@mspath, this article was the reason I went back to the Tile Museum and the Fronteira Palace during my recent stay in Lisbon. It is true that there is no shortage of tiles to enjoy in Lisbon, in churches, on buildings, just about everywhere you look, but those two places are both very interesting. The Tile Museum has a decent little café as well. It’s chapel is one of those gilded over the top places, and I thought it was interesting that on one side of the chapel the tiles depicted religious scenes, while the other side was filles with gardens, hunting, animals, all sorts of irreligious depictions. I couldn’t find anyone to ask about why that would have been the case.
The Fronteira Palace requires you to take a guided tour to go in the house (but not to walk around the gardens, which have some awesome tiles as well), and the docent was a British woman with some personal ties to the Marqués’ family. So the tour was definitely much better than your average canned tour and narrated in totally comprehensible English!
The Fronteira Palace is a bit off the beaten path, but we took an Uber there. On the way back, since we didn’t have any data and there was no wifi, and there were no cabs driving around, we just walked (10-15 minutes) over the pedestrian crossway and got ourselves onto the Estrada de Benfica, where there was a good selection of buses to take us back to the center.
The Caminho from Lisbon goes right by the Tile Museum, but it is not likely to be open for visiting when you walk by.