A deeper look at Portuguese azulejos, and why the famous blue and white came late

Blue and white tiles are the picture most of us carry home from Portugal, but they are the newcomers in a story that goes back more than five centuries. I learned that in a potter’s workshop in a tiny Alentejo hamlet, from a tilemaker who still makes azulejos the old way, raising thin walls of clay to hold each colour in place. Here’s what she showed me, how the tiles got onto almost every surface in the country, and where to see the finest of them.

It’s no secret that I’m in love with Portugal. Over one particularly busy year, I travelled to Lisbon, Porto, the Douro Valley, the Algarve and the Alentejo, and every trip made me appreciate the country’s history and culture a little more. Everywhere I went, I saw azulejos: on the fronts of houses, inside churches and restaurants, lining railway stations and mansions. There are very few places you don’t see them.

Portuguese azulejos are far more than decoration. For five hundred years, they have kept buildings cool and dry, told Bible stories to people who couldn’t read, shown off the wealth of kings and convents, and given whole streets their character. Yet it wasn’t until a trip to the Alentejo, the wild, sparsely populated region south of Lisbon, that I had the chance to learn how they’re actually made.

It happened on an October afternoon, at the start of a week on the Rota Vicentina, the network of trails along the southwest coast. As well as walking, the trip was about meeting the people who live and work along the route, and one of them was artisan tilemaker Rita Silvério Morais.

Learning the old way in an Alentejo workshop

Rita works in Brejão, a small hamlet on the edge of the Southwest Alentejo and Vicentine Coast Natural Park, a few minutes inland from the fishing harbour at Azenha do Mar. It’s a place of balance, as my host from the Rota Vicentina put it: a stretch of coast that’s increasingly known for its beauty, and also a farming hub, where big new growers of berries and greens now work the land alongside the old smallholdings.

Rita keeps the tradition of azulejos alive in her work, drawing on a long heritage and on methods that haven’t changed in centuries. The word azulejo comes from Arabic and is usually translated as “small polished stone”, which seems like an understatement for the pieces that have been made over the centuries, and for the ones Rita makes today.

Walls of clay to keep the colours apart

“These tiles are made using a very traditional method,” Rita explained, gesturing to a row of azulejos in jewel-like colours and geometric patterns. “I build small raised walls on the flat surface of the tile to form the pattern and separate the colours.”

Without those ridges, the glazes would run into each other in the kiln. The technique has Arabic roots, and it arrived in Portugal with the tiles imported from Seville around 500 years ago. In Portuguese, it’s called aresta, from the word for an edge or ridge. The other way to keep the colours apart, she told me, is with a greasy line painted between them that resists the glaze, a method known as corda seca (dry cord).

Why blue and white came late

“In contrast to some Portuguese tiles, these ones are coloured in blues, greens, yellows and reds,” Rita said. “People sometimes associate the blue and white azulejos with tradition, but actually, the blue and white only became fashionable in the 18th century, where these colours had been used for centuries before.”

Rita prefers the bright colours and geometric styles that came from the Moors to the blue and white figurative panels you mostly find in places of wealth, such as palaces, convents and grand churches. The history backs her up. The first tiles in Portugal were patterned and many-coloured, and blue and white only took hold at the end of the 1600s, when Chinese porcelain and Dutch Delftware made it the height of fashion. It dominated the 18th century so completely that it’s what most people now think of as traditional.

She also showed me something I’d never have thought of: pieces where she takes fragments of broken 18th-century tiles and sets them into her own work, giving old azulejos a second life.

Schist, rock rose and blue bulls

The red-bodied tiles start out as lumps of raw yellow clay, and it’s hard to believe they’ll take on the deep terracotta colour of the fired tile, but they do. Rita uses a lot of local clay, but she searches far and wide across the country for others to suit each process, working by trial and error, with a fine white clay for her paler pieces.

Away from the tiles, she makes a wide range of pottery: big bowls and cups, pendants, and rotund, whimsical bulls. Her dark grey pieces take their colour from the jagged schist that dominates this coastline, and the bulls belong to a range named after a blue bull from a story once told to local children. There are clay animals for children, too, black pigs, goats, sheep and storks. This is one of the few places in the world where white storks nest on sea cliffs, and you’ll see them perched on the rock stacks along the coast.

She used to throw her pots on a kick wheel, powered by the rhythm of her feet, though these days the wheel is electric. Her pigments she buys and mixes by hand, ground with powdered glass and fired until they melt into a glaze. Then she picked up an old sardine tin full of crushed, dried leaves and held it out to me. It was esteva, the rock rose that covers the hills along the trails. “This is the smell of the countryside,” she said. When her family drives down from Lisbon, it’s the first thing they smell.

Touring her workshop, it was clear how much the landscape shapes everything she makes, right down to the candles she pours with beeswax from the local association of honey producers. It’s rare to get such a complete sense of place, but the Alentejo is like that.

Finding Brejão

Rita’s workshop is called Oficina do Barro, and the Odemira artisans’ association, CACO, lists her among its makers, with edge-tile azulejos inspired by Hispano-Arab designs alongside her pottery. It’s a working studio rather than a shop with opening hours, so don’t just turn up. CACO, based in Odemira, and the Rota Vicentina association are the people to ask about arranging a visit to the area’s artisans.

Brejão itself is tiny, so pair it with the coast. Azenha do Mar, where fishermen still mend their lines on the harbour and there’s often a queue for the seafood restaurant, is just down the road, and the Fishermen’s Trail runs along the clifftops above it.

A short history of Portuguese tiles

You don’t need to know the history to enjoy the tiles, but it makes hunting them down much more fun. Tiles were long one of the main forms of art in Portugal, and you can read the country’s story on its walls, from Moorish geometry to baroque battle scenes and 20th-century metro stations.

Moorish roots and tiles from Seville

The craft came from the Islamic world by way of Spain. In the late 15th and early 16th centuries, Portugal imported its tiles from the workshops of Seville, made with the same aresta and corda seca methods Rita uses. King Manuel I was the great patron: after travelling through Spain, he had the National Palace in Sintra covered in them, and it still holds the finest collection of these Mudéjar tiles in the country, many in their original positions.

Portugal starts painting its own

The game changed with majolica, an Italian technique that let artists paint directly onto a flat, white tin glaze rather than filling in raised compartments. It reached Portugal through Seville and Antwerp, and by the second half of the 16th century, Lisbon workshops were producing their own panels. Two of the earliest landmarks are the Susanna and the Elders panel of 1565 at the Quinta da Bacalhôa, near Setúbal, and the 1584 panel in Lisbon’s São Roque church, the first dated work by a Portuguese tile painter.

In the 17th century, whole church interiors were covered in patterned “carpet” tiling, repeating designs in blue, yellow and green that spread across walls like a rug. Later in the century came lively designs of birds and branches, borrowed from printed textiles from India.

The blue and white golden age

Towards the end of the 1600s, the fashion for Chinese porcelain and Dutch Delftware turned Portuguese tiles blue and white. King Pedro II even banned imports of Dutch tiles for a time to protect the workshops at home. What followed, roughly from 1700 to the middle of the century, is remembered as the golden age: the Cycle of the Masters, when painters such as António de Oliveira Bernardes signed huge figurative panels, followed by mass production under João V, with tiles shipped by the boatload to churches and palaces in Brazil.

After the earthquake

The earthquake of 1 November 1755 flattened much of Lisbon, and rebuilding it called for something quicker and cheaper. Simple patterned tiles, produced in quantity, lined the new buildings of the Marquis of Pombal’s Baixa, and in 1767 the Real Fábrica do Rato opened as the city’s royal factory, turning out neoclassical designs in softer colours.

Façades, factories and the 20th century

Tiles moved outdoors in the 19th century. Portuguese emigrants returning from Brazil, where tiled façades kept houses cool and dry in the tropical rain, brought the fashion home, and new industrial factories such as Viúva Lamego, founded in Lisbon in 1849, made it affordable. Within a few decades, whole streets in Lisbon, Porto and Ovar were wrapped in pattern.

The 20th century added grand narrative panels, such as Jorge Colaço’s battle scenes for Porto’s São Bento station, and a modernist streak: from the 1950s, Maria Keil’s designs turned Lisbon’s early metro stations into galleries. The tradition is still alive. In 2016, the street artist André Saraiva unveiled a Lisbon mural made up of 52,738 tiles, all painted by hand at Viúva Lamego.

Tiles are protected, too. So many were stolen from old buildings that the police set up a unit, SOS Azulejo, in 2007; Lisbon banned the demolition of tiled façades in 2013; and since 2017, a national law has made it illegal to demolish them or strip their tiles anywhere in the country. Portugal now marks a National Azulejo Day every year on 6 May.

Where to see the best azulejos in Lisbon, Porto and beyond

You’ll see tiles everywhere without trying, but these are the places that show the craft at its best. Most of the façades are free to admire from the street.

Lisbon and Sintra

Museu Nacional do Azulejo

The National Tile Museum is the one place that tells the whole story, from Seville imports to contemporary work, housed in the Madre de Deus convent, founded in 1509 in the Xabregas district east of the Baixa. Its best-known piece is a 23-metre blue and white panorama of Lisbon’s waterfront before the 1755 earthquake, and the convent church is a gilded baroque riot lined with tiles.

The catch: it has been closed for a major restoration since November 2025, and no reopening date had been announced by October 2026. While it’s shut, its shop has moved to the Palácio Foz on Praça dos Restauradores, and since August 2026 its Open Azulejo project has been showing restored panels in place at the Palácio dos Condes da Calheta, in Belém’s tropical botanical garden.

São Vicente de Fora and Santa Luzia

On the far side of Alfama, the monastery of São Vicente de Fora has cloisters lined with 18th-century blue and white panels, including 38 that illustrate La Fontaine’s fables, and tickets cost about €8. Down the hill, the Miradouro de Santa Luzia has two large tile panels on its outer wall, one of Praça do Comércio before the earthquake and one of the Christian siege of the castle in 1147, and it’s free. My guide to Alfama covers both, along with the rest of the quarter.

André Saraiva’s mural

My favourite modern tiles in the city are opposite the Panteão Nacional, where André Saraiva’s mural stretches for nearly 200 metres along the wall below a little garden. A PR at my hotel sent me to find it one January, and I loved its dreamlike skyline of Lisbon, Paris and New York, painted loosely in blue, pink and purple on a traditional white tile ground. It pairs perfectly with the Feira da Ladra flea market on a Tuesday or Saturday morning.

Palácio Fronteira

For blue and white at its most extravagant, head to Benfica, on the northwest side of the city, to the Palácio dos Marqueses de Fronteira. Built from the 1670s, it’s still lived in by the family, and its formal gardens are lined with tiled terraces, benches and fountains, including a gallery of allegorical figures for the arts and a panel of battles from the war of independence from Spain inside the palace.

Intendente

The Largo do Intendente, a short walk north of Mouraria, is a good place to see 19th and 20th-century tiles in one go. The old Viúva Lamego building on the square, the factory’s shop until 2021, wears a naïve 19th-century façade by Luís Ferreira, with exotic figures and garlands, and the metro station below, opened in 1966, has panels by Maria Keil. You can also browse, and buy, old factory tiles nearby at Cortiço & Netos, which I cover in my guide to the best things to do in Lisbon.

The National Palace in Sintra

If you’re doing a day trip to Sintra, don’t let the more famous Pena Palace upstage the National Palace in the centre of the old town. With its two huge conical chimneys, it holds the collection of Mudéjar tiles that Manuel I brought back into fashion in the early 1500s, many of them still where they were first laid.

Porto

Porto’s tiles are mostly on the outside, which makes the city one big open-air gallery. Many of its most famous façades are less than a century old.

São Bento station

Colaço’s masterpiece covers the walls of the booking hall at São Bento, the station that has served the heart of the city since 1916. He was the leading tile painter of his day, and some 20,000 of his blue and white tiles picture episodes from the nation’s past, from battles to royal arrivals, with a coloured frieze above them tracing the history of transport. Walking in costs nothing, so look in even if you’re not catching a train (though you may well be: the Douro line starts here).

Igreja do Carmo

The side wall of this rococo church, completed in the 1760s, is covered by one of the biggest tile panels in the city. Added in 1912 and designed by Silvestro Silvestri, it shows the founding of the Carmelite order on Mount Carmel, with the prophets and hermits of its legend. Next door stands a second church, the Igreja dos Carmelitas, and between the two hides a house barely a metre wide, which you can visit on a small ticket. My guide to the best things to do in Porto has the details.

Capela das Almas

A short walk away, at the top of Porto’s busiest shopping street, Rua de Santa Catarina, the Capela das Almas looks like a small chapel wrapped in blue and white paper. Its outer walls were covered in 1929 with 15,947 tiles designed by Eduardo Leite and made by Viúva Lamego in Lisbon, showing the lives of St Francis of Assisi and St Catherine. It’s a working chapel and free to visit, generally from early morning until about 6pm, though it closes for part of the day at weekends.

Igreja de Santo Ildefonso

Finish at Praça da Batalha, where the twin-towered church of Santo Ildefonso, built in the 1730s, wears a façade of about 11,000 tiles added in 1932, again by Jorge Colaço. In the afternoon sun, the blue against the granite is spectacular.

The cathedral cloister

For older work, the Gothic cloister of Porto’s Sé is lined with baroque panels from the late 1720s and early 1730s, attributed to Valentim de Almeida, telling stories from the Song of Songs. It’s part of the cathedral’s €4 visit.

Beyond the cities

Pinhão station, Douro Valley

Deep in port country, Pinhão’s small riverside station is wrapped in 24 blue and white panels. The Aleluia factory in Aveiro made the roughly 3,000 tiles, and they went up in 1937, picturing a Douro that has largely vanished: hand-dug terraces, the vintage being picked and carried, and rabelo boats sailing casks of port downriver to Gaia. It’s free, and it’s the end of one of the loveliest train rides in the country. My Douro Valley guide has the rest of the valley.

Tavira and the Algarve

In the Algarve, tiles are part of the everyday street scene rather than the big monuments. Tavira, its prettiest town, is full of 19th-century houses with patterned façades, wrought-iron balconies and doorways framed in tiles. Wander the old streets on both sides of the river and keep looking up. My Tavira travel guide has the rest of the town.

Santiago do Cacém, Alentejo

Back in the Alentejo, the cobbled hill town of Santiago do Cacém, the start of the Historical Way walking route, has lanes of colourful houses with intricate tiles below its ten-towered castle. It’s an easy stop on the drive between Lisbon and the Rota Vicentina.

Tips for azulejo hunters

• Look up, and look sideways. The best panels are often on the side or upper walls of a building, or on the corners of streets, where tiles name the street and the house numbers.
• Never buy antique tiles at a flea market. Many old tiles on sale were stripped from historic buildings, and removing them is now illegal. Buy reproductions from a maker, or old factory stock from a reputable dealer such as Cortiço & Netos in Lisbon.
• Time it for the light. Glazed façades photograph best in soft light, so aim for early morning or late afternoon, when the sun isn’t bouncing straight off the glaze.
• Check the National Tile Museum’s status before you plan around it. It’s the best place to understand the story, but it has been closed for works since November 2025.
• Go on 6 May if you can. National Azulejo Day brings talks, open days and guided walks in museums and towns across the country.

Map

Read next

• Five secret travel spots in the Alentejo
• Why you need to see André Saraiva’s tiled mural in São Vicente de Fora
• Getting lost in Alfama, the Lisbon quarter the earthquake spared
• The best things to do in Lisbon
• The best things to do in Porto
• A travel guide to the Douro Valley
• The best things to do in Portugal

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