Comodoro Rivadavia
— — the wind, and the oil under it.
Not only on a wall.
“A port city on the Gulf of San Jorge in Argentine Patagonia, founded in 1901 as the shipping point for the wool of Chubut. Oil was struck in 1907 by a crew drilling for fresh water. The town grew up around the wells. Cerro Chenque rises behind it, a flat-topped bluff of red sandstone. The wind comes off the steppe and does not stop.
Comodoro Rivadavia, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Comodoro Rivadavia is the largest city in Chubut Province, on the Gulf of San Jorge in central Argentine Patagonia, roughly 1,800 kilometres south of Buenos Aires. The 2022 national census recorded a population of around 207,000, making it the third-largest city in Patagonia after Neuquén and Bariloche. The city was founded in 1901 as a maritime outlet for wool from the inland sheep estancias of Chubut. Cerro Chenque, a flat-topped bluff of red Patagonian sandstone rising to about 212 metres, sits directly behind the downtown and is the city's defining landform.
Comodoro is one of the windiest inhabited places in the Western Hemisphere. Mean annual wind speed runs around 30 kilometres per hour, and gusts above 100 kilometres per hour are routine, particularly in spring. The wind is constant enough that local idiom refers to it simply as el viento, and the regional power grid draws meaningful generation from wind farms on the steppe above the city. The climate is cool oceanic: summer rarely passes 28 degrees Celsius, winter rarely drops below freezing, and rainfall is sparse and irregular throughout the year.
Oil was discovered on 13 December 1907 by a state drilling crew searching for groundwater on the southern edge of the town. The date is observed nationally as Día del Petróleo. The find led to the founding of YPF, the Argentine state oil company, in 1922, and Comodoro became the operational capital of the Argentine petroleum industry. The National Petroleum Museum sits at kilometre 3, on the site of the original well. Aeropuerto General Mosconi (CRD) connects the city to Buenos Aires and other Patagonian centres with multiple daily flights.