Tabique construction is part of the Portuguese heritage and similar techniques are applied worldwide. Therefore, research works developed on this field may be an added value to future retrofitting processes. In this context, an experimental analysis of the thermal behaviour of three different solutions of tabique walls is presented. These solutions are an uncoated tabique wall, a tabique wall coated with schist tiles and a tabique wall coated with schist tiles and thermally retrofitted with the application of a current insulation material. The obtained experimental results may give a contribution to better understand the thermal behaviour of this type of traditional building elements and also to help future studies focused on achieving energy efficiency solutions to be applied in this context. It was concluded that a simple tabique wall has adequate thermal behaviour for current applications, that coating this building element with a schist tiles layer improves its thermal insulation ability and adding a current thermal insulation material is possible and thermally efficient. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.