Mar del Plata
— — a sea city the country goes to in summer.
Not only on a wall.
“The largest beach city in Argentina, about 400 kilometres south of Buenos Aires on the open Atlantic. Sea lions haul out at the old fishing port. The Rambla curves along Playa Bristol. Mar del Plata is loudest in January and February, when half the country seems to be on its sand, and quietest in winter when the wind comes in cold and the city remembers itself.
Mar del Plata, 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.
Mar del Plata sits on Argentina's Atlantic coast in southeastern Buenos Aires Province, about 400 kilometres south of the federal capital. Founded in 1874 by Patricio Peralta Ramos, the city grew through the late nineteenth century as the summer destination of the Buenos Aires elite, then as a mass-tourism resort through the twentieth. The resident population is around 650,000, and during the high summer months it climbs well above a million. The headland at Punta Mogotes marks the southern end of the principal beaches; the port and Banquina de Pescadores sit on the south side.
The Atlantic at Mar del Plata is cold for a beach city this far north. The Falkland Current runs north along this coast and holds summer water temperatures in the high teens Celsius. The break at Playa Grande and Playa Varese gives the city its small but real surf culture. Offshore, the South Atlantic shelf is one of the world's most productive fisheries; the artisanal fleet of yellow wooden boats at the Banquina de Pescadores still lands hake and anchovy daily.
Mar del Plata has two faces. From mid-December through February it is the Argentine summer capital; the Rambla is dense, the theatres on Avenida Independencia run nightly, and the casino on Playa Bristol, opened in 1939 in the rationalist building by Alejandro Bustillo, lights up after dark. From May through September the temperature falls, the wind off the ocean sharpens, and the city empties into the quiet version of itself, with the lobos marinos still barking from the rocks at the old port.