Chiloé Island
— — wooden churches the rain has not finished with.
Not only on a wall.
“An archipelago off the coast of southern Chile, separated from the mainland by the Chacao Channel and a long-running fog. Sixteen of the wooden churches built by Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries are inscribed on the UNESCO list. The palafito houses at Castro stand on long stilts above the tide. The rain is steady most of the year, and the curanto cooks slowly in a pit lined with hot stones.
Chiloé Island, 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.
Chiloé is the largest island of the Chiloé Archipelago, off the southern coast of Chile in the Los Lagos Region, separated from the mainland by the Chacao Channel. The main island runs about 190 kilometres north to south and covers roughly 9,200 square kilometres, the second-largest in South America after Tierra del Fuego. Settlement by Spanish Jesuits and Franciscans from the late sixteenth century onward produced the wooden churches that now define the island. UNESCO inscribed sixteen of them as a single World Heritage Site in 2000.
The Pacific brings the weather; the inland sea, the Mar Interior between Chiloé and the mainland, carries the boats. Rain falls on more than two hundred days a year on the western coast, fewer on the eastern lee where most towns sit. Tides on the Castro fjord regularly run more than seven metres, which is why the palafito houses there stand on long posts above the mudflat. The Humboldt Current cools the western beaches enough that swimming is rare even at the height of January.
The Chacao Channel ferry from Pargua on the mainland runs daily and takes about thirty minutes; a fixed bridge is under construction but not yet open. Most visitors base in Castro, the island's largest town, and spend two or three days circling between the UNESCO churches at Achao, Dalcahue, Nercón, and Chonchi. The summer window runs December through February when southern light stretches past nine in the evening; July and August are wet and cold, but the curanto kitchens stay open through the winter.