Portugal in Photos: Street Art Edition

Given, well, everything, I thought today’s photo selection could focus a bit on Portugal’s prodigious, and I do mean prodigious, street art presence.

Obviously, Portugal is home to a deep presence of art everywhere — statues, fountains, architecture, egg tarts (ahem), and perhaps most notable and everpresent, the azulejo tiles. But it’s the street art that hits you perhaps first and most relentlessly, because it’s everywhere. Everywhere. At all times. My understanding of this is, it’s technically illegal, but they open up buildings and certain objects (electrical boxes, f’rex) to being all arted up; that does not, however, stop a lot of other art from popping up all over the place. It runs the gamut — beautiful, transgressive, simplistic, bombastic, egotistical, historical, political. You could travel to Portugal and see none of the sights except wandering to check out the street art and, I suspect, you’d still come away in awe, wanting to go back.

There are a number of notable Portugese street artists — in the earlier post with the Half-Rabbit, that’s Bordalo II, and you can find his work here. The first one below is the work of Diogo Machado, or Add Fuel. You can find more of the bigger-known artists here.

ANYWAY, the art is really something else, so here’s a spread of it from all over Portugal. And by all over, I mean: Lagos, Porto, Lisbon, Sintra.