Cienfuegos
— a French city that learned to speak Cuban.
Not only on a wall.
“Cuba's southern port, founded in 1819 by French settlers from Bordeaux and Louisiana. The grid of streets and neoclassical façades around José Martí Park are unusual in Cuba: quieter, more orderly, more Parisian than Spanish. At the end of the long Punta Gorda peninsula the Palacio de Valle keeps its Moorish-revival turrets pointed at the bay. The city calls itself La Perla del Sur, the Pearl of the South.
Cienfuegos, 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.
Cienfuegos sits on a deep natural bay on the southern coast of Cuba, about 250 kilometres southeast of Havana in the province of the same name. The city was founded in 1819 by French settlers from Bordeaux and Louisiana under Don Louis De Clouet, which gives the historic centre its uncharacteristically neoclassical street grid. The urban historic centre, organised around José Martí Park, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2005 as the first complete example of nineteenth-century Spanish-American urban planning.
The Tomás Terry Theatre on the north side of José Martí Park opened in 1890; the wooden ceiling was painted by Camilo Salaya and the seats are carved Cuban hardwood. A short walk south along the Prado, the Palacio de Valle, completed in 1917 in a Moorish-revival style with Gothic and Venetian elements, anchors the Punta Gorda peninsula. The neoclassical Cathedral of the Purísima Concepción closes the park's east side. The historic core preserves an unbroken nineteenth-century streetscape.
The Bay of Cienfuegos is one of the deepest natural harbours in the Caribbean, roughly 88 square kilometres of sheltered water reached through a narrow channel guarded since 1745 by the Castillo de Jagua. The bay opens south to the Caribbean Sea and is rimmed by mangroves and the long Punta Gorda peninsula, which thins to a strip of bayside mansions ending at the Palacio de Valle. Sunset over the water is the city's defining hour, watched from the Prado promenade.