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Sources, method and privacy
How we check
Every place and fact lists the page it came from. We read official pages (museums, factories, UNESCO, law texts) and record the date we last checked. Where an official page could not be read, we mark the entry “not fully checked” and either leave details out or show them clearly as “reported”. We do not invent opening hours, prices or dates. Our research notes, including what we could not verify, are in the project repository.
What we know is missing
We could not read the official sites of the Museu da Cerâmica in Caldas da Rainha, the Museu Vista Alegre history pages and SOS Azulejo, nor the Património Cultural website or EUR-Lex. Molelos, Nisa, the Alentejo potteries, Coimbra faïence and Viana’s faïence rest on secondary sources only and are marked as such. We found no ceramic production tradition in Madeira.
Images and data
The home-page hero is a Blender (Cycles) render made by us, using the tile pattern from our own tile lab. The photographs on the home page and the page banners, and the engraving in the footer, are AI-generated illustrations made with OpenAI’s image tool through Codex from prompts kept in the repository; they are not pictures of real objects, places or people, and are labelled as illustrations. All tile patterns and pottery models are generated by code. Map outlines come from Natural Earth (public domain, naturalearthdata.com), simplified by us. Fonts are Fraunces and DM Sans (open licence, via Fontsource). 3D uses three.js (MIT).
Affiliate links and money
There are no affiliate links and no sponsored listings. We looked for public affiliate programmes at Vista Alegre, Bordallo Pinheiro, Viúva Lamego and Sant’Anna and found none. If that changes, the page will say so next to the link.
Privacy
We use Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics in consent mode: analytics storage is denied until you accept. Your choice is stored in this browser under the key ceramic-analytics-consent. The tile lab and pottery wheel keep your design in the page address (after the #) and nothing is sent to us.