Beloved Pamplona Owner Dies at 90

Though it sits mostly below ground level, the Café Pamplona seems riotously bright, its canary yellow walls catching and reflecting the light from its small, high windows.

Today, in front of one of those windows and next to a candle picturing the Virgen de Guadalupe, you will find a vase full of bright white flowers with a note attached.

“In loving memory of Josephina,” it reads, “founder and spirit of the Café Pamplona.”

After almost 50 years of running her café on Arrow Street, Josefina Yanguas died of cancer on August 1 at the age of 90. Pamplona brought a slice of authentic European café culture to Harvard Square, and for decades it has served as a haven for intellectuals who came for fine coffee and fine conversation.

Through all the changes that have reshaped the Square in the past 50 years, Yanguas never changed her philosophy.

“Most places you go, it feels like a business,” said David H. Brennan, a Pamplona patron of more than 30 years whose poem “Ode to Pamplona” has a place on the café’s wall. “[Pamplona] is more a living room than a business...it’s like being invited into a good friend’s house.”

According to Karen S. Buo, who has been a cook at Pamplona for almost a year, it is for that reason that Yanguas opened Pamplona.

It was to be a place “where lonely people could make friends,” Buo said.

Yanguas saw cooking as a celebration of life, and generations of students and thinkers who passed the time conversing near the aroma of her kitchen came under Pamplona’s unique and inviting spell.

“Josie has always been the presiding spirit of the place,” Brennan said. “It’s the only place of its kind.”

According to the Boston Globe, Yanguas is survived by her sister Petra Yanguas Perez of Pamplona, Spain, where Josefina was born and immigrated from in 1948.

—Staff writer M. Aidan Kelly can be reached at makelly@fas.harvard.edu.