Cartagena
— — the walled city the sea keeps warm.
Not only on a wall.
“Spain built the wall in the seventeenth century to keep the English out. Inside it, balconies overhang narrow streets in coral and ochre and lime, and the bougainvillea grows over everything. Getsemaní, just outside the main gate, holds the music and the small plazas where the city still eats outdoors after dark. Out in the harbour, San Felipe sits on its hill, the largest fortress Spain ever built in the Americas. from the studio
Cartagena, 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.
Cartagena de Indias sits on the Caribbean coast of Colombia in the department of Bolívar, on a bay sheltered from the open sea by a chain of low barrier islands. The city was founded in 1533 by Pedro de Heredia and grew through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the Spanish empire's main treasure port on the South American mainland. The walled old town and its fortress system were inscribed by UNESCO in 1984. The metropolitan population is about 1.1 million.
The murallas around the old town run roughly eleven kilometres in their complete circuit, built in coral stone between 1586 and the late eighteenth century, after Sir Francis Drake sacked the city in 1586. The Castillo de San Felipe de Barajas rises on the San Lázaro hill east of the centre and is the largest Spanish-built fortress in the Americas, begun in 1657 and expanded after the failed British siege of 1741. Inside the walls, the streets follow the original colonial grid almost unchanged.
Cartagena holds a tropical climate with daytime highs near 31°C through most of the year, softened by a steady Caribbean trade wind off the bay. The drier season runs from December through April; the green, wetter months from August through November. Gabriel García Márquez kept a house in the old town for decades and set much of Love in the Time of Cholera in its streets and porticos. The Rosario Islands, a small archipelago about an hour south by boat, mark the edge of a national marine park.