guimarães on 20 November 1938, with the official name of Martins Sarmento Theatre, due to a political decision communicated days before its opening. It was the initiative of businessman Bernardino Jordão (1868-1940), concessionaire for electricity in Guimarães, who entrusted the project and construction management to architect and civil engineer Júlio José de Brito (1896-1965), whose best-known work is the Rivoli Theatre in Porto. This theatre was born out of the need to provide Guimarães with a decent concert hall, as the Guimarães Propaganda and Defence Society had already demanded in 1929. At the time, only two concert halls existed in Guimarães, the Gil Vicente Theatre, at the time closed due to legal disputes over its ownership, and the Afonso Henriques Theatre, built in 1855 but closed in February 1930 after many years of lack of maintenance and decaying infrastructure. On 1 January 1937, Bernardino Jordão confirmed to the newspaper O Comércio de Guimarães his intentions to build a new theatre: "I'm going to build the (so demanded) theatre and I expect it to be up and running by next summer." He also said that an architect had started work, looking at various possible sites for the much-desired building, which would have the conditions to host theatre and film shows. The legal dispute between the tenants and owners of the Gil Vicente Theatre on 25 July 1935 led to the temporary closure of the city's only proper cinema/theatre, a situation that lasted for the next 18 months. In the meantime, cinema-goers in Guimarães had to look outside the city. The Afonso Henriques Theatre, opened in 1855, closed in 1936. On 18 February of that same year, the Guimarães City Council met in extraordinary session to decide on the construction of a new theatre. The idea was to rebuild the Afonso Henriques Theatre, which was still standing because the street provided for in the 1933 decree had not been t