E-learning

In the village of Mouriscas, near Abrantes city, a craft tradition remains active in the factory Cerâmica do Tejo. It comes to traditional brick and tiles used especially for bread ovens. The particular resistance property and heat absorption, are from the geological nature of the clay with which these architectonical elements are manufactured. The clay is from clay quarry near Mouriscas, in the alluvial plain of Tagus river. Earlier was explored handmade, allowing to extract separately the different types of clay which are located in a single quarry: that process was very tiring and slow…today the extraction is mechanical.
In the different video, they show some aspects of the different stages of the operating chain: the caly quarry to extract the raw material, the machine to dough the extracted clay, the mold of traditional “tijolo burro” (solid brick) and “tijoleira” (tile), the traditional structure of the kiln (earliest existing about 40 kiln in the Mouriscas, now only that in the video) and the technique to prepare and place the crude bricks in the bottom of kiln.

Traditional bricks and tiles