The 2026 Sardine Contest launches its international creativity challenge under the theme “What’s your story?”
The 2026 edition of the Sardine Contest will get officially underway tomorrow, 6 March. This initiative organised by EGEAC – Lisboa Cultura once again invites artists, designers, illustrators and creatives of all ages and nationalities to reinterpret one of the city’s most iconic symbols: the sardine.
Using the original sardine outline, we challenge participants to create unique and surprising sardine designs, using whatever artistic techniques they see fit: drawing, painting, collage, photography, illustration, digital, three-dimensional or any other form of visual expression.
You have complete creative freedom, but this year’s theme (“What’s your story?”) encourages you to reflect, remember and imagine.
In this 16th edition of the contest, we invite you to embark on a creative journey through the stories that have shaped us, individually or collectively. Stories of achievements and discoveries, of revolutions and transformations, of culture, science and human rights. From the Battle of São Mamede (foundational to Portugal), to the April Revolution, from the invention of the printing press to the moon landing, from the Industrial Revolution to the Digital Age, from the Renaissance to Modernism, from the Olympic Games to the Football World Cup, from the Theory of Relativity to Artificial Intelligence, from the Magna Carta to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, from popular traditions to personal and family narratives – all stories have a place in this challenge.
Of course, the sardine contest also has its own story (see the EGEAC website), which began at the fish market in 2003 when, together with the Silva Designers studio, we took a real sardine, scanned it and transformed it into an iconic image of the city of Lisbon. This marked the beginning of a long and successful journey that led to the creation of the contest in 2011, encouraging creativity across the country and beyond. And so, the sardine has played multiple roles and been almost everything imaginable: a reporter, an artist, a migrant, an activist, a feminist, an environmentalist, a religious figure, a proud local, an athlete, a tourist…
More than revisiting the past, this year’s contest encourages reinvention: what stories do we want to tell about the present? What achievements are we building? What future do we imagine? Each sardine can be a manifesto, a memory, a celebration or an artistic provocation. Because each sardine tells a story. And in 2026, the question is simple: what’s yours?
The five winning designs, which will become part of the official Sardinhas 2026 collection, will each be awarded a prize of €1,500 (one thousand, five hundred euros).
Submit your design by 6pm on 7 April at Sardines Contest platform (link).
