Vitória
— — a port city the mountains lean over.
Not only on a wall.
“Vitória is built on an island, with bridges out to the mainland and a working iron-ore port that runs day and night. The old centre keeps its colonial bones — pastel townhouses, a 16th-century palace, the cathedral on its rise — while Camburi beach curves north under the hills. From almost anywhere in the city you can see the Convento da Penha across the bay in Vila Velha, white on a granite outcrop. Capixabas eat moqueca in clay pots and call the city *Vitória* like a small surprise.
Vitória, 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.
Vitória is the capital of Espírito Santo, a coastal state on the south Atlantic side of Brazil between Rio de Janeiro and Bahia. The city sits on an island in a bay, linked to the mainland and to Vila Velha by a sequence of bridges, and serves the Tubarão iron-ore terminal — one of the largest bulk ports in the southern hemisphere. The Portuguese founded the settlement in 1551 on the feast of Our Lady of Victory, the source of the name. The municipality counts roughly 365,000 people, with a metropolitan area of close to two million across Vila Velha, Serra, and Cariacica.
The old centre still carries the bones of the colonial city. The Palácio Anchieta, built into the original 16th-century Jesuit college, holds the seat of state government on the rise above the bay. The Catedral Metropolitana looks down the same slope in neo-Gothic stone finished in 1970 on the site of the older church. Across the channel in Vila Velha, the Convento da Penha sits 154 metres up on a granite dome, founded in 1558 by the Franciscan Pedro Palácios and still the most photographed silhouette in the state.
The city has its own international airport at Goiabeiras, about ten kilometres north of the centre, with flights from São Paulo and Rio in roughly an hour. Camburi beach runs the north shore for about six kilometres of walkable sand. The Convento da Penha is open most days and is reached by foot up a paved ramp or by car on the back road; the climb takes twenty minutes at a slow pace. Capixaba moqueca, the local fish stew cooked in a black clay pot from Goiabeiras, is the dish to ask for at lunch.