San José
— — the city the mountains keep watch over.
Not only on a wall.
“The capital sits in the Central Valley at about eleven hundred metres, ringed by the cordillera and four volcanoes that show themselves on clear mornings. Coffee built the city in the nineteenth century. The Teatro Nacional still anchors the centre, and the side streets of Barrio Amón hold the older houses, painted in the colours coffee money once paid for.
San José, 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.
San José sits in Costa Rica's Valle Central at roughly 1,170 metres above sea level, ringed by the Cordillera Central and the volcanoes Poás, Irazú, and Barva. Founded in 1738 and named for Saint Joseph, it became the capital in 1823 after the brief civil conflict known as the Battle of Ochomogo and grew through the nineteenth-century coffee boom that funded landmarks like the Teatro Nacional, completed in 1897. The metropolitan area is home to roughly two million people, close to half of Costa Rica's population, and Juan Santamaría International Airport lies about eighteen kilometres northwest in Alajuela.
At 1,170 metres the city sits above the heat of both coasts, with an average temperature near 22°C and almost no seasonal swing. The mountains catch the trade winds and split the year into two seasons rather than four — verano from December through April, invierno from May through November — and the afternoon rains of the wet season arrive nearly to the hour. The valley's altitude is also why the coffee grown on its slopes is dense and bright; the best of it is exported under regional names like Tarrazú and Tres Ríos.
The historic core radiates from the Plaza de la Cultura, where the Teatro Nacional and the Museo del Oro Precolombino sit beneath the same block. The Mercado Central, open since 1880, holds dozens of sodas serving casado and gallo pinto. Barrio Amón to the north preserves the cafetalero mansions and now houses small hotels; Barrio Escalante to the east holds the restaurant scene. Juan Santamaría International Airport in Alajuela is the gateway, and the city's bus network covers the central provinces. Most travellers pass through on the way to a coast or a cloud forest.