About

Pedro Leitão is an urban artist and sculptor based in Covilhã. He came to it late and completely: he had painted, played music and written since childhood — he has played piano at Charles de Gaulle and sung and played guitar in the streets of Nazaré — began experimenting with urban art during the pandemic, and then left his post as president of the local junta de freguesia to work as an artist full time.

What draws him to street artists, he says, is their freedom. The sculpture is made from what other people have thrown away: plastic and debris collected and rebuilt into figures, some out of childhood memory and some simply from whatever the pile offers up. He names Vik Muniz — for the work made with the waste pickers of Rio — and Bordalo II, for what he calls an organised casualness.

He has now placed sixteen of them across municipalities in the interior, including Vale de Senhora da Póvoa in Penamacor, with more planned for Fundão and Sabugal. The pattern repeats each time: he arrives, a heap of local rubbish accumulates, the neighbours are sceptical, and then the heap turns into something.

His best-known painted work is Bem-Haja, on the granite facade of the former Casa de Saúde de São Tiago in Covilhã — the maternity where thousands of the town were born. A tribute to the healthcare workers who held the front line through the pandemic, it uses the building's blind window openings as frames for its figures, and was unveiled on World Health Day, 7 April 2022.