Barranquilla
— — a city that dances four days a year and remembers the rest.
Not only on a wall.
“Barranquilla is the river-mouth city, the place where the Magdalena finally gives up to the Caribbean after fifteen hundred kilometres. Trade built it; carnival defined it. For four days before Lent the streets fill with cumbia drums, marimondas in long-nosed masks, and the slow loops of the Batalla de Flores along Vía 40. The rest of the year the air is wet and warm, the ceiba trees throw long shadows over El Prado's old mansions, and the river runs brown and steady to the bar. from the studio
Barranquilla, 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.
Barranquilla is the capital of Atlántico department and the largest city of Colombia's Caribbean coast, with a metropolitan population near 2.3 million. It sits on the west bank of the Río Magdalena about 15 kilometres upstream of the river's mouth at Bocas de Ceniza. The city was officially founded in 1813, late by Colombian standards, and rose through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the country's principal river-and-sea port. It is the hometown of Shakira and the writer of Cien Años de Soledad, Gabriel García Márquez, who began his journalism career here.
The Carnival of Barranquilla runs the four days before Ash Wednesday and is the second-largest carnival in the Americas after Rio. UNESCO inscribed it on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008. The Saturday Batalla de Flores, a long parade of floats and dance troupes along Vía 40, opens the festival; the Monday Gran Parada de Tradición keeps to older folk forms — cumbia, garabato, congo, mapalé. The closing on Tuesday evening is the symbolic burial of Joselito Carnaval, the figure who embodies the festival itself.
Barranquilla sits at 18 metres above sea level and runs hot year-round, with average daytime highs near 32°C and a fairly steady trade-wind off the Caribbean from December through April. The wet season runs roughly August to November and can bring intense afternoon storms; the city has worked for two decades to tame its arroyos, the streets that turn into flash rivers after heavy rain. The Gran Malecón, a 5-kilometre riverfront promenade along the Magdalena, opened in stages from 2018 and is the city's best late-afternoon walk.