Santiago de los Caballeros
— — the white monument the morning sun finds first.
Not only on a wall.
“The second city of the Dominican Republic, set in the wide Cibao Valley between the Cordillera Septentrional and the Cordillera Central. The Yaque del Norte runs along its edge. On the hill above the centre, the Monument to the Heroes of the Restoration carries the city's long memory of independence. Tobacco country. Cigar country. The kind of place where music carries from one block to the next on a warm evening.
Santiago de los Caballeros, 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.
Santiago de los Caballeros sits in the Cibao Valley of the northern Dominican Republic, roughly 155 km north-west of Santo Domingo. The city holds about 700,000 residents and serves as the commercial heart of the country's tobacco and cigar industry. Founded in 1495 by Bartolomé Columbus and rebuilt after the 1562 earthquake at its present site on the south bank of the Yaque del Norte, it grew along the trade route between the Atlantic coast at Puerto Plata and the capital on the southern shore.
The Monument to the Heroes of the Restoration rises 67 metres from a hill at the eastern end of Calle del Sol, white marble over a concrete core. The architect Henry Gazón Bona completed the obelisk in 1944. It was originally raised by the dictator Rafael Trujillo to himself, then rededicated after 1961 to the fighters of the 1863-1865 Restoration War that returned Dominican sovereignty after the brief Spanish reannexation. From the top the whole Cibao Valley opens out toward the northern cordillera.
Santiago's carnival, held every Sunday in February and culminating on the last weekend before Lent, is among the oldest in the Americas. The signature figures are the lechones, masked devils in horned papier-mâché whose two regional styles, joyeros and pepineros, take their names from old neighbourhoods of the city. The masks are made by hand through the autumn and worn down the Avenida las Carreras in long, loud processions. UNESCO inscribed Dominican carnival on its representative list of intangible cultural heritage.