Blumenau
— a German village translated into a Brazilian valley.
Not only on a wall.
“A city of about 360,000 in the state of Santa Catarina, founded in 1850 by the German pharmacist Hermann Blumenau and his first seventeen colonists from Lower Saxony. The half-timbered facades along the Rua XV de Novembro and the river bend below them keep the colony's first century visible. Each October the city hosts the largest Oktoberfest in the Americas. — from the studio
Blumenau, 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.
Blumenau sits in the Vale do Itajaí of Santa Catarina, about 150 kilometres north of Florianópolis and 50 kilometres inland from the Atlantic coast at Itajaí. The city was founded on 2 September 1850 by Dr Hermann Bruno Otto Blumenau, a pharmacist from Hasselfelde in what is now Saxony-Anhalt, with seventeen German colonists. The municipal population today runs around 360,000, and German remains an inherited household language in surrounding rural districts such as Pomerode.
The Oktoberfest of Blumenau, first held in 1984 to lift the city after that year's floods, has become the largest German festival in the Americas and the second-largest in the world after Munich's. It runs for about seventeen days each October at the Vila Germânica park and draws roughly 600,000 visitors. Beyond Oktoberfest the calendar holds the smaller Festitália in June, marking the valley's Italian colonial heritage, and the riverside Sommerfest in February.
The half-timbered Fachwerk facades along the Rua XV de Novembro are mostly twentieth-century revivals rather than original 1850s structures; the city deliberately rebuilt in the German vernacular after the wars to keep its identity legible. Standouts include the 1921 Castelinho de Moellmann and the Mausoléu Dr Blumenau, a 1974 marker of the founder's grave. The Itajaí-Açu river runs through the centre and floods on roughly a decade cycle, most catastrophically in 1983, 1984, 2008, and 2023.