Portugal's azulejo tradition dates to the early sixteenth century, when Moorish tin-glazed tiles arrived from Seville and were adopted by Lisbon's wealthy merchants to clad palace walls and chapel interiors. By the eighteenth century, Portuguese artisans had developed a distinctly national style, favoring cobalt-blue narratives on white fields that depicted everything from biblical scenes to quotidian market life. The craft endured Lisbon's 1755 earthquake, which leveled much of the city yet left azulejo-clad façades standing — proof of ceramic's resilience — and the rebuilding effort created a centuries-long demand for tile painters, glaziers, and kiln operators. Today Lisbon remains Europe's tile capital, with more than sixty active azulejo studios concentrated in the Alfama, Mouraria, and Santos neighborhoods. Artisan-led tile painting classes preserve techniques that predate industrial production: hand-mixing pigments from cobalt oxide and manganese dioxide, tracing designs onto bisque-fired ceramic with charcoal sticks, and applying glaze in controlled washes that account for kiln shrinkage and color shift. Many workshops occupy converted nineteenth-century potteries, their vaulted ceilings and north-facing windows designed to diffuse Lisbon's intense summer light. The city's National Tile Museum, housed in a former convent, holds more than seven thousand examples spanning five centuries, and several tile painting classes include guided visits to its collection before the hands-on session. Modern azulejo classes cater to both tourists seeking a two-hour introduction and local hobbyists enrolled in multi-week courses. Participants work on fifteen-centimeter square tiles, the standard dimension since the Pombaline reconstruction, and instructors demonstrate the traditional majolica technique: painting directly onto raw glaze with metal-oxide pigments that fuse during a single high-temperature firing. The palette remains constrained by chemistry — cobalt for blue, copper for green, manganese for brown — and most studios fire tiles at 1,020 degrees Celsius, the threshold at which lead-based glazes achieve their characteristic glossy surface. Finished tiles are shipped to participants within three weeks, once the firing cycle completes and the pieces cool. Lisbon's tile painting studios now export their pedagogy worldwide, yet the concentration of working artisans, historic kilns, and unbroken craft lineage makes a Lisbon tile painting class the definitive immersion in azulejo technique.