Cascais

In 1842, prisoners at São Jorge Castle in Lisbon became the world’s first calceteiros, pavement artists, when they were ordered to lay black and white stones in a zigzag pattern. The work was so popular that within six years, Rossio Square received its famous wave design, paying homage to Portuguese sailors. Today, these hand laid limestone mosaics carpet sidewalks across Portugal, each stone placed no more than two millimeters apart, a craft now being considered for UNESCO World Heritage status.

The man behind both projects, Lieutenant General Eusébio Cândido Cordeiro Pinheiro Furtado, seems to have had a talent for getting other people to do his best work. The original São Jorge courtyard no longer exists, destroyed during restorations in the 1940s that prioritized the castle’s medieval bones over what was, at the time, considered a fairly recent novelty. Rossio’s wave pattern fared better, though it too has been altered over the decades, its ornamental border stripped away and much of its original footprint reduced by the 1920s. The craft itself now faces a shortage more mundane than any earthquake or renovation: between 1986 and 2019, a dedicated Lisbon training school produced only 224 certified calceteiros, a trickle of skilled labor trying to maintain a tradition that once employed hundreds of pavers across the capital alone.