Praia
— the plateau where the Atlantic meets the trade wind.
Not only on a wall.
“The capital of Cape Verde, on the south coast of Santiago Island, four hundred miles off the West African coast. The old town sits on a tabletop plateau above the harbour, reached by a single winding road. Coloured houses line the cliff edge. A short drive west, Cidade Velha, the first European settlement in the tropics, keeps its sixteenth-century fort above the original cobbled street.
Praia, 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.
Praia sits on the south coast of Santiago, the largest of the ten islands of Cape Verde, about 570 kilometres off the coast of Senegal in the central Atlantic. The municipality holds roughly 160,000 people, about a third of the country's total population. The historic core, called the Platô, occupies a flat-topped plateau rising about 35 metres above the harbour, ringed on three sides by cliffs. The wider city has grown across surrounding ridges since independence from Portugal in 1975.
Fifteen kilometres west along the coast, Cidade Velha, originally Ribeira Grande, was the first European-founded city in the tropics, established by the Portuguese in 1462. It served as the administrative capital of the Cape Verde archipelago and a major node of the Atlantic slave trade until repeated corsair raids, including by Francis Drake in 1585, pushed the colonial capital's move to Praia in 1770. The Fort of São Filipe, built in 1593 on the hill above the town, still stands. UNESCO inscribed the site in 2009.
Cape Verde sits in the path of the northeast trade winds, which blow steadily from October through June and keep Praia's temperatures even: daytime highs hover near 25°C in January and 29°C in September. Rain falls in a short window between August and October, but the islands are semi-arid and the city often goes weeks without it. The harmattan, a dry wind off the Sahara, sometimes carries reddish dust to the city in winter. The Atlantic off Praia averages 22 to 26°C through the year.