Cafe Pamplona’s interior has remained largely unchanged since it opened.

Fifty years ago, Josephina Yangcras walked down Bow Street and spotted a four-story house with a small patio.

She knew at first sight it was perfect for the cafe she was planning to start.

Now 85 years old, Yangcras still opens Cafe Pamplona’s doors each day at 11 a.m.

Little has changed at the austere, low-ceilinged cafe since its opening in 1959. But there have been a few concessions to the passage of time—Yangcras agreed to ban smoking in 1998, the first female waiter was hired one year later and, two months ago, Yangcras expanded her one-sandwich menu to include a full tapas offering.

Still, waiters and patrons tell stories of memorable customers, many of them students from Adams House—“when it was still artsy,” as one regular puts it—who return after thirty years and marvel at how little the cafe has changed.

“They always are surprised. They go, ‘It’s still here, nothing else is the same, but this is still here,’” says David H. Brennan, who has been coming to Pamplona since the 1970s.

During his visits to the cafe, he reads and writes poetry over a concoction he invented involving coffee, milk, crushed ice and chocolate syrup.

He even wrote a poem titled “Ode to the Cafe Pamplona.”

The poem includes the lines, “When your steam machine roars/I hear bulls thunder through holy Pamplona/Your caffeine music kindles my veins.”

An Intricate History

It is 11 a.m., opening time at the cafe. Yangcras navigates her way through the kitchen and 12 cramped tables with surprising agility given her slightly stooped frame, settling down to do what is done best at Cafe Pamplona—sit and chat.

Yangcras came to America from Pamplona, Spain in 1950 leaving a country ravaged by the Spanish Civil War.

Her father’s third cousin was in Harvard’s Romance Languages Department, she says. Yangcras came to live with the distant relatives in Cambridge until she made enough money from her job at an upscale Boston clothing store to get her own place.

Starting up a new life was difficult, she says.

“I was so lonely,” she laughs. “There was no place to go. In Spain, we have places you can go and meet your friends.”