Portuguese Pottery

Ceramics are one of the brightest and best souvenirs you can have from a Portuguese holiday. They bring home not only the sunshine of your stay but an authentic part, no matter how tiny, of the Portuguese cultural inheritance.

But if you are looking to follow up your interest in china or pottery on Portuguese sites, you find you need a much more precise vocabulary.

Ceramica is often used simply to define the fine art at the top end of the decorator scale. For china, you have the choice of searching under porcelana or seeing an article described as made " de louça", pronounced di low-ssuh.

The word louça is, however, in constant daily use to describe your everyday sets of crockery while when you talk about "louça de barro", you are talking about earthenware.

What best describes the pottery production for which the Portuguese are famous is perhaps the noun "faiança" for here we are talking about faience a particular technique used in tin glazing the earthenware.

Both delftware from Holland and majolica from Italy as well as the faience from France use a comparable process.

The word for a pottery is "olaria" but be careful when searching for an "oleiro" (pronounced o-layee-roo) as you are highly likely to turn up innumerable references to the young but ubiquitous wizard Harry Potter rather than learn too much about the potter and his craft.

This is not a highly informed article on Antiques and Collectibles for which you have to visit the wonderful site belonging to Barbara Nicholson Bell but is an exploratory tribute to a fascinating art which nowadays is flourishing once more throughout Portugal.

A traditional craft, its patterns and designs are being revived in potteries which have been given a new lease of life through home and outside interest in the wonderful shapes and designs of yesteryear.

In fact the unique pottery of the Algarve had all but disappeared when the industry was saved by Irish writer and potter Patrick Swift in the sixties who retrained local people in the art of producing the rough red amphorae typical of the area. Now the Olaria de Porsches and others in Almansil produce both ceramica and the more typical local souvenirs.

Everyone has a favourite type of pottery, a favourite mark or make. In Portugal too, each region produces a type of pottery as individual as a DNA sample.

From Alcobaca, we expect to find blue and white dishes while from Barcelos, everything is mainly brightly coloured, the emphasis being on pots and, of course, the legendary cockerels which are nowadays the most famous of the Portuguese icons. At the Museu de Olaria, there are almost 7000 pottery exhibits, a few of which including, of course, a cockerel are on display at their website.

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