Inca road system
— — a thread of stone older than the empire that finished it.
Not only on a wall.
“The Qhapaq Ñan, the great road of the Inca, ran more than thirty thousand kilometres from southern Colombia to central Chile. The Chilean reach crossed the driest desert on earth and climbed into the high cordillera. Stretches of dry stone, way-stations called tambos, and switchbacks worn by llama trains still hold their shape in the Atacama. The road was finished by the Inca, but parts of it are older. from the studio
Inca road system, 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.
The Qhapaq Ñan, sometimes written Capac Ñan, was the spine of the Inca state — a road network that ran more than thirty thousand kilometres along the Andes, from what is now southern Colombia to the Maule River in central Chile. The Chilean arm crossed the Atacama Desert and the high cordillera, linking tambos a day's walk apart. UNESCO inscribed the road as a World Heritage site in 2014, recognising it as a shared trans-Andean property of six countries.
The road was built without wheels and without iron. Surveyors laid it to a width of roughly four to six metres on the flats and narrowed it on the climbs. Where the ground gave way, the Inca built dry-stone revetments and stairways cut directly into the bedrock. In the driest stretches of the Atacama the road is still legible from the air, a pale line drawn across the pampa, joining sites like Catarpe, near San Pedro de Atacama, to high-altitude waypoints on the way south.
In Chile the most accessible segments lie around San Pedro de Atacama, in the Antofagasta Region, where the road passes the ruins of the Catarpe tambo and continues toward the salt flats. Tours run year-round out of San Pedro; the cooler southern winter months, June through August, are easiest underfoot, though nights at altitude drop well below freezing. Visitors come for the long sightlines: the road runs straight for kilometres at a time across the pampa, indifferent to the volcanoes on the horizon.