Coffee houses, or cafés, are social spaces that have been constituted over long periods of time by important interactions between different geographies. In this paper, I analyse one form of coffee house in particular: the political and literary café. This type of social space reflects the changes that many societies in Europe and Latin America have been facing across time. My argument is that, even on different continents, they illuminate the movement from local economies to the global economy that has been developing intensively over the last two hundred years. The expansion of coffee consumption implies a particular social history of pilgrimage from which cafés have emerged.My analysis in the first section opens by focusing upon this pilgrimage in order to understand the emergence of this kind of place and the ways in which private consumption was alternatively replaced by public consumption. The second section analyses how cafés enacted certain social values that were learnt and adapted to local conditions in capital cities worldwide. Mimesis but also adaptation are keywords to understand the importance of cafés and how they were connected, not only from the global north to the global south but also within the Latin America region itself. At the start, they shared a certain kind of morality that later was projected into the intellectual dimension. The third section shifts to assess the key role that the resulting literary and political cafés in many capital cities played in the twentieth century. These places incorporated the importance of knowledge and the literary and the critical conscience of the city in the twentieth century. In the fourth section I discuss the origin of coffee shops such as JuanValdez, a new model that has its background in cafés such as Starbucks and stands in acute contrast to the traditional coffee houses and cafés of the past. The final section draws together this discussion and seeks to anticipate some key issues relating to other types of place like those located in poor neighbourhoods, and their interaction with globalised values.