Porto São Bento
Beaux-Arts train station covered in twenty thousand hand-painted tiles of Portuguese history.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Porto's São Bento station traces its unlikely path from a Benedictine monastery, founded in 1518 and gutted by fire in 1783, to a Beaux-Arts station wrapped by architect José Marques da Silva. Its real subject is painter Jorge Colaço, who began tiling the entrance hall by hand in 1905 and spent eleven years covering it in scenes from Portuguese history, from a royal wedding procession to medieval battles. It's a look at how a train station became one man's decade-long ceramic undertaking.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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