From Wool to Walls: The Story of Portugal’s WOOL Festival
Written by Giulia BLocal Riva
Published on August 4th, 2025
Covilhã clings to the slopes of Portugal’s highest mountains like wool to a loom. Once the beating heart of the country’s textile industry, this stone-built town at the edge of the Serra da Estrela National Park fell into a quiet slumber after the mills closed and the looms fell silent.
When the textile industry collapsed, Covilhã fell quiet. But over the past decade, the city has begun to tell a new story, one painted on its walls. WOOL, Portugal’s first festival dedicated to urban art, was founded in 2011 not as a marketing campaign or art-world spectacle, but as a tribute.
The transformation began in the city’s historic center, the area hit hardest by the economic downturn, with a mural that still lingers near the Church of Santa Maria. Painted by the Portuguese duo ARM Collective, the piece is a surreal composition: a man whose head has morphed into a tangled ball of wool carries a three-headed sheep on his shoulders (a reference to cloning, a subject of national debate at the time).
On the adjacent façade, a figure resembling an Asian factory worker strains under the weight of the city itself, portrayed as a crumbling industrial complex. The mural’s color palette and composition echo those of the church beside it, anchoring the work even more firmly in its surroundings. It’s a site-specific dialogue—visual, historical, and political—that speaks directly to Covilhã’s losses and reorientations.
That first intervention set the tone for the dozens that followed, each one site-specific, each rooted in the city’s identity, history, and terrain. In Covilhã, urban art became a way to look outward again. What began as a handful of murals has since unfolded into a layered cityscape of memory: more than fifty walls now echo with stories, faces, fabrics, and half-remembered mythologies. The art doesn’t seek to overwrite Covilhã’s story, but it listens to it, then repeats it, poetically and attentively. That’s where the true transformation lies.
There is, in WOOL’s curatorial process, a quiet defiance. Artists are not flown in for a weekend whirlwind. They begin their residency with a walk through disused factories, up mountain trails, into conversations with locals and former mill workers.
Most recently, in the 2025 edition, the Spanish artist Ampparito created an installation on the grand iron gate of a textile factory abandoned since the 1990s. Armed with a color chart featuring dozens of shades of green, he began asking former factory workers a single question: Which green was the gate? One by one, they pointed to different tones, each person carrying a different version of the same memory. No two answers matched exactly, so the gate was not repainted in a single, uniform shade. It became a mosaic of recollections, a portrait of the people who had passed through it, and the tones their stories had taken on over time.
Ampparito’s piece is just one example of the many conversations urban art has opened in Covilhã. Each mural is rooted in local stories—of factories and families, of labor and land, of the mountain’s looming presence and the industry that once sustained the valley below. For residents, these artworks have become a mirror of identity, reflecting back fragments of a shared past. For visitors, they offer something rarer than orientation: a way to understand the city not as a collection of sights, but as a living archive of memory, material, and meaning.
Over the years, some of my favorite urban artists have passed through Covilhã, leaving behind works that resonate far beyond the walls they occupy. In Helen Bur’s 2023 mural, a woman kneels beneath a towering pile of textiles, her posture strained, almost mythic. It’s an Atlas pose, but inverted: not holding up the heavens, but the weight of history, the burden of unpaid, unacknowledged labor that most women should carry. The folds of fabric are not just cloth; they’re generations of work, of repetition, of erasure.
Elsewhere around the city, artists like Cinta Vidal, Daniel Eime, TAXIS, and Marta Lapeña have also turned their attention to women, those who used to work for Covilhã’s textile industry.
Many murals pay tribute to the people of Covilhã, some ordinary, some celebrated, all integral to the city’s story. Sebas Velasco painted a quietly striking portrait of a local girl, capturing not just a face but a mood, a light, a setting.
Mariana Duarte Santos turned her attention to a historic local football team, immortalizing them through a composition drawn from vintage photographs, an image that merges nostalgia with civic pride. Poet Ernesto de Melo e Castro, a native son of Covilhã, was honored by Frederico Draw in one of his signature monochrome portraits, rendered with such sensitivity that the spraycan feels more like charcoal than paint. Douglas Pereira, of the Brazilian duo Bicicleta Sem Freio, contributed a vibrant mural featuring an astrolabe (an instrument for navigation invented by a 16th-century engineer from Covilhã) spinning local invention into cosmic symbolism.
And in the 2025 edition, two murals drew inspiration from the photorealistic paintings of last century’s local painter Eduardo Malta: one by Stelios Pupet, the other by Lidia Cao. Though stylistically distinct, both works extend Malta’s legacy into the city’s present-day surfaces, layering contemporary technique over historical homage.
Other murals turn their attention to the surrounding landscape: its rhythms, its symbols, its inhabitants, its quiet lessons. In 2015, Pantónio painted one of his signature kinetic compositions, inspired by the swallows that cross Covilhã’s skies in seasonal arcs. His birds sweep across the wall in graceful loops, a choreography of migration that mirrors the city’s own cycles of departure and return.
In 2023, Portuguese artist Tiago Hesp focused on the nearby mountain, also a big part of the city’s identity. His mural centers on a massive stone near a nearby village. Yet it’s not a symbol of immobility, but of ascent. The city’s architecture, shaped by endless climbs and descents, becomes a metaphor for effort, for generations of locals who scaled the slope in search of something better. Hesp’s mural honors that endurance: the balance, hard-won, between sweat and opportunity.
At its 12th edition this year, WOOL resists the glossier impulses of contemporary street art culture. The murals act less like attractions and more like annotations, marks in the margins of Covilhã’s long, unfinished book.
Perhaps that’s why the festival has endured. It hasn’t chased spectacle, but cultivated resonance.
Perhaps that’s why the festival has endured. It hasn’t chased spectacle, but cultivated resonance. It doesn’t commission murals as decoration, but as questions. What do we carry from our past? What do we choose to remember? What does it mean to stitch history back into public view?
WOOL’s greatest achievement may be this: not that it changed Covilhã, but that it revealed how the city never stopped speaking; it only needed someone to listen.
For more on the WOOL festival, check our Giulia’s stories on her blog
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