Avenida Infante Santo - On Foot

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There are streets in Lisbon that only reveal themselves to people who slow down; they rarely announce themselves, but reward a closer look. Avenida Infante Santo runs between Santos and Estrela; it is the kind of place most people pass through without pausing or miss entirely from the window of a car. I found it, as it turns out, by "accident of assignment": on a quiet Sunday morning in March, I walked its full length for the first time and within only 30 minutes, I discovered the seven azulejo tile works, each one hiding in the open and more unexpected than the last.

The works run mainly along one side of the avenue, mounted across the retaining walls of six staircases and one vast underpass at the bottom. I walked it from the bottom up, where Google Maps had dropped me, but I´d recommend starting from the top (where it meets Rua de Sant'Ana à Lapa) and letting the street carry you downhill toward the Santos riverfront. That way, allowing the avenue to tell its story in chronological order, beginning in 1958 and ending, decades later, in an explosive spectrum of colours at the river´s edge.

If you have the time, walk the street twice: up close on your way down and then back up on the other side of the street, where the distance gives you the full picture of each work at once. The panels, like most things in life, gain clarity with distance.

Before we start walking, I´ll give you a quick historical context. In the late 1950s, as five large modernist blocks were built along the avenue, the city commissioned four of Portugal’s most renowned artists to decorate the staircase walls alongside them, with a vision centred on Portuguese culture and the sea. Eduardo Nery extended the route in 1994 and then again in 2001. And in 2007, urban artist Add Fuel finally tiled the one staircase that had been left untouched for nearly sixty years, completing something the city had started six decades earlier.

Before you venture down the street, take a moment to find Jorge Vieira´s abstract bronze figure, which clings to the red-brick wall at the top of the street. Part human, part something harder to name. A good omen, I´d say.

If you choose to start at the top of the street, the walk begins with Maria Keil´s panel from 1958, restored in 2003, as a small note on the wall politely informs you. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, you might have encountered her work elsewhere: Keil designed the azulejo panels for Lisbon´s first metro stations. She is widely known for reviving a tradition that was at the time considered outdated. Unlike her metro work, which came with strict constraints, this panel was free; the only limitation she had was its surrounding architecture. To one side of this panel, a figure is seen holding a child in one arm and a small boat in the other. Sailboats are rising behind them against a blue, green, and purple background formed of geometric tiles. Look closely enough and small shells appear, pressed into individual tiles.

A few steps further, Carlos Botelho´s Colorful City lifts the mood entirely. Lisbon's architecture is depicted here in an abstract, almost playful form: coloured facades, arched doorways, and church domes are stacked against each other in bold, joyful combinations. Botelho was known as the “painter of Lisbon”, passionately capturing the city throughout his career. You could spend ten minutes on this wall and still find something new.

In contrast to Botelho, who painted the city as architecture, Júlio Pomar and Alice Jorge painted it as people. Their panel seems to be a snapshot of a Lisbon afternoon; children kicking a ball, an old woman settled under an umbrella, a barefooted fisherman striding past with an eel in his net. The panel was a collaboration between two artists who were, at the time, also husband and wife. Look closely, and you might feel it, warm ochres and soft greens, like afternoon light on a familiar street. Of all the panels on the avenue, this one feels most like a memory of Lisbon, one you wish you could´ve seen.

Rolando Sá Nogueira´s Riverside Lisbon is the panel with the most dimension. On the left, large boats push forward, while smaller, more intimate scenes of fishermen and figures at rest recede on the right. The whole composition is swept with white lines, like nets cast across water. Currents are suggested through wave patterns over the entire panel. Unlike the previous panel, where women, children and men filled the streets, here the river belongs entirely to the men. A reminder that these works, however beautiful, are also documents of their time.

The shift is abrupt and deliberate. Eduardo Nery’s 1994 intervention abandons figures and narrative entirely, no boats, no people, no Lisbon skyline. Instead, warm amber and orange tiles protrude from the wall in angular geometric forms, catching the light differently with every step you take: walk past it slowly and the whole surface seems to move. It is the most sculptural piece on the avenue, less something to look at than something to experience.

On the brick wall beside it, a woman rides a bicycle with one arm raised. No plaque, no explanation. Just her, mid-motion, going somewhere.

Add Fuel’s Praise of Liveliness was added in 2017, the last piece to complete the route. Diogo Machado, the artist behind the Add Fuel name, designed it as a conscious homage to everything that came before it: the wave patterns echo Sá Nogueira, the geometric rhythms nod to Nery, the blue and white palette is pure Portuguese azulejo tradition. Standing in front of it, you might not immediately read it as contemporary, which is perhaps the point. It is polished and precise in a way the older panels, weathered by decades on the street, are not.

And then the street ends and the avenue opens up. Eduardo Nery’s tile cladding of the underpass doesn’t ask for your attention, it commands it. The full colour spectrum rendered in vertical bands of tile, stretching the entire width of the underpass and wrapping around the corner. It is by far the largest and loudest work on the avenue. Cars pass in front of it, adding noise and movement to something that already has plenty of both. After the intimacy of everything that came before, the quiet shells, the barefoot fisherman, the amber tiles catching the afternoon light, this artwork demands nothing less than your full attention.

I have lived in Lisbon for over six months. I walk its streets daily, take its trams, know its hills. And yet it took a work assignment to bring me to a street I had never noticed. There is something particular about being handed a list of seven things and sent to find them, not knowing where exactly they’ll appear or what they’ll look like. It turns a walk into a treasure hunt, and a street into something worth paying attention to. Each panel arrived as a small surprise, a reward for looking up at the right moment. In a city (in a world) where it is very easy to move fast and not pay attention to your surroundings, thirty minutes of enforced curiosity felt like a gift, or like a playful mindfulness exercise. Avenida Infante Santo will not appear on most tourist maps, but for anyone who could use half an hour outside, walking slowly with nowhere else to be, it is waiting.

Don’t drive.

Authored by Lynn Kler