Bucaramanga
— — a city the canyon wind reaches before the news does.
Not only on a wall.
“The capital of Santander, set on a plateau about nine hundred and sixty metres above the Lebrija River where the eastern Andes drop into the Chicamocha canyon. Locals call it the city of parks; more than seventy of them break up the grid. The climate is mild and the light is even, the kind of clear high-elevation day that holds its colour.
Bucaramanga, 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.
Bucaramanga sits in northeastern Colombia, capital of Santander department, on a stepped plateau that drops westward toward the Lebrija River. The metropolitan area holds about one point one million people across Bucaramanga, Floridablanca, Girón, and Piedecuesta. The city was founded in December 1622 and grew slowly until the late nineteenth century, when coffee and tobacco trade brought a railway link to the Magdalena River. The Chicamocha canyon, one of the deepest in the Americas, opens about an hour south.
At roughly nine hundred and sixty metres the air stays in the low to mid twenties Celsius through most of the year, with afternoon thunder building over the cordillera in the wet months. The plateau is known for its parks: Parque Santander, Parque García Rovira, Parque San Pío. Paragliders launch from the cliff at Las Águilas above the Chicamocha, riding the canyon's reliable updraughts. The wind that carries them often reaches the city below as a cool evening breeze.
Palonegro International Airport sits on a mesa across the valley in Lebrija, a forty-minute taxi from the centre. The Metrolínea bus system links the four municipalities of the metropolitan area; most travellers use it to reach the cable car at Parque Nacional del Chicamocha, an hour south by road. Coffee from Santander is sold at the Mercado Central, and the regional dish is hormigas culonas, large toasted leafcutter ants eaten as a delicacy since pre-Columbian times.