São Bento Station in Porto is a railway terminus where you go to catch a train and end up staring at walls instead. Its entrance hall is lined with roughly 20,000 azulejo tiles, painted by Jorge Colaço over eleven years, depicting scenes from Portuguese history, medieval battles, royal processions and the conquest of Ceuta. The building itself replaced a Benedictine monastery (São Bento dos Monásticos, hence the name), and when architect José Marques da Silva won the commission in 1896, he'd just returned from Paris with Beaux-Arts ambitions that show in every cornice.

What makes the tiles remarkable isn't just their scale but their narrative purpose. Colaço treated the vestibule like a national storybook, arranging scenes chronologically so that walking the hall is, in effect, reading Portugal's past from left to right.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours unpack Colaço's tile narratives scene by scene, connecting the station's imagery to Porto's layered relationship with trade, empire and religious history.