You can click on any photo to see a larger version. For the slider images, click on the full screen button near the upper right corner of the slider (note: on an iPhone, you can’t enlarge the photos in a slider).
Or, in English, the National Tile Museum.
I’ve mentioned several times in these posts that decorative tiles are a major component of Portugal’s artistic history (and still a big part of its artistic traditions today, for that matter).
The reasons for that go back centuries, to when the Phoenicians/Carthaginians first made contact with the people living in the Lisbon area and taught them how to enhance the quality and beauty of the ceramics they’d been making.
The era of Islamic rule expanded things further, because tiles (generally with geometric or religious patterns) were and are a significant part of Islamic culture.
When the Portuguese regained control over their nation, they dramatically expanded what they did with tiles, using them to depict people and scenes.
While tiles did not replace paintings, they ended up occupying a more significant role in Portuguese art than in many other countries1.
Tile art spans a large range of sizes, from the small (including individual tiles)…
…to the very large. The tiles used to decorate buildings often depict images that span an entire wall.
Some of the tile images are so large they contain amazing amounts of detail. This set of charging horses was a small part of a very large tile “painting”.
In the modern era, tile imagery often tends to be more abstract and/or whimsical.
The tile museum isn’t all about tiles, showcasing a number of beautiful and oddball pieces of non-tile art.
The museum is also adjacent to a beautifully restored old church…
…which, of course, incorporates large tile paintings!
After visiting the tile museum we walked over to Torre Vasco da Gama, the Vasco da Gama Tower, named after the famous Portuguese explorer and the tallest building in Lisbon. It offers sweeping panoramas of the city and the riverfront from the bar at its top.
It was nice to relax for a while admiring the scenery, although it did get a little warm because the bar’s roof is mostly glass. We decided to call it a day at that point. We both tended to get tired around 4 or 5 PM local time, probably the result of not quite ever fully adapting to the time change.
Little did we know we were in for an additional adventure. We hiked a ways to our bus stop…only to have, after waiting for about 25 minutes, our bus zoom right by us without stopping! We never did figure out why that happened. Is there some bus flagging protocol you have to follow in Lisbon that we were unaware of?
By now we were pretty tired, and stressed, so we decided to abandon buses and hike to the nearest metro station, which would get us back to our hotel’s neighborhood fast.
Only I was sufficiently befuddled that I told Google Maps to search for the nearest subway…so it happily directed me to a local franchise of the Subway restaurant chain. Apparently, Google Maps isn’t big on synonyms.
Fortunately, the actual metro (subway :)) station was only a block away from the restaurant. The rest of our trip back to the hotel was, thankfully, uneventful.
I hope for the artist’s sake they got permission from Disney to use Mickey… 🙂 ↩
