The Paper Was Already Waiting

Inside a Creative Retreat at Casa Fuzetta

Every travelling artist knows the suitcase problem. A watercolour retreat in Olhão this spring highlighted the difference when the art supplies come to you, and a working Portuguese fishing town does the rest.

The Suitcase Problem

Ask any painter what they dread about teaching abroad, and they will not say the flights, or the timetable, or even the weather. They will say the luggage.

Watercolour paper is heavy. The good kind, Arches, 300gsm, thick enough to drink a wash without buckling, is heavier still. It cannot be folded, does not forgive a careless baggage handler, and takes up the space where your clothes were supposed to go. Add pigments, brushes, boards and tape, and an art retreat travels like a small orchestra.

Most hosts quietly ration what they bring, which means that somewhere over the ocean, the retreat has already been made smaller.

At Casa Fuzetta, a painter and retreat host finds the arithmetic had changed. The Arches paper is already at the house. The Winsor & Newton paints came from a trade supplier and arrived at the door in Olhão. Nobody sacrificed a single dress for a block of paper.

“All an artist has to carry is their eyes.”

It sounds like a small thing. It is not. A watercolour setup is famously humble: two cups of water, a dump bucket, a bin, and more paper than you think you could possibly need, and when those simple things are simply there, something shifts. Suitcases arrive light. Heads arrive lighter. The retreat begins before the first brush is wet.

A Town That Doesn’t Pose

Then there is Olhão itself.

The eastern Algarve’s old fishing town does not perform for visitors. Its market is a working market; octopus and oranges, grandmothers with trolleys, fishermen with no interest in being photogenic who are photogenic anyway. Its streets are a study in texture: salt-softened plaster, peeling shutters, tiled doorways worn to a shine. The Japanese have a phrase for this kind of beauty, wabi-sabi, the loveliness of the imperfect and the weathered, and Olhão has it on every corner, unplanned and unbothered.

Unlike Lisbon, the town has never been absorbed into somebody else’s idea of it. At our first creative retreat, The Art of Life, as one guest, Katie, put it, walking back from the market:

“There are tourists here, but it isn’t touristy.”

For a creative retreat, that distinction is everything. Artists do not want a backdrop. They want a subject.

The Art of Life led by Lizzie Larock will be back again in 2027, 1-6 April and 14-20 September.

Sketchbooks in the Streets

The scale of the town matters too. Olhão is small enough to hold in your head after a single morning, which means guests can take a sketchbook and wander off alone, unhurried and unguided, and always find their way back for lunch.

No labyrinth, no guide required, no one waiting anxiously at the door. For a host, that freedom is a quiet gift; the town does half the teaching.

Urban sketching, the contemporary, come-as-you-are cousin of what earlier generations named painting en plein air. Urban sketching says: bring a pen, sit on a step, catch what is in front of you. And Olhão obliges. A photo walk to the market becomes a morning of compositions. An afternoon of tile painting back at the house folds the town’s azulejo tradition into the guests’ own hands. Every session ends the same way with people comparing the corners they had each discovered, as if the town had been dealt out between them like cards.

The Comfortable Kind of Raw

None of which means roughing it.

Because here is Olhão’s quiet trick: the crumbling walls and the working market sit alongside very good restaurants, wonderful wine, and small boutiques worth losing an hour to. You can spend the morning drawing a doorway that has not been painted since the seventies and the evening eating remarkably well two streets away. Texture by day, tablecloths by night.

For hosts, the possibility of that pairing at Casa Fuzetta solves the oldest problem in retreat planning: how to promise guests authenticity without asking them to give up comfort. Olhão never asks them to choose. And if it ever did, the tried-and-tested network of private chefs, masseurs and yoga teachers at Casa Fuzetta keeps bellies full, muscles relaxed, and minds soothed.

What the House Gives a Host

And at the centre of it all sits the house; light-filled, generous, made for exactly this.

Casa Fuzetta gives a creative retreat what it actually needs: long tables where work can be spread out and talked over, a rooftop where the light does its best work at either end of the day, and corners enough for people to be alone together. The practical is quietly handled by an experienced house team who have supported more than 225 retreats.

Hosts bring the vision. The house carries the logistics.

Strip away the freight and the friction, place artists somewhere honestly beautiful, and the work takes care of itself.

A Patchwork of Hidden Corners

Olhão. Artisans in studios, Artists’ galleries, tiled façades, hidden courtyards, streets most guidebooks haven’t found. The best creative retreats are not really about teaching people to paint. They are about teaching people to notice.

And Olhão, more than anywhere, rewards noticing.

Some places must be dressed for the camera. Olhão just has to be seen. Come with an empty suitcase and open eyes; at Casa Fuzetta, paints and paper will be ready and waiting.