Azulejo: what it is, and where the word comes from

A tin-glazed tile, and a way of laying it. The Priberam dictionary defines it as a thin ceramic plate, usually square, glazed on one side, with varied designs and colours, used to clad surfaces. Nothing specifically Portuguese there. Spain, Italy and the Netherlands made as many glazed tiles.

The difference lies in the scale and in how it attaches to the building. The Museu Nacional do Azulejo, in Lisbon, which publishes in English as well as Portuguese, writes that one of the characteristics of the Portuguese tile is the way it was applied as a structuring element of architecture: the panel is composed for the wall it clads, and not cut from a roll of pattern. And the multiplicity of solutions of seventeenth-century Portuguese azulejos has, the museum adds, no parallel in other European production.

From Arabic, not from blue. Priberam gives the origin in three words: “espanhol azulejo, do árabe hispânico al-zuléig”. Portuguese took the word from Spanish, which had it from the Arabic spoken in the Iberian peninsula. The Brazilian Aulete dictionary gives the same descent with another transcription: “do espn. azulejo, do ár. az-zuleidj”. The transcriptions vary from one dictionary to another; the source language does not.

The original sense has nothing to do with a colour. Presenting a children’s book on azulejos, the Imprensa Nacional, the Portuguese state printing house, meets the confusion head on: perhaps you are already thinking that azulejo comes from the colour azul, it writes, and nothing of the kind. It translates the Arabic word, which it spells azzelij, as “pequena pedra polida”, a small polished stone.

The trap is a resemblance. Azul does mean blue in Portuguese, and the initial a of azulejo looks like that of the hundreds of Arabisms in the language, where the Arabic article al- has fused to the noun. Rodrigues Vaz, on the Ciberdúvidas da Língua Portuguesa site, explains the general mechanism: the l of the article sometimes assimilates to the following consonant, and that is how ar-ruzz became arroz and az-zayt, azeite. Priberam in fact records two homonymous verbs azulejar: one formed on azulejo, to lay tiles, the other on azul, to turn blue.

By way of Spain, at the start of the sixteenth century. The Museu Nacional do Azulejo places there the spread of the tile as a wall covering, with motifs in Hispano-Moresque techniques, corda seca and aresta, produced at Seville and Toledo. Behind those techniques, an older reference: Islamic culture is, the museum writes, the first great reference of azulejos in Portugal, and it leaves them a lasting taste for horror vacui, the fear of empty space.

The largest known order of that early century is royal. Parques de Sintra, which runs the national palace of Sintra, writes that more than ten thousand tiles for the palace were landed at the port of Belém, in Lisbon, in 1508, under Manuel I. The palace holds one of the largest sets of Mudéjar tiles still in place in Europe. Those carrying the armillary sphere, the king’s emblem, are thought to have been ordered in 1508-1509 from the Seville workshop of Fernand Martínes Guijarro and his son Pedro de Herrera.

Portugal only made its own in the second half of the sixteenth century, when Flemish craftsmen settled in Lisbon with a new technique, faience. The Portuguese word faiança comes from French, which has it from Faenza, in Italy, Priberam notes. The result can be seen in the museum: the retable of Nossa Senhora da Vida, dated 1580 and attributed to Marçal de Matos, 1,498 polychrome faience tiles five metres high, where columns, frames and statues are painted in trompe l’oeil.

Because a fashion from Holland won, and late. In the seventeenth century, the museum writes, the motifs repeat in modules of 2 by 2, 4 by 4, 6 by 6 and 12 by 12 tiles, in blue, green and yellow, or already in blue on a white ground. It is between the end of the seventeenth century and the start of the eighteenth that painting in cobalt blue on white takes over, under Dutch influence. The previous century is polychrome.

The same moment turns tile painters into authors. From 1690 to 1725 comes the cycle of the Masters: the workshops compose with more freedom, after engravings, and the painters often sign their panels, the museum writes. The century that follows invents the figura de convite, the invitation figure, a life-size character in tiles posted at the entrance to a building, used more or less continuously from the second quarter of the eighteenth century to the first quarter of the nineteenth.

In two stages: an earthquake, then cities spreading out. After 1755, to rebuild Lisbon, tiles with repeated motifs were laid inside the new buildings, an effective and low-cost solution, the museum writes. They are called pombalinos, after Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo (1699-1782), the marquis of Pombal, who ran the works.

In the nineteenth century the tile goes out into the street. The expansion of cities, the new quarters and, the museum writes, a more individualistic attitude to success and to displaying a status earned by work push people to clad their façades; industry follows, and the northern factories work in relief. The argument is not only decorative: on the stations, Infraestruturas de Portugal writes that the tile makes the great originality of the façade decoration and saves on upkeep and cleaning, by how long it lasts and how it protects. In 2016 its heritage subsidiary recorded azulejos in 116 built zones, 38 per cent of the network’s 308 stations and halts.

A law of 2017, municipal regulations, and a project born in a police museum. In 2007 the museum of the Judicial Police launched SOS Azulejo. Its coordinator, Leonor Sá, curator of that museum, told the Lusa agency in 2023 that tile thefts had fallen 84 per cent since 2007, according to the project’s 2022 report, but that the heaviest losses had been legal, not illegal. Before Lisbon’s planning regulation, she adds, demolitions in the city were practically weekly.

The national law is three sentences slipped into a planning text. Lei n.º 79/2017, of 18 August, amends for the thirteenth time the legal regime of planning and building, decree-law n.º 555/99. From then on, any operation resulting in the removal of façade tiles requires an administrative licence, whether or not it faces the street or a courtyard. Interior works lose their exemption from control if they remove façade tiles. And the council may refuse the licence to an operation that demolishes a tiled façade, save in duly justified cases, on the ground that those tiles are absent or of little heritage value.

The law was approved on 7 July 2017, promulgated on 3 August, published on the 18th, and comes into force the day after publication: 19 August 2017. Parliament had already voted two texts on 24 March that year. Resolução n.º 144/2017 makes 6 May the Dia Nacional do Azulejo, the national azulejo day. Resolução n.º 145/2017 recommends to the government a protection plan with an inventory of public and private tile heritage, in partnership with the Museu Nacional do Azulejo, the Rede de Investigação em Azulejo and the Direção-Geral do Património Cultural.

The reference place is the Museu Nacional do Azulejo, in Lisbon. Created in 1965, becoming the museum of the Azulejo in 1980, it occupies the former convent of the Madre de Deus, founded in 1509 by Queen Leonor, and its collection covers tile production from the second half of the fifteenth century to today. The official file of Museums and Monuments of Portugal sees in it the artistic expression that sets Portuguese culture apart in the world.

Elsewhere: the national palace of Sintra, for the early sixteenth-century Mudéjar tiles still in place; the railway stations, for the industrial tile of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the Lisbon metro, where the museum sees the proof that the tile goes on reinventing itself, as far as the pixel images laid by Ivan Chermayeff at the Oceanário in 1998.