Maria (2024) by Daniel Eime, on Rua Joaquim Tim Tim Sitima, Amadora, painted for Conversas na Rua as part of celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution. Photo by Paolo Giannotti, courtesy BLocal Travel Press.
As Seen on the Streets of Lisbon, by Giulia Blocal Riva, with photographs by Paolo Giannotti
Lisbon has no shortage of walls and no shortage of street artists ready to take advantage of them. Writer Giulia "BLocal" Riva interviewed 13 of them at length, then built a book around what they had to say. As Seen on the Streets of Lisbon is the latest in a series of important tomes that chronicle the ever-growing, ever-evolving global street art scene.
The book, available now, is the third volume in Riva's independent As Seen on the Streets of... series, after Paris in 2024 and London in 2025. Lisbon is not a detour for her. She first photographed graffiti there in 2000 and has been coming back for 26 years, long before she launched her BLocal blog in 2011.
Lisbon’s street art scene, like others around the world, has at once evolved and stayed the same. While illegal graffiti persists, it now shares wall space with commissioned murals. Its Galeria de Arte Urbana, known as GAU, was set up by the City Council in 2008, in part to control graffiti in the historic center. It began with panels on Calçada da Glória and grew into a program commissioning murals citywide and running MURO_LX.
Untitled mural (2024) by Jaime Ferraz painted for the Cor de Chelas festival in Chelas, Lisbon. Photo by Paolo Giannotti, courtesy BLocal Travel Press.
Alongside a historical introduction, the book carries the 13 interviews, shorter contributions from other local figures, stories behind individual works and help for getting beyond the tourist routes. Research began in May 2025 with a small-group trip that let BLocal's audience join the fieldwork and help finance an independently produced book. That is the model for the series: no big publisher, no survey assembled from press releases, just time on the ground.
Photographer Paolo Giannotti, Riva's partner and co-founder of BLocal Travel Press in 2024, shot the pictures. His photographs keep the work where it belongs, on gable ends, bridge pillars and neighborhood walls, with the street still in the frame. A mural in Lisbon is rarely just an image; it’s a housing block, a festival site, a place people pass every day.
Among the works featured by Riva is Maria, a work painted by Daniel Eime in Amadora in 2024 for Conversas na Rua. In it, the artist turns a house into a portrait coming apart, the woman's face scored in red and her hair blowing out, so the figure seems to be dissolving back into an olive and white figure eight pattern background. There’s also Leveza by Jaime Ferraz, painted for the 2024 Cor de Chelas festival in Chelas, that features a woman in profile sending iridescent soap bubbles across a green gable. Under the Vasco da Gama Bridge, Nuno Viegas covered a pillar with yellow throw-ups and a masked figure for the 2021 piece Shirt Mask SOW03, at the time his tallest mural.
Shirt Mask SOW03 (2021) by Nuno Viegas, on a pillar of the Vasco da Gama Bridge at Parque das Nações, Lisbon, painted for the MURO urban art festival. Photo by Paolo Giannotti, courtesy BLocal Travel Press.
None of it is permanent, and Riva knows it. "Even a few weeks before publication, we were still making changes as murals disappeared and cultural spaces closed," she says. The value, she argues, is in "documenting an art form that is often ephemeral" while making the book as current as possible. A detailed Google map, updated as the city changes, extends it after publication.
Lisbon's early responses suggest she got the balance right. Curator Lara Seixo Rodrigues, co-founder of the WOOL festival, calls it "a tremendous journey through time." Ricardo Campos, a researcher at Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, says it shows "how and why Lisbon has become one of the most significant destinations for graffiti and street art over the past few decades."
As Seen on the Streets of Lisbon is published in English by BLocal Travel Press in two editions: a hardcover art book, 254 × 178 mm (ISBN 9791224342496), and an A5 paperback travel guide, 210 × 148 mm (ISBN 9791224342519). It is, in the end, a guidebook. It is also a record of a city at a moment, made before that moment disappears.
The two editions of As Seen on the Streets of Lisbon by Giulia Blocal Riva — hardcover, left, and paperback — photographed on a map of Lisbon and the Tagus River (Tejo). Photo by Paolo Giannotti, courtesy BLocal Travel Press.
