The Blue Tiles of Portugal

The blue and white tile is the most recognizable Portuguese object in the world, and the only one most visitors bring home. It covers church fronts, railway stations, market halls and ordinary houses, in a country that decided at some point that the outside of a building was worth as much attention as the inside.

It is called an azulejo, and almost everyone assumes that comes from azul, blue. It does not. The word is from the Arabic az-zulayj, meaning a small polished stone, and it named the technique centuries before blue became the color anyone associated with it. The resemblance is a coincidence that has fooled a lot of people, including a lot of Portuguese people.

They arrived as geometry

Tilework came into the Iberian peninsula with the Moors, and the earliest work is mosaic: small pieces of glazed stone cut and fitted into interlocking patterns, with no pictures in them at all. Islamic practice avoided figurative images in religious settings, so the craft put its whole intelligence into geometry instead, and got extremely good at it.

Portugal did not make its own at first. It bought them. King Manuel I, the king whose armillary sphere ended up on this brand's certificate, visited Seville in the late 1490s, saw the tiled rooms there, and had tiles shipped back for his palace at Sintra. Those rooms still exist and are the oldest important tilework in the country. For most of the sixteenth century the good tiles were Spanish and Italian imports.

Then Italy made pictures possible

The change was technical. Italian majolica let a painter work directly onto a flat white tin glaze, the way you would work on paper, instead of fighting the ridges and channels the older methods needed to keep colors from bleeding into each other. Once a tile could hold a brushstroke, a wall of tiles could hold a scene.

Portugal took that further than anyone. By the seventeenth century whole church interiors were being covered in patterned tile laid out like carpet, and by the end of it the country had settled hard on blue on white. Two things pushed it there. Chinese porcelain was arriving on the India route in real quantity and it was blue and white, and Dutch tiles were being imported by the thousand around 1700 in the same palette. Portugal took the fashion, then out-produced everyone who sold it to them.

The generation that followed is the one with names attached. António de Oliveira Bernardes and his son Policarpo ran the workshops behind the great painted interiors of the period, and their panels are still the ones people travel to see. This was hand painted work, tile by tile, by people whose signatures we have.

The earthquake, and then the whole street

On All Saints Day in 1755 an earthquake, a fire and a wave destroyed most of Lisbon. What went up in its place was rebuilt fast, to a plan, in standard parts. Tile suited that perfectly: it could be made to a repeating pattern in volume, and it went on a wall quickly.

The step from grand interiors to ordinary house fronts came later, in the nineteenth century, and it came partly from Brazil. Portuguese emigrants who had done well there came home having seen facades tiled as a matter of course, and they tiled theirs. It caught on because it is genuinely practical and not only because it is handsome. A tiled front sheds rain, shrugs off salt air and cleans with a bucket of water, which on an Atlantic coast is worth more than decoration.

That is the thing to understand about Portuguese tile. Elsewhere it is a luxury finish for a room someone wants to impress you with. In Portugal it went on the outside of buildings belonging to people with no interest in impressing anyone.

Still being made, still being stolen

The twentieth century gave the tradition its biggest public commission when the Lisbon Metro started opening in 1959 and put artists to work on the stations. Maria Keil did dozens of them over three decades, and the result is a subway system that is also the largest tile gallery in the country. It is still being added to.

The sadder modern story is theft. Antique facade tiles are worth money to collectors, and for years they were simply chiselled off buildings in Lisbon and Porto, sometimes from houses that were still occupied. The city eventually made it much harder to strip or demolish a tiled front, which is the kind of law you only pass after losing a great deal of something.

If you want to see the best of it in one building, the Museu Nacional do Azulejo in Lisbon is in a sixteenth century convent and holds a tiled panorama of the city as it looked before the earthquake, running the length of a room. It is a picture of a place that no longer exists, made of the material that place was famous for.

Why this brand is blue

The color on the certificate comes from here. The deep blue on the sheet, the seal and the type is the blue of these tiles, and the whole house is set in it for that reason and no other.

We do not ship a tile. Not today, and possibly not ever. If that ever changes it will be because we found a workshop in Portugal worth naming, and we will name them and say plainly who made what. Until then this page is here because the tiles are worth reading about on their own, which is the honest reason to write anything. What actually arrives when you buy from us is on the certificate page, in full.