Classroom lesson · Azulejos - Portugal's painted tiles · 🇵🇹 Portugal

Azulejos - Portugal's painted tiles

Whole buildings dressed in blue-and-white pictures

A wall covered in traditional blue-and-white Portuguese azulejo tiles

Photo · Wikimedia Commons

What is it?

Azulejos (you say it 'ah-zoo-LAY-zhoosh') are painted tiles, usually blue and white, that cover the walls of buildings all over Portugal. Whole train stations, churches and even ordinary houses are dressed in them, like a giant picture book on the outside.

Tell me more

Each tile is a small square of clay, about the size of a postcard, painted by hand and then baked in an oven so the colours stick forever. When the tiles are placed next to each other on a wall, they make one huge picture - sometimes of a story, sometimes of flowers or ships, sometimes just lovely patterns.

The idea came to Portugal hundreds of years ago from North Africa, through people called the Moors. The word 'azulejo' comes from an Arabic word that means 'small polished stone'. The Portuguese loved the tiles so much that they began making them in their own way, with their own pictures and stories.

Blue and white became the most famous colours, but azulejos can be any colour. Some of the biggest tile pictures in Portugal cover the inside of São Bento train station in Porto - 20,000 tiles telling stories about the country. Travellers stop just to look at the walls.

Today, many Portuguese kids learn to paint their own little azulejo at school. The tiles are so loved that there is a whole museum about them in Lisbon - the National Tile Museum - where you can see tiles from 500 years ago next to brand-new ones.

In the classroom

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Talk together

Discussion prompts

01Why might it be useful to put pictures on the outside of buildings, not just the inside?
02If your school had one wall covered in painted tiles, what story would you want them to tell?
03Tile pictures can last for hundreds of years. What other things in your town have lasted a really long time?

Try this

Classroom activity

Give each pupil a square of paper the size of a postcard. Using only blue felt-tip or paint on white, design your own azulejo. Make sure the pattern still works if four of them are placed corner-to-corner. Stick them all up on a big wall to make one giant class azulejo.

Azulejos - Portugal's painted tiles

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Discussion prompts

Classroom activity

Other things that make Portugal special

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