Azulejos

Our trip to Portugal this past October took us from Lisbon to the Alentejo to Coimbra to Porto. It took us to cafes and past farms and vineyards and into castles and museums and bakeries and past bridges and to lots and lots and lots and lots of monasteries and churches. It was a bit of a whirlwind tour that touched on some of the highlights of the country and barely scratched the surface in most places. It was an introduction.

If there was a single constant through our entire week in country, I would have to say it would be the ceramic tiles. Sound like a strange thing to highlight as a cohesive memory binding a week long vacation together in a gorgeous European country? Expecting castles or all those monasteries or sardines or hills or churches or art or Cristiano Ronaldo or salt cod or a Mediterranean climate or something else? It was none of those. It was ceramic tiles. It was the one thing we found everywhere we went in Portugal. And to be honest, there are some spectacular looking tiles over there. 

I know maybe what you are thinking: don't we have ceramic tiles in the United States? Well, yes we do. But not like they have in Portugal. If you have been there or if you go in the future, you will know what I'm talking about. It's pretty obvious. These things are everywhere. Just walk the streets. There are buildings everywhere that are tiled on the outside. Think you won't notice? You will. You can't escape it. It is literally inescapable. And if by some chance you don't pick up on it by walking down the street, it will hit you over the head in every church and convent and palace and monastery you visit. And you will visit a lot of these, especially those monasteries. There are a ton of them. I might have already mentioned that.

Azulejo covered buildings in Coimbra (top) and Lisbon (bottom).

Now in Portugal, of course, they don't call them tiles. They call them azulejos. And if you are wondering how to pronounce that word (we were...), it's a-zu-le-jos, not az-ul-e-jos (hopefully that non-dictionary guide makes sense; the "l" belongs to the "lejos" and not the "azul"). The word itself is derived from an Arabic word meaning "polished stone". And Arabic and Muslim lands is not just the origin of the word. It's the source of the tiles themselves.

Azulejos were introduced to the Iberian peninsula in the 13th century by the Moors, who conquered and held much of Portugal and parts of Spain beginning in the 10th century until they were driven out a few hundred years later. Coincidentally that was just about the time that azulejos started to become widely used on buildings in southern Spain. 

While tiles started to become a thing in Spain about the end of the Moorish occupation, it would take a little longer before the azulejos started being used in a common way in what is now Portugal, although the use of mosaics for sidewalks and public paved squares had already been popular for a couple of hundred years when they started decorating the walls of places with these things. Think 15th century and think simple geometric or naturalistic motifs in blue and white only. This is all the Moors had available to them so that's all they used to make these things back in the 1400s.

As Portugal embarked on their age of discovery in the 16th century, they started to import goods which would forever change their way of life. On the tile manufacturing front, trips back and forth to what is now Asia brought yellow dyes which added a third color to the two-tone azulejos that were already so popular. At the same time, the tile artisans started to supplement the regular and repeating patterning with narrative scenes or pictures, effectively creating large scale artworks through tiles.

Tiles (ca. 1680) from the Museu Nacional do Azulejos (top) and St. Michael's Chapel, Coimbra University (bottom).

Those new, large scale scenes seemed to become the next point of departure for azulejos artisans as we entered the 17th century. I can't tell you how many churches and monasteries and train stations we visited with detailed scenes upon scenes from history or the Bible constructed out of tiles 4" or smaller. These things must have been created off site somewhere as a giant sort of canvas and then put back together in situ. And they most always were just simple blue and white, taking a step back a couple of hundred years but in a totally different level of detail and precision.

If churches seem like an odd place to find these murals of azulejos, they shouldn't. For a while, the Catholic church was the main patron of azulejo artisans. Think about the number of paintings and sculptures in churches all around the world. There was a time that the only secure place to have a commissioned work of art was in a church or cathedral. Think Michelangelo in Rome. Think Goya in Madrid. Think azulejos in Portugal. And there is a whole of Catholicism in Portugal.

To get a great look at tiled buildings everywhere we went in Portugal, we walked the streets, we visited churches, we visited monasteries (have I mentioned there are a few of those in Portugal?), we visited castles, we visited palaces. But for a more in depth and formal learning experience, we stopped by the Museu Nacional do Azulejos in Lisbon. Yes, there is a whole museum dedicated to the history of tile work in Portugal.

The Museu is located in the old Madre de Deus convent on the east side of the city. The Museu features both original azulejo artwork in their original spaces and exhibits extracted from elsewhere in the country and moved and displayed in the halls of the convent. Arguably the start attraction in the museum is the main church space, which features blue and white tiled murals in the style that became popular in the 17th century, but there are other similarly impressive exhibits hanging elsewhere in the Museu accompanied by plentiful signage in Portuguese and English. 

Two of the more interesting exhibits in the Museu for me were a tile mold for making tiles with raised patterns and the scene (in tile form, of course) of Lisbon before the great earthquake of 1755 which ends the museum's visit sequence. We saw so few molded tiles in Portugal but we did find some on the walls of buildings in Porto and Sintra; these mini-sculptures are in some ways a lot more interesting than the flat painted tiles we found elsewhere. I also appreciated the scene of Lisbon pre-earthquake as an historical record. It was different and (to me) far more informative than the Biblical scenes we found all over the religious buildings we traipsed through during our time in Portugal.

Museu Nacional do Azulejos: the church, the great Lisbon panorama and the Chicken's Wedding.

I can't tell you how many pictures of tiles I ended up with on my phone after a week in Portugal but it was a lot. I wouldn't be surprised if they made up half of the total pictures that I took during the week. There were a lot because honestly I found these things super interesting. Maybe borderline obsessive. "Maybe" and "borderline" means not really, right?

I think for me, I was more fascinated by the earlier, simpler patterned blue, white and gold azulejos than the later blue and white large scale artworks. I know that part of this attraction was fueled by the Moorish connection. We worked hard to try to find any remnant of Moorish culture in the places we visited and were largely unable, probably because when the Christians drove out the Moors they destroyed most or all of what they had created. Maybe by the time the Moors were defeated the Portuguese didn't remember where the azulejos came from in the first place.

I also appreciated some of the earlier departures from the simple patterning into actual scenes of life real or imagined. There are some really impressive views into daily Portuguese life in some of these tiled works, along with some very fanciful scenes of ridiculousness like the Chicken's Wedding that we found in the Museu Nacional do Azulejos. Seriously, there's a chicken's wedding scene in multicolored tiles. Who thinks up this stuff in the middle (or maybe a little later) of the last millennium?

If you are thinking all that would likely mean that I was not a fan of the later and almost exclusively Biblical artworks created for the churches and monasteries, you would be correct. I just don't get the amount of effort that went into these things and I'm not a super fan of the subject matter either. They are so serious but some churches really got into these things, commissioning about as many works as would fill either the interior or exterior of their buildings. There's a church in Porto (the Chapel of Souls) that has gone full arm sleeve on us and covered pretty much every square inch of available exterior wall space with tiles.

The Chapel of Souls in Porto (top) and a molded or stamped tile in the Pena Palace in Sintra.

Azulejos are clearly a symbol of national pride for the Portuguese. There are so many old buildings with centuries-old tiles inside and outside that have endured over the centuries. But it also appears that there is an ongoing effort to resurrect this tradition in a more modern way, meaning not just copying the colors or motifs of centuries of several hundred years ago. I think we saw this beautifully in the main train station in Porto. 

Porto's train station features some older works of tiled art showing scenes from Portugal's history, including a massive battle scene on the west side (if I'm remembering correctly) of the main entrance hall. But next to these historical artworks are more modern tiles showing locomotives. They aren't necessarily using the colors or subject matter used in azulejos laid in the 15th through 17th centuries, (although honestly the top portion shown below is remarkably reminiscent of the 16th century azulejos) but they ARE tiles. And they do remind us of Portugal's history of this sort of wall treatment. I love it. Well done!

I know it's a strange thing to memorialize as a memory of Portugal but honestly, I'll always remember the azulejos.

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How We Did It

As I hope comes across in this post, it is not difficult to find azulejos in Portugal. We found them to be plentiful in Lisbon and Sintra and Coimbra and Porto, although perhaps a little more difficult to find in Évora.

Other than wandering around the streets of these cities and discovering, I thought it was worthwhile visiting the Museu Nacional do Azulejo in Lisbon. The Museu is located at Rua da Madre de Deus, 4 and is easily reachable by public transportation. We took either the 759 or 794 bus directly there from the Plaça do Comércio. The total bus ride is about 15 minutes or so. The Museu is open daily except Mondays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. although they do close for lunch every day for an hour starting at 1 p.m.

There are definitely tiled buildings worth visiting in Sintra, Coimbra and Porto in addition to Lisbon. Some are pictured in this post although quite frankly there were many more pictures left on the cutting room floor. Other than the Museu, I don't have a strong feeling either way about the value in seeking out these other buildings. There are literally tiled buildings pretty much everywhere.

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