What is Primeira Plateia

Portugal has hundreds of stages and no common audience. Cultural programming is scattered across dozens of websites — each with its own calendar, its own format, its own typos. Primeira Plateiabrings it all together in one place, so finding out what's on stops being detective work.

The story

Primeira Plateia is the second life of an old idea. Between 2016 and 2018, EmCena.ptpursued the same goal — a single home for theatre listings — but it depended on manual work by the theatres' communication teams, who entered their own programming. It asked for time from people who had little to spare.

What changed since then is the technology. Today the collection is automatic: venues don't have to do anything — the programming they publish on their official websites is read directly, every day. The idea is the same; the effort is finally on the right side.

Who makes this

I'm Fábio, and Primeira Plateia is an independent project, built solo — with plenty of help from automation. It belongs to no media group and no ticketing company: the events you see here are here because they happen, not because someone paid to appear.

How it works

Every day, automatically, we collect the programming published on each venue's official website. Each event is normalised and classified by category — music, performing arts, visual arts, ideas, film, education — and enriched with metadata: prices, sessions, accessibility, age guidance.

Automation makes mistakes. A swapped date, a sold-out session we missed, a missing event — if you spot something wrong, write to us and we'll fix it. And always confirm the details on the official site before buying tickets: the final word belongs to each venue's box office, not to us.

For cultural venues

Do you programme a venue that isn't here yet? Write to us — adding a new venue is, in most cases, quick.

Synopses and images belong to their respective venues and producers; we use them for information only, always linking directly to the source. Want to correct information about your venue, or prefer we stop showing your images? Tell us and we'll handle it within 48 hours.

Contact and subscribe

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Project status

Primeira Plateia is under active development — and it's open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. The code lives on GitHub for anyone who wants to see how it works, report issues or contribute.