IKEA’s first new Portuguese store in almost a decade is now weeks away. The Swedish furniture giant’s retail operator, Ingka Group, is putting the finishing touches on a 4,124 m² store at Mondego Retail Park in Taveiro, on the western edge of Coimbra — the first store in Portugal built on IKEA’s new compact format, and the company’s first Portuguese opening since Loulé in 2017. Hiring for roughly 34 staff is underway, with the doors scheduled to open at the start of summer.
Coimbra is not a random choice. The city anchors Portugal’s Centro region — the largest population pocket between IKEA’s existing big-box stores in Matosinhos and Braga to the north and Loures and Alfragide to the south. Until now, customers in the region either drove an hour-plus or ordered online. The compact store, pitched internally under the slogan “pequena mas poderosa” (small but mighty), is designed to close exactly that kind of gap: inspiration displays, a takeaway range of essentials, a Circular Area for second-life products, and the obligatory Swedish meatballs — in roughly a tenth of the floor area of a classic blue box.
Portugal is an early stop on a global rollout. In March, Ingka Group announced plans to open 20 small-format stores across Europe and North America, naming Coimbra as Portugal’s first. And the programme is accelerating: this week Ingka confirmed an omnichannel push in France built on the same compact model, with ten new small stores planned there by 2030. For Ingka, compact stores are the capital-light answer to a saturated big-box map; for mid-sized cities like Coimbra, they are the first time the IKEA brand has been economically viable at local scale.
The deepest Swedish footprint in Portugal
The Coimbra opening adds a sixth retail location to what is already arguably the deepest Swedish corporate footprint in the country. IKEA has operated in Portugal since the Alfragide store opened in 2004, and today employs around 5,000 people across retail and manufacturing — the latter through Swedwood Portugal in Paços de Ferreira, one of Europe’s largest flat-pack furniture plants, which exports into IKEA’s European supply chain.
The retail expansion also sits alongside an energy story. In March, Ingka Investments unveiled the hybridisation of its Pisco wind park in Portugal — adding solar panels to the existing 25-turbine, 50 MW site to lift annual output from 150 GWh to 233 GWh and the grid connection’s capacity factor from 34% to 50%. Ingka has invested or committed around €4.3 billion to renewables globally, with up to €7.5 billion planned by 2030 — and Portugal is one of the markets where it both sells sofas and generates the power to run the stores.
What to watch. Retail-park operators in Viseu, Leiria and Aveiro will read Coimbra as a template: if the compact format hits its numbers, Ingka’s 20-store programme gives it an obvious pipeline of similar mid-sized Portuguese cities. Suppliers should note the Circular Area concept — second-life logistics is a growing procurement line for Ingka in Iberia. And for Nordic retailers still hesitating about Portugal, the signal is blunt: the most data-driven retail operator in the Nordics keeps allocating capital here, store by store, megawatt by megawatt.
NorthSouth HQ tracks Nordic retail expansion across Portugal — see the Nordics → Portugal directory for the full list of Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Finnish operators on the ground.