Europe 25: Street Art in Porto, Gaia, and Aveiro

It’s somewhat difficult to write about public art in a city where a significant percentage of the buildings are covered with decorative tiles. Where do you draw the line? What counts as public art and what simply counts as wall coverings?

This is a high-class problem to have, really. Porto, Gaia, and Aveiro, which I am lumping together in this discussion because I’m only going to make one post about public art from our stay in Portugal and the same basic conditions apply to all three of those cities, are full to the brim with all sorts of art, pretty much wherever you look.

There are a lot of really nice Art Deco buildings, for example.

And we really liked the neon on this one.

What’s interesting is that even just the logos seem to have some art to them in Porto. The negative space on this one was really cool, though to be honest I no longer remember what business this was advertising.

There were a great many cows. The Ale Hop stores all had their own cow, for example, and the train station in Aveiro did as well. I don’t think they were selling anything at the train station, but a cow’s a cow.

This one was advertising a soccer club that had its own store in Porto. I just thought the motto was interesting.

It always pays to look up as you’re walking around in European cities. Sometimes you find interesting sculptures.

But more often, at least in Porto and Aveiro, you’ll find murals. There were a lot of them on the walls and they were fun to notice. These were in Porto, for example.

At the time I thought I was expected to know who the second one was, but as my education in all things Portuguese was regrettably thin he remained a mystery while we were there. A quick internet search just now reveals that this is the grandfather of the artist who painted it, however.

This one was in Gaia.

Of all of the murals in Porto, though, this one was the one I liked most. We must have walked by it a half dozen times, as it was on our route from the apartment to the downtown area, and I always stopped to look at it. My favorite of the portraits is about halfway down on the lower level. It’s called Cecilia and it was originally painted by someone named Henrique Pausao in 1882. I found an image of it online to put here so I remember it.

In Aveiro we stumbled across this archway on our way to the canal boats.

While on the boats we passed several tiled murals along the way. Our fellow passenger was not nearly as grumpy as her expression would suggest, but sometimes photos just turn out that way.

This one we saw just walking around.

And this one was on a plaza next to a small church, which it seemed to be advertising.

Perhaps the most interesting set of murals we saw was one that we went by on the staircase down from the upper level of Gaiai to the river. It’s a serious collection of stairs with landings every so often to break your descent and every time you hit a landing there would be one of these murals. These photos are arranged from top to bottom.

There was also a lot of 3D art around – sculptures, reliefs, and so on. Sometimes you’d just wander across a sculpture randomly on a street corner or on the sidewalk.

Or in a park that was set aside specifically for such things.

Or just protruding from the side of a building. The second one was on a wall that we passed on the way to and from the tile workshop, and the face sat about knee high off the sidewalk. The cigarette was likely added by a passerby and I have to say that it improved the artwork immensely.

The Half Rabbit is down in Gaia and it is one of the more famous sculptures in the Porto/Gaia area from what I could tell. Several bridal parties were lined up to take their group photos there so it was a bit of a wait to get our own photos without them (you can see one leaving in the last photo – they’re the ones in the uniform black dresses). It’s an interesting sculpture in that it is clearly a rabbit when you look at it from the front but from the sides it just looks like a collection of random detritus bolted to the corner of a building and it is pretty impressive how it all comes together when you look at it just right. Apparently it was sculpted by someone named Bordalo II (no word about the original Bordalo) from rubbish collected in the immediate vicinity and it’s supposed to raise awareness about sustainability, consumerism, and pollution but mostly it just looks like a rabbit and people say “Awwwwww” as they walk by so I’m not sure it is succeeding.

The Mercado Bolhão had its own sculptures on display on the third floor when we went back the second time. I suppose they were there the first time, but we didn’t climb that high on that trip so we cannot say. We were richly rewarded for doing so on the second visit, however. For one thing, there was this sculpture of a can of sardines. It's hard to see in this photo, but that sculpture is about five feet wide. Sardines are one of the things that Porto is known for and there is at least one stall at the market that sells nothing but brightly colored tins of sardines for those who enjoy them.

More impressively, there was the “Traditional Miniature Installation,” which apparently is something they set up every year at the Mercado. It’s a communal project created mostly by amateurs, according to the sign next to it, and you can get a pretty good sense of the city from looking at it.

If you look closely you can see individual landmarks. The tall building in the front center of the first photo is the Clérigos Tower, for example.

And if you look even more closely you’ll see things you can’t unsee no matter how much port wine you consume, and that’s just how art works.

There are a lot of odd statues in Porto, actually. This one was outside of a shop and it probably has something to do with what they sell there but I have no idea how.

And this one was outside of another shop that we passed on the climb down from the Miradouro da Vitória and I have even less of an idea how it might possibly connect to the shop next to it than the first one. But it was striking enough for us to stop and take a photo and thus spend time standing by the shop entrance, perhaps on a different day to wander inside, so I suppose as advertising it did its job.

I think the art I enjoyed most of all of this, though, was the graffiti art. Some of it was pretty well drawn.

I loved this one, though I have no idea who Pixo is. I’m glad they’re not dead, though. We passed this building several times and every time I found it immensely cheering.

Some of the graffiti was just graffiti, though there were a few pointed messages delivered.

This one, though, was my favorite. It was on the side of a building not far from the Cathedral, just as you walked down the hill toward the Casa Guitarra and the upper level of the Dom Luis I bridge, and there was just something about the way the lines flowed that appealed to me.

It’s a lovely thing to wander through a city full of art.