Maré with Maru Godàs · Portugal, 15–19 June 2027
Retreat
You want to take your art further, with more confidence, more technique, more understanding and more courage. Five days on Portugal's Atlantic coast with Maru Godàs is a place to do that.
Maru Godàs shares her colour, her materials and her experiments, from the first find to the finished piece. Over five days you move through three places that build on each other. The sea gives you raw material: what it leaves behind, and the chance you can't plan for. Óbidos is a town that has kept its stories for centuries, and you draw your own story. Caldas da Rainha is alive with market, people and craft, where making is part of everyday life.
You spend those five days sketching outdoors and in the towns around you, and you come home with more technique, the experience and the feeling of being an artist, and a sketchbook full of treasures you have created and collected.
Portugal's navigators sailed past the edges of the known map. You go exploring too: you push your own frontiers, discover new techniques, and come home with a logbook of what you found.
Fernando Pessoa is one of Portugal's greatest poets, and he published very little in his lifetime. When he died in Lisbon in 1935, he left a trunk holding more than 25,000 pages: poems, letters, fragments and plans he never published. A lot of it was written under names of people who never existed. He gave each one a birth date, a style and a point of view. Álvaro de Campos wrote odes to the sea. Alberto Caeiro wrote about the fields and the flocks. Bernardo Soares kept a diary of quiet doubts.
Today the trunk sits in Lisbon's National Library, and we are still discovering what is inside.
Now it's your turn. You start with a trunk of your own, still empty. The Atlantic leaves its traces on the shore, the walled village of Óbidos lends you its words and pages, and Caldas da Rainha shows you its makers' hands. At each place, you collect something and try on a new voice, the way Pessoa did, and it goes into your trunk.
Pay in full or in two instalments, with a €250 non-refundable deposit either way, and choose your option at checkout.
At the shore, the tide gives you everything to work with. Collect what you find and integrate it into your work to experiment: as colour, as painted texture, as structures for your drawings. Get inspired by the light on the water, the birds and the shapes the sea leaves behind. You make: a set of experiments from what you found.
Óbidos is one of Portugal's best-preserved medieval towns, with a 12th-century castle and walls you can walk for over a kilometre. Here you draw history as it shows in the stone, and learn to draw the marks of time rather than a clean outline. You make: studies of the walls and the town for your book.
Caldas da Rainha is loud and busy at the Praça da Fruta market, and green and calm in Parque D. Carlos I. You learn to draw, reduce a scene to its essentials and capture its atmosphere: the colours, the scents and the people moving through it. You make: market and park studies, including quick sketches of people.
Maru Godàs is an illustrator, designer and urban sketcher from Barcelona, and her work is all about colour, vibrance and material. She mixes unexpected materials, experiments constantly and keeps pushing her own boundaries, always looking for new techniques. She started as a graphic designer for National Geographic, Planeta and RBA, and her books include Park Güell Journey and Organic Beauty. In her new book, Pinta tu mundo: color en acción, she shares her approach to colour and materials. If you want to learn directly from her, join the retreat. Over the years she has taught her methods and techniques to students in workshops or retreats around the world.
Rio do Prado is an eco-design estate in the Óbidos lagoon area, one hour from Lisbon, set among large gardens. The estate runs on an eco-friendly ethic: reclaimed materials, grassed roofs and a low carbon footprint. Its suites sit in the landscape, several with a fireplace and floor-to-ceiling windows onto the gardens. There are two outdoor pools, a greenhouse, a library and a bookshop on site, and the village of Arelho is a short walk away. Each participant has a private suite. The programme leaves time to enjoy the place: to relax by the pool, read in the library or walk the gardens, to practise what you have learned, or to book a spa treatment or massage on site.
