Sketch Tour Portugal
Algarve
June 2021
Client: Turismo de Portugal (Portuguese Tourism Board)
Sketch Tour Portugal is a joint effort between Turismo de Portugal - the Portuguese Tourism Board - and the Urban Sketchers Portugal Association, dating back to 2018, aimed at promoting international tourism in the different regions of the country.
The project joins Portuguese and foreign sketchers and writers touring around the country, showing the secrets of all the different regions in words and sketches. I had the pleasure of being part of the Reload Tour to my home region of Algarve, in 2021, sketching side by side with Italian sketcher Simo Capecchi and writer Matilde Campilho.
Pedro Loureiro is from Lagos. On this tour, he comes home to see everything with fresh eyes.
Born in the western Algarve, a childhood of legos and sand castles led him to study architecture, but teenage years spent with comic books encouraged him to pursue illustration. He now works across both professions, as an architectural illustrator. He likes to draw, to travel, and to cut vegetables into tiny pieces.
What surprised you on this journey?
The experience of drawing a journey is familiar to me. The surprising thing was seeing the journey and the region through the eyes of my travel companions. The difference in the gaze, the attention, and the discovery that each made of the Algarve. Our own view of a journey is not as valuable as the mosaic of views of a group of travellers with different artistic outlooks.
Tell us something you saw that you had never seen before.
I am from the western Algarve and have rarely visited the eastern side. Discovering places in the region I grew up in but that I hadn't seen yet was a revelation, especially the cliffs of Algar Seco and the alleys and stories of the people of Albufeira.
If you had to tell a child about your journey, what would you say?
Our sketch book is like a little box of treasures that we keep, holding places and people we have met. The drawings we make of a journey are our secret, but one that everyone is welcome to see.
How has this experience changed the way you travel from now on?
Each journey I make is unique and is always recorded in my sketch books. This one in particular showed me that even places we think we know well always have something new to offer the senses. Drawing helps us stay in a place long enough for those new aspects to reveal themselves.
Viagem Lisboa-Algarve A2
Praia do Vale de Centeanes - Carvoeiro
Jantar convívio - Carvoeiro
Mercado de Lagos
Avenida dos Descobrimentos - Lagos
D. Sebastião de Cutileiro - Lagos
Mercado de Escravos - Lagos
Forte Ponta da Bandeira - Lagos
Largo Infante Henrique - Lagos
Ponta da Piedade - Lagos
Algar Seco + Nossa Senhora da Rocha
Carvoeiro
Castelo de Silves
Silves
Albufeira
Albufeira
Nossa Senhora da Rocha
Mercado de Olhão
Mercado de Olhão
Centro histórico de Faro
Faro
Quinta do Marco - Tavira
Algarve