14/05/2026 - Restoration of the Ourique tile panel at the Carlos Lopes Pavilion completed

Following a rumour of theft that spread on social media, the Ourique tile panel at the Carlos Lopes Pavilion in Lisbon, created by Jorge Colaço (1920), has been fully reinstalled. The confusion arose when members of the public noticed that 650 tiles were missing from the panel. However, it turned out to be a misunderstanding: the tiles had been removed for a restoration project coordinated by the Lisbon Tourism Association, with the technical work carried out by ERA Arqueologia.

The decision to intervene came at the end of 2025, following the fall of two tiles, which alerted the technicians to worrying signs of deterioration. In an interview with the newspaper Público, Patrícia Mestre, director of conservation and restoration at ERA, explained: “The major warning came from the fall of two tiles. We thus realised that the panel required intervention sooner than we had thought.” ERA carried out the work in early April.

The restoration process involved the careful removal of most of the tiles, which were duly marked for later replacement. In the workshop, our team mechanically cleaned the tiles and then repositioned them using volumetric reintegration, a technique that fills in the gaps to ensure visual uniformity of the surface. Chromatic reintegration is scheduled for May, aimed at restoring the original colours of the 104-year-old work.

On a more optimistic note, Patrícia Mestre also pointed out that, despite the widespread perception that the city’s tile heritage is under threat, the overall state of preservation is “far better than it was just a few years ago, as public authorities are now much more attentive to this issue”, noting that “you only have to look at photographs of the city from the 1980s to see how things have changed”.