Coffee to your liking...

Coffee is such a wonderful drink: it helps us start the day on the right foot, is present when meeting with friends or work meetings and is the ideal drink for relaxing moments reading a book or watching the vibrant streets from your room at Palacio Solecio.

People from Malaga have a particular way of ordering their coffee, always looking for the perfect milk to coffee ratio, so that the fantastic cup of coffee that we are looking forward to enjoying is exactly like the one we have in mind. And we have a wide range of options to choose from…

The story behind this special coffee menu started at Café Central, a traditional café operating since the beginning of the 1900s that is located in the historic centre of Malaga, just a few minutes walk from Palacio Solecio. Back in the 1950s, the owner of Café Central, José Prado Crespo, realized that every client asked for a certain amount of coffee and milk and when he didn’t get it exactly right, they asked for it to be replaced. In post-war Spain, where goods like coffee were quite expensive, he wanted to ensure no coffee was wasted. 

That’s when he came up with the idea of creating a menu that to this day we still use to order coffee in Malaga. The menu includes 9 different varieties: from the traditional “solo” (alone) black coffee to the “nube” (cloud) a little bit of coffee and a lot of milk.

The design he made for the menu that he planned on hanging on the wall had two rows and he needed to have an even number of names to make it look tidy. One of the waiters that worked with him came up with the “no me lo ponga” (don’t serve it) as a little joke, which he liked and ended up using in his design.

The result was the well-known image with the names and an image of a cup of coffee showing the proportion of milk to coffee ratio. This image ended up on the tiles on the wall of this traditional café.

Today, you can still find this image on the wall. The main coffee brand from Málaga, Santa Cristina, made this image popular as they used it for commercial purposes.

© Café Central