From Galicia to Caldas da Rainha: Discovering Bordallo’s Ceramics

In Galician restaurants, it was common to see plates hanging on the walls, often depicting arrangements of seafood in earthenware, sometimes accompanied by vegetables. When I was young, those tavern-style decorations were far from what anyone considered good taste. Over the years, and with my increasingly frequent trips to Portugal, I began to grow familiar with this kind of work and discovered that its creator was a nineteenth-century ceramic artist who had revived the legacy of a fascinating Renaissance figure, the Frenchman Bernard Palissy.

Bordallo’s ceramics feature not only crustaceans and shellfish but an entire botanical world that, as a gardener, I couldn’t help but find captivating. So when the time came to choose tableware for Baixa House, it became clear that it had to be Portuguese and that it needed to have a rich, unmistakable botanical repertoire. We selected pieces from three different collections in the characteristic Caldas da Rainha green, with a touch of yellow in the cereal and soup bowls, and with leaf patterns that work beautifully together.