Santiago del Estero
— — Argentina's oldest city, still keeping time to the chacarera.
Not only on a wall.
“The oldest continuously inhabited Spanish-founded city in Argentina, set on the Río Dulce in the country's hot, flat north. Founded in 1553, twenty-seven years before Buenos Aires. The afternoons run quiet under the carob trees; evenings belong to the chacarera, the syncopated folk rhythm that came out of this province and never quite left. — from the studio
Santiago del Estero, 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.
Santiago del Estero sits at about 200 metres elevation on the western bank of the Río Dulce, in the dry Chaco lowlands of northern Argentina. The city was founded on 25 July 1553 by Francisco de Aguirre, making it the oldest continuously inhabited Spanish-founded settlement in present-day Argentina, twenty-seven years older than Buenos Aires. It is the capital of Santiago del Estero Province and anchors a metropolitan area of roughly four hundred thousand. The climate is hot semi-arid, with summer highs above forty degrees Celsius and a brief, intense rainy season running from December through March each year.
The province is the birthplace of the chacarera, the six-eight folk rhythm that defines Argentine music outside Buenos Aires. The genre took its modern shape here in the early twentieth century around figures like Andrés Chazarreta, whose 1911 Buenos Aires performance brought the rhythm to the rest of the country. Every July the city hosts the Marcha de los Bombos, when thousands of drummers move through the streets to mark the founding anniversary. The Quichua language, brought south with the Spanish conquest, still has a few thousand speakers in the surrounding countryside.
The Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady on Plaza Libertad is the city's centre, a nineteenth-century rebuild on the site of the original 1577 church. The Convent of Santo Domingo holds a relic claimed as a fragment of the True Cross, given by Philip II of Spain in 1585. The city's small but respected Wagner Archaeology Museum displays material from the pre-Columbian cultures of the region. Most visitors arrive from Tucumán, two hours west, or fly direct from Buenos Aires. The dry winter months from May through August are the comfortable season.