Art & Architecture
Portugal has a long and storied art history. Neolithic tribes, Celtic peoples, Romans, Visigoths, Moors and early Christian crusaders have all left their mark on the Iberian nation. The Age of Discoveries – a rich era of grand cathedrals and lavish palaces – began around 1500. In the 500 years that followed, Portugal became a showcase for a dizzying array of architectural styles. Meanwhile, painters, sculptors, poets and novelists all made contributions to Portugal’s artistic heritage.
The Palaeolithic Palette
The Cromeleque dos Almendres, a most mysterious group of 95 huge monoliths, forms a strange circle in an isolated clearing among Alentejan olive groves near Évora. It’s one of Europe’s most impressive prehistoric sites.
All over Portugal, but especially in the Alentejo, you can visit such ancient funerary and religious structures, built during the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras. Most impressive are the dolmens: rectangular, polygonal or round funerary chambers, reached by a corridor of stone slabs and covered with earth to create an artificial mound. King of these is Europe’s largest dolmen, the Anta Grande do Zambujeiro, near Évora, with six 6m-high stones forming a huge chamber. Single monoliths, or menhirs, often carved with phallic or religious symbols, also dot the countryside like an army of stone sentinels. Their relationship to promoting fertility seems obvious.
With the arrival of the Celts (800–200 BC) came the first established hilltop settlements, called castros. The best-preserved example is the Citânia de Briteiros, in the Minho, where you can step into Portugal’s past. Stone dwellings were built on a circular or elliptical plan, and the complex was surrounded by a drystone defensive wall. In the citânias (fortified villages) further south, dwellings tended to be rectangular.
A Serendipitous Discovery
In 1989 researchers were studying the rugged valley of the Rio Côa, 15km from the Spanish frontier, to understand the environmental impact of a planned hydroelectric dam that was to flood the valley. In the course of their work, they made an extraordinary discovery: a number of petroglyphs (rock engravings) dating back tens of thousands of years.
Yet it wasn’t until 1992, after the dam's construction was under way, that the importance of the find began to be recognised. Archaeologists came across whole clusters of petroglyphs, mostly dating from the Upper Palaeolithic period (10,000 to 40,000 years ago). Local people joined the search and the inventory of engravings soon grew into the thousands. In 1998 the future of the collection was safeguarded when Unesco designated the valley a World Heritage Site.
Today Rio Côa (www.arte-coa.pt; Rua do Museu; park sites each €10, museum €5, park & museum €12; 
hmuseum & park 9am-6pm Tue-Sun Mar-Oct, 9am-1pm & 2-6pm Tue-Sun Nov-Feb) holds one of the largest-known collections of open-air Palaeolithic art in the world. Archaeologists are still puzzling over the meaning of the engravings – and why this site was chosen. Most of the petroglyphs depict animals: stylised horses, aurochs (extinct ancestors of domesticated cattle) and long-horned ibex (extinct species of wild goat). Some animals are depicted with multiple heads – as if to indicate the animal in motion – while others are drawn so finely that they require artificial light to be seen. Later petroglyphs begin to depict human figures as well. The most intriguing engravings consist of overlapping layers, with successive artists adding their touches thousands of years after the first strokes were applied – a kind of Palaeolithic palimpsest in which generations of hunters worked and reworked the engravings of their forebears.
The Romans
The Romans left Portugal their typical architectural and engineering feats – roads, bridges, towns complete with forums (marketplaces), villas, public baths and aqueducts. These have now largely disappeared from the surface, though the majority of Portugal’s cities are built on Roman foundations. Today you can descend into dank subterranean areas under new buildings in Lisbon and Évora, and see Roman fragments around Braga. At Conímbriga, the country’s largest Roman site, an entire town is under excavation. Revealed so far are some spectacular mosaics, along with structural or decorative columns, carved entablatures and classical ornamentation, giving a sense of the Roman high life.
Portugal’s most famous and complete Roman ruin is the Templo Romano, the so-called Temple of Diana in Évora, with its flouncy-topped Corinthian columns nowadays echoed by the complementary towers of Évora's cathedral. This is the finest temple of its kind on the Iberian Peninsula, its preservation the result of having been walled up in the Middle Ages and later used as a slaughterhouse.
Architectural Movements
Great Gothic
Cistercians introduced the Gothic trend, which reached its pinnacle in Alcobaça, in one of Portugal’s most ethereally beautiful buildings. The austere abbey church and cloister of the Mosteiro de Santa Maria de Alcobaça, begun in 1178, has a lightness and simplicity strongly influenced by Clairvaux Abbey in France. Its hauntingly simple Cloisters of Silence were a model for later cathedral cloisters at Coimbra, Lisbon, Évora and many other places. This was the birth of Portuguese Gothic, which flowered and transmuted over the coming years as the country gained more and more experience of the outside world – for centuries it had been culturally dominated and restricted by Spain and the Moors.
By the 14th century, when the Mosteiro de Santa Maria da Vitória (commonly known as Mosteiro da Batalha or Battle Abbey) was constructed, simplicity was a distant, vague memory. Portuguese, Irish and French architects worked on this breathtaking monument for more than two centuries. The combination of their skills and the changing architectural fashions of the times, from Flamboyant (late) Gothic to Renaissance and then Manueline, turned the abbey into a seething mass of carving, organic decorations, lofty spaces and slanting stained-glass light. A showcase of High Gothic art, it exults in the decorative (especially in its Gothic Royal Cloisters and Chapter House) and its flying buttresses tip their hat to English Perpendicular Gothic.
Secular architecture also enjoyed a Gothic boom, thanks to the need for fortifications against the Moors and to the castle-building fervour of 13th-century ruler Dom Dinis. Some of Portugal’s most spectacular, huddled, thick-walled castles – for example, Estremoz, Óbidos and Bragança – date from this time, many featuring massive double-perimeter walls and an inner square tower.
Manueline
Manueline is a uniquely Portuguese style: a specific, crazed flavour of late Gothic architecture. Ferociously decorative, it coincided roughly with the reign of Dom Manuel I (r 1495–1521) and is interesting not just because of its extraordinarily imaginative designs, burbling with life, but also because this dizzyingly creative architecture skipped hand in hand with the era’s booming confidence.
During Dom Manuel’s reign, Vasco da Gama and fellow explorers claimed new overseas lands and new wealth for Portugal. The Age of Discoveries was expressed in sculptural creations of eccentric inventiveness that drew heavily on nautical themes: twisted ropes, coral and anchors in stone, topped by the ubiquitous armillary sphere (a navigational device that became Dom Manuel’s personal symbol) and the cross of the Order of Christ (symbol of the religious military order that largely financed and inspired Portugal’s explorations).
Manueline first emerged in Setúbal’s Igreja de Jesus, designed in the 1490s by French expatriate Diogo de Boitaca, who gave it columns like trees growing into the ceiling, and ribbed vaulting like twisted ropes. The style quickly caught on, and soon decorative carving was creeping, twisting and crawling over everything (aptly described by 19th-century English novelist William Beckford as ‘scollops and twistifications’).
Outstanding Manueline masterpieces are Belém’s Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, masterminded largely by Diogo de Boitaca and João de Castilho; and Batalha’s Mosteiro de Santa Maria da Vitória’s otherworldly Capelas Imperfeitas (Unfinished Chapels).
Other famous creations include Belém’s Torre de Belém, a Manueline-Moorish cake crossed with a chess piece by Francisco de Arruda; his brother Diogo de Arruda’s fantastical organic, seemingly barnacle-encrusted window in the Chapter House of Tomar’s Convento de Cristo; and the convent's fanciful 16-sided Charola – the Templar church, resembling an eerie Star Wars set. Many other churches sport a Manueline flourish against a plain facade.
The style was enormously resonant in Portugal, and reappeared in the early 20th century in exercises in mystical romanticism, such as Sintra’s Quinta da Regaleira and Palácio Nacional da Pena, and Luso’s over-the-top and extraordinary neo-Manueline Palace Hotel do Buçaco.
Baroque
With independence from Spain re-established and the influence of the Inquisition on the wane, Portugal burst out in a fever of baroque – an architectural style that was exuberant and theatrical and fired straight at the senses. Nothing could rival the Manueline flourish, but the baroque style – named after the Portuguese word for a rough pearl, barroco – cornered the market in flamboyance. At its height during the 18th century (almost a century later than in Italy), it was characterised by curvaceous forms, huge monuments, spatially complex schemes and lots and lots and lots of gold.
Financed by the 17th-century gold and diamond discoveries in Brazil, and encouraged by the extravagant Dom João V, local and foreign (particularly Italian) artists created mind-bogglingly opulent masterpieces. Prodigious talha dourada (gilded woodwork) adorns church interiors all over the place, but it reached its extreme in Aveiro’s Mosteiro de Jesus, Lisbon’s Igreja de São Roque and Porto’s Igreja de São Francisco.
The baroque of central and southern Portugal was more restrained. Examples include the chancel of Évora’s cathedral and the massive Palácio Nacional de Mafra. Designed by the German architect João Frederico Ludovice to rival the palace-monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial (near Madrid), the Mafra version is relatively sober, apart from its size – which is such that at one point it had a workforce of 45,000, looked after by a police force of 7000.
Meanwhile, Tuscan painter and architect Nicolau Nasoni (who settled in Porto around 1725) introduced a more ornamental baroque style to the north. Nasoni is responsible for Porto’s Torre dos Clérigos and Igreja da Misericórdia, and the whimsical Palácio de Mateus near Vila Real (internationally famous as the image on Mateus rosé wine bottles).
In the mid-18th century a school of architecture evolved in Braga. Local artists such as André Soares built churches and palaces in a very decorative style, heavily influenced by Augsburg engravings from southern Germany. Soares’ Casa do Raio, in Braga, and much of the monumental staircase of the nearby Bom Jesus do Monte, are typical examples of this period’s ornamentation.
Only when the gold ran out did the baroque fad fade. At the end of the 18th century, architects flirted briefly with rococo (best exemplified by Mateus Vicente’s Palácio de Queluz, begun in 1747, or the palace at Estói) before embracing neoclassicism.
The Modern Era
The Salazar years favoured decidedly severe, Soviet-style state commissions (eg Coimbra university’s dull faculty buildings, which replaced elegant 18th-century neoclassical ones). Ugly buildings and apartment blocks rose on city outskirts. Notable exceptions dating from the 1960s are Lisbon’s Palácio da Justiça in the Campolide district, and the gloriously sleek Museu Calouste Gulbenkian. The beautiful wood-panelled Galeto cafe-restaurant is a time capsule from this era.
The tendency towards urban mediocrity continued after the 1974 revolution, although architects such as Fernando Távora and Eduardo Souto de Moura have produced impressive schemes. Lisbon’s postmodern Amoreiras shopping complex, by Tomás Taveira, is another striking contribution.
Portugal’s most prolific contemporary architect is Álvaro Siza Vieira. A believer in clarity and simplicity, he takes an expressionist approach that is reflected in projects such as the Pavilhão de Portugal for Expo 98, Porto’s splendid Museu de Arte Contemporânea and the Igreja de Santa Maria at Marco de Canavezes, south of Amarante. He has also restored central Lisbon’s historic Chiado shopping district with notable sensitivity, following a major fire in 1988.
Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava designed the lean, organic monster Gare do Oriente for Expo 98, architecture that is complemented by the work of many renowned contemporary artists. The interior is more state-of-the-art spaceship than station. In the same area lies Lisbon’s architectural trailblazer the Parque das Nações, with a bevy of unique designs, including a riverfront park and Europe’s largest aquarium. The longest bridge in Europe, the Ponte de Vasco da Gama, built in 1998, stalks out across the river from nearby.
Since the turn of the millennium, Portugal has seen a handful of architecturally ambitious projects come to fruition. One of the grander projects is Rem Koolhaas’ Casa da Música in Porto (2005). From a distance, the extremely forward-looking design appears to be a solid white block of carefully cut crystal. Both geometric and defiantly asymmetrical, the building mixes elements of tradition – like azulejos (hand-painted tiles) hidden in one room – with high modernism, such as the enormous curtains of corrugated glass flanking the concert stage.
Two Legendary Architects
Porto is home to not one but two celebrated contemporary architects: Álvaro Siza Vieira (born 1933) and Eduardo Souto de Moura (born 1952). Both remain fairly unknown outside their home country, which is surprising given their loyal following among fellow architects and their long and distinguished careers. Both have earned the acclaimed Pritzker Prize, the Nobel of the architecture world (Siza Vieira in 1992, Souto de Moura in 2011). The two men are quite close, and they even have offices in the same building. They have collaborated on a handful of projects (prior to going out on his own, Souto de Moura also worked for Siza Vieira).
On the surface, Siza Vieira's work may seem less than dazzling. Stucco, stone, tile and glass are his building materials of choice. Place means everything in Siza Vieira’s work, with geography and climate carefully considered before any plans are laid, regardless of the size or scale of the project. Many of his works are outside the country, although the Serralves Museu de Arte Contemporânea in Porto and the cliffside Boa Nova Casa Chá near Matosinhos are two of his most famous works in Portugal.
Like Siza Vieira, Souto de Moura spurns flashy designs. His works feature minimalist but artful structures that utilise local building materials. The Estádio Municipal de Braga, built for the 2004 European football championship, is set in a former granite quarry (granite from the site was used to make concrete for the stadium). The rock walls of the quarry lie behind one goal; the other side opens to views of the city. Better known is Souto de Moura's design for the Casa das Histórias Paula Rego in Cascais. The red-concrete museum is distinguished by its two pyramid-shaped towers, providing a modern reinterpretation of classic Portuguese shapes (which appear in chimneys, lighthouses, towers, and old palaces such as the Palácio Nacional de Sintra).
Literary Giants
In 2010, Portugal lost one of its greatest writers when José Saramago died at the age of 87. Known for his discursive, cynical and darkly humorous novels, Saramago gained worldwide attention after winning the Nobel Prize in 1998. His best works mine the depths of the human experience and are often set in a uniquely Portuguese landscape. Sometimes his quasi-magical tales revolve around historic events – like the Christian Siege of Lisbon or the building of the Palácio Nacional de Mafra – while at other times he takes on grander topics (writing, for instance, of Jesus’ life as a fallible human being) or even creates modern-day fables (in Blindness, everyone on earth suddenly goes blind). As a self-described libertarian communist, Saramago had political views that sometimes landed him in trouble. After his name was removed from a list of nominees for a European literary prize, he went into self-imposed exile, spending the last years of his life in the Canary Islands.
In the shadow of Saramago, António Lobo Antunes is Portugal’s other literary great – and many of his admirers say the Nobel committee gave the prize to the wrong Portuguese writer. Antunes produces magical, fast-paced prose, often with dark undertones and vast historical sweeps; some critics compare his work to that of William Faulkner. Antunes’ writing reflects his harrowing experience as a field doctor in Angola during Portugal’s bloody colonial wars, and he often turns a critical gaze on Portuguese history – setting his novels around colonial wars, the dark days of the Salazar dictatorship and the 1974 revolution. Slowly gaining an international following, Antunes is still active today, and many of his earlier novels have finally been translated into English.
Fernando Pessoa
‘There’s no such man known as Fernando Pessoa’, swore Alberto Caeiro, who, truth be told, didn’t really exist himself. He was one of more than a dozen heteronyms (identities) adopted by Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), Portugal’s greatest 20th-century poet.
Heralded by literary critics as one of the icons of modernism, Pessoa was also among the stranger characters to wander the streets of Lisbon. He worked as a translator by day (having learned English while living in South Africa as a young boy) and wrote poetry by night – but not just Pessoa’s poetry. He took on numerous personas, writing in entirely different styles, representing different philosophies, backgrounds and levels of mastery. Of Pessoa’s four primary heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro was regarded as the great master by other heteronyms Alvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis. (Fernando Pessoa was the fourth heteronym, but his existence, as alluded to earlier, was denied by the other three.) Any one style would have earned Pessoa renown as a major poet of his time, but considered together, the variety places him among the greats of modern literature.
Pessoa for many is inextricably linked to Lisbon. He spent his nights in cafes, writing, drinking and talking until late into the evening, and many of his works are set in Lisbon’s old neighbourhoods. Among Pessoa’s phobias: lightning and having his photograph taken. You can see a few of the existing photos of him at the Café Martinho da Arcada, one of his regular haunts.
Despite his quirks and brilliance, Pessoa published very little in his lifetime, with his great work Livro do Desassossego (Book of Disquiet) only appearing in 1982, 50 years after it was written. In fact, the great bulk of Pessoa’s writing was discovered after his death: thousands of manuscript pages lay hidden away inside a wooden trunk. Scholars are still poring over his elusive works.
Painting
The Early Masters
As Gothic art gave way to more humanistic Renaissance works, Portugal’s 15th-century painters developed their own style. Led by the master Nuno Gonçalves, the escola nacional (national school) took religious subjects and grounded them against contemporary backgrounds. In Gonçalves’ most famous painting, the panels of Santo Antonio (in Lisbon's Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga), he includes a full milieu of Portuguese society – noblemen, Jews, fishermen, sailors, knights, priests, monks and beggars.
Some of Portugal’s finest early paintings emerged from the 16th-century Manueline school. These artists, influenced by Flemish painters, developed a style known for its incredible delicacy, realism and luminous colours. The most celebrated painter of his time was Vasco Fernandes, known as Grão Vasco (1480–1543). His richly hued paintings (still striking five centuries later) hang in a museum in Viseu dedicated to his work – as well as that of his Manueline school colleague Gaspar Vaz. Meanwhile, sculptors including Diogo de Boitaca went wild with Portuguese seafaring fantasies and exuberant decoration on some of Portugal’s icons.
The Star of Óbidos
The 17th century saw a number of talented Portuguese artists emerge. One of the best was Josefa de Óbidos, who enjoyed success as a female artist – an extreme rarity in those days. Josefa’s paintings were unique in their personal, sympathetic interpretations of religious subjects and for their sense of innocence. Although she studied at an Augustine convent as a young girl, she left without taking the vows and settled in Óbidos (where she got her nickname). Still she maintained close ties to the church, which provided many of her commissions, and remained famously chaste until her death in 1684. Josefa left one of the finest legacies of work of any Portuguese painter. She excelled in richly coloured still lifes and detailed religious works, ignoring established iconography.
Naturalism
In the 19th century, naturalism was the dominant trend, with a handful of innovators pushing Portuguese art in new directions. Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro, who hailed from a family of artists, was a seminal figure among the Portuguese artists of his time. He played a prominent role in the Leã d’Ouro, a group of distinguished artists, writers and intellectuals who gathered in the capital and were deeply involved in the aesthetic trends of the day. A prolific artist, Pinheiro painted some of the luminaries of his day, including the novelist Eça de Queirós and Teófilo Braga (a celebrated writer who later became president of the early republic). One of his best-known works is a haunting portrait of the poet Antero de Quental, who later died by suicide.
The 20th Century
Building on the works of the naturalists, Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso lived a short but productive life, experimenting with new techniques emerging in Europe. Raised in a sleepy village outside Amarante, he studied architecture at the Academia de Belas Artes in Lisbon but soon dropped out and moved to Paris. There he found his calling as a painter, and mingled with the leading artists and writers of the time, including Amedeo Modigliani, Gertrude Stein, Max Jacob and many others. He experimented with impressionism, and later cubism and futurism, and created a captivating body of work, though he is little known outside Portugal.
José Sobral de Almada Negreiros delved even deeper into futurism, inspired by the Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. His work encompassed richly hued portraits with abstract geometrical details – an example is his famous 1954 portrait of Fernando Pessoa – and he was also a sculptor, writer and critic. He managed to walk a fine line during the Salazar regime, creating large-scale murals by public commission as well as socially engaged works critical of Portuguese society.
Paula Rego
The conservative Salazar years of the mid-20th century didn’t create the ideal environment to nurture contemporary creativity, and many artists left the country. These include Portugal’s best-known living artist, Paula Rego, who was born in Lisbon in 1935 but has been a resident of the UK since 1951. Rego’s signature style developed around fairy-tale paintings with a nightmarish twist. Her works deal in ambiguity and psychological and sexual tension, such as The Family (1988), where a seated businessman is either being tortured or smothered with affection by his wife and daughter. Domination, fear, sexuality and grief are all recurring themes in Rego’s paintings, and the mysterious and sinister atmosphere, heavy use of chiaroscuro (stark contrasting of light and shade) and strange distortion of scale are reminiscent of the work of surrealists Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico.
Rego is considered one of the great early champions of painting from a female perspective and she continues to add to a substantial volume of work. Her acclaim is growing, particularly with the opening of the Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, in Cascais, which showcases her work.