Ceramic ridge ornaments

Ridge tiles cover the top of a roof where two planes meet and direct water onto both sides. Hip tiles cover the joint where two slopes meet. English Wikipedia lists the fittings of a clay roof that go beyond the common tile: terminals, which cap the gable end or apex of a ridge and can be purely decorative, even a sculpture, and graduated tiles, which shrink from bottom to top and are needed for towers, cones and domes. These fittings make the roof edge a place where function and decoration meet in ceramic.

The same article describes the antefix, a vertical block that conceals and ends the base of a mission, imbrex-and-tegula or pantile roof, and notes that under-eave tiles are often ornamental, as in Sri Lankan temple architecture. It also mentions Japanese onigawara as a related roof ornament, which shows that finishing a roof with a decorative clay piece exists in many traditions, though that says nothing about Portugal. The sources we opened give the general vocabulary, not the history of Portuguese ridge ornaments, which we could not confirm.