Portalegre Tapestry Manufactory

The Manufactura de Tapeçarias de Portalegre was set up in 1946 by two friends, Guy Fino and Manuel Celestino Peixeiro, in a town with a long textile history. Their first plan, to revive hand-knotted carpets, did not pay, so they turned to wall tapestry using a stitch invented years earlier by Manuel do Carmo Peixeiro, Manuel Celestino's father. The first tapestry left the looms in 1948. Ten years later the French master Jean Lurçat, shown one of his own tapestries beside a copy woven in Portalegre, took the Portalegre piece for the French one, and went on to have many of his works woven here.

The method is still entirely manual. A painting by an artist is enlarged onto squared paper on which each square stands for one stitch, and its colours are matched against a palette of more than seven thousand shades of wool. The weavers then work on vertical looms from the back of the piece, wrapping the wool weft around a cotton warp at a density of some 2,500 stitches per square decimetre. Wool and cotton are the only materials. Each design is woven in a limited edition of one, four or eight pieces, authenticated by the artist's signature, and more than two hundred painters have had work translated into tapestry here.

The manufactory is a place of work, not a museum, so it can be visited only by appointment. Tapestries are sold through the manufactory's own gallery in Lisbon, and a department cleans and restores older pieces. In Portalegre, the municipal Museu da Tapeçaria de Portalegre – Guy Fino shows the history, the technique and tapestries from the 1940s to the present, and is the natural companion to a visit. Portalegre is the main town of the northern Alentejo, at the foot of the Serra de São Mamede, and is reached by the IP2 road.