City of tiles and yellow trams
Lisbon
House fronts covered in patterned glazed tiles, yellow trams on steep hills and pavements of white stone.
Why Lisbon is azulejo blue
Lisbon is built on hills above the wide mouth of the Tagus. Much of it was rebuilt after a great earthquake in 1755. Its signature is the azulejo, a glazed ceramic tile. Blue-and-white painted panels were the fashion of the late 17th and 18th centuries and line churches and palaces. In the 19th century, factory-made patterned tiles spread across ordinary house fronts, where they also keep out damp. The National Tile Museum tells the story. Other colours are easy to find: small yellow trams from the 1930s climb the old quarters, roofs are terracotta, and pavements are laid in patterns of white and black limestone. Walls not tiled are painted pink, yellow or pale blue.
Values are fair approximations of what the eye sees there, not measurements.
Colours tied to Lisbon
Written by the Rang desk with AI assistance. Background: "Lisbon" on Wikipedia. If you know Lisbon and we have it wrong, tell us.
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🇵🇹 The striped housesCosta NovaA beach village near Aveiro whose wooden houses are painted in bold vertical stripes on white.
🇮🇳 The Blue CityJodhpurOld-city houses washed in blue crowd the foot of Mehrangarh Fort, on the edge of the Thar Desert.🇮🇳 Town of mud-resist block printBagruA small town near Jaipur where the Chhipa community prints cotton by hand in indigo, black and red.
🇮🇳 Prayer flags over a high desertLehStrings of five-coloured prayer flags and white stupas stand out against the brown mountains of Ladakh.Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Jodhpur In: Lavpatel2008, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Leh In: Vyacheslav Argenberg, CC BY 4.0, source
- Porto Pt: Rititaneves, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Aveiro Pt: Joaomartinho63, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Costa Nova Pt: Vitor Oliveira, CC BY-SA 2.0, source