The cold and grey walls of houses, churches and palaces of Porto come to life when covered with small tiles. Colouring majestic façades or panels, the tile is a profound symbol of Porto’s culture.
It was in the nineteenth century that the application of this type of ornamental coating had its heyday, contributing to that the influence of Brazilian migrants that returned to Portugal and built their homes using this material.
At that time the ceramic industry, which until then was exclusively in the South, gave its first fruits in the cities of Porto and Gaia then going through a period of great prosperity (design patterns in relief are typically from the northern region).
Most of the production was intended to export to Brazil where the application of the tile in the lining of the façades of the buildings was already a common practice to provide a good protection for humidity and for its resistance to thermal characteristics.
However we can find traces of the use of this material long before this time, for example, the tiles from Igreja da Misericórdia done by Domingos Rocha in 1629-30 are, however, rare previous interior coating of the nineteenth century.
Over the times the potters kept following different artistic currents, so the tiles express a bit of the art history. The techniques used were also changing and evolving and the manual painting gave way to mechanical embossing.
The harmonious sharing of the city between granite and tile made major changes creating the image we have of Porto nowadays.
Porto traditional tiles
The cold and grey walls of houses, churches and palaces of Porto come to life when covered with small tiles. Colouring majestic façades or panels, the tile is a profound symbol of Porto’s culture.
It was in the nineteenth century that the application of this type of ornamental coating had its heyday, contributing to that the influence of Brazilian migrants that returned to Portugal and built their homes using this material.
At that time the ceramic industry, which until then was exclusively in the South, gave its first fruits in the cities of Porto and Gaia then going through a period of great prosperity (design patterns in relief are typically from the northern region).
Most of the production was intended to export to Brazil where the application of the tile in the lining of the façades of the buildings was already a common practice to provide a good protection for humidity and for its resistance to thermal characteristics.
However we can find traces of the use of this material long before this time, for example, the tiles from Igreja da Misericórdia done by Domingos Rocha in 1629-30 are, however, rare previous interior coating of the nineteenth century.
Over the times the potters kept following different artistic currents, so the tiles express a bit of the art history. The techniques used were also changing and evolving and the manual painting gave way to mechanical embossing.
The harmonious sharing of the city between granite and tile made major changes creating the image we have of Porto nowadays.