Arica
— — the city the desert lets touch the sea.
Not only on a wall.
“Chile's northernmost city, eighteen kilometres south of the Peruvian border, on a thin coastal strip between the driest desert on earth and a cold, fish-rich sea. The Morro rises 139 metres straight out of the town, the headland that decided the 1880 battle and still holds the view back over the harbour. In the plaza, the small iron cathedral Gustave Eiffel built in 1876 still stands. The light here works in long lateral bars; the air carries salt and a little dust off the pampa. from the studio
Arica, 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.
Arica is the capital of the Arica y Parinacota Region and the northernmost city in Chile, lying about 18 kilometres south of the Peruvian border at the western edge of the Atacama Desert. The city occupies a narrow coastal plain backed by the Morro de Arica, a 139-metre cliff, and is home to roughly 222,000 people. The climate is one of the driest in the world — average annual rainfall is under 1 millimetre — but the cool Humboldt Current keeps year-round temperatures mild, earning Arica its tagline as the *ciudad de la eterna primavera*.
Two structures define the town centre. The Catedral de San Marcos, prefabricated in iron by the workshop of Gustave Eiffel in Paris and assembled in Arica in 1876, replaced an older church destroyed in the 1868 earthquake; it is one of the few all-metal churches anywhere. A short walk away, the old Aduana, the customs house, came from the same workshop in 1874 and now serves as a cultural centre. Above them the Morro de Arica still carries the cannons and memorials from the Battle of Arica on 7 June 1880.
Arica is the home of the Chinchorro culture, whose mummies — first prepared around 5,000 BCE — are the oldest deliberately mummified human remains known, predating the Egyptian practice by some 2,000 years. The Museo Arqueológico San Miguel de Azapa, in the green Azapa Valley 12 kilometres inland, holds the principal collection, and the Chinchorro sites were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2021. The valley itself is famous for the small, sweet *aceituna de Azapa* olive, grown here for more than four centuries.