Iguaçu Falls
— — the sound a forest makes when it falls.
Not only on a wall.
“Two hundred and seventy-five separate falls strung across a basalt curve nearly two miles wide, the Iguaçu River dropping into a gorge on the border of Paraná and Misiones. The Brazilian side gives the panorama — the full arc, the mist, the Devil's Throat seen across the canyon. The Argentine side puts you on top of the water. Coatis work the boardwalks. Great dusky swifts fly through the spray to their nests behind the falls. A place that belongs to no nation and both. from the studio
Iguaçu Falls, 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.
Iguaçu Falls sit on the Iguaçu River at the border of Paraná state in Brazil and Misiones province in Argentina, about fourteen miles upstream of the river's confluence with the Paraná. The system spans roughly 2.7 kilometres along a basalt escarpment and is made of 275 individual cataracts, the largest being the U-shaped Garganta do Diabo / Garganta del Diablo — the Devil's Throat — which alone drops about 80 metres. Iguaçu National Park on the Brazilian side was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986, two years after its Argentine counterpart. Together the two parks protect one of the largest remaining tracts of Atlantic Forest in the world.
Average flow over the falls is about 1,500 cubic metres per second, with floods that have pushed past 45,000. The river runs east-to-west across a Paraná Basin basalt sill laid down roughly 130 million years ago in the Cretaceous, and the cataracts retreat upstream at a measurable rate as the basalt edges spall. Inside the Devil's Throat the spray rises high enough that a column of mist is visible from Foz do Iguaçu town on clear afternoons. Great dusky swifts nest on the cliffs behind the cataracts and fly through the falling water at dusk to reach the rock.
The Brazilian park, headquartered at Foz do Iguaçu in Paraná, runs a paved walk of about 1.2 kilometres from the shuttle stop down to a catwalk just below the Devil's Throat — the panorama side. The Argentine park, reached from Puerto Iguazú in Misiones, runs the Upper and Lower Circuits and a separate train to the rim of the Throat — the immersive side. Most travellers do both, on different days, crossing at the Tancredo Neves Bridge. Hours and entry fees are set by ICMBio in Brazil and the Administración de Parques Nacionales in Argentina; both parks open daily.