Cuenca
— — the city of four rivers and blue domes.
Not only on a wall.
“Ecuador's third-largest city, high in the southern Andes at two thousand five hundred metres. The Spanish founded it in 1557 on the ruins of an Inca city, which itself sat on a Cañari capital. Four rivers cross the valley — the Tomebamba, the Yanuncay, the Tarqui, the Machángara. The historic centre, with its blue-domed cathedral, has held a UNESCO World Heritage listing since 1999.
Cuenca, 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.
Capital of Azuay Province in the southern Ecuadorian Andes, at an elevation of 2,560 metres. Population is roughly six hundred thousand in the canton. The city occupies a high valley crossed by four rivers — the Tomebamba, Yanuncay, Tarqui, and Machángara — that converge to feed the Paute basin. The Spanish founded Santa Ana de los Cuatro Ríos de Cuenca in 1557 over the Inca city of Tomebamba, which itself was built on the Cañari capital of Guapondelig. The historic centre, with around four square kilometres of colonial street grid, was inscribed by UNESCO in 1999.
The Catedral de la Inmaculada Concepción — the New Cathedral — rises over the Parque Calderón with three blue-tiled domes finished in Czech ceramic. Construction began in 1885 under the German architect Juan Bautista Stiehle and stretched on for nearly a century. The planned bell towers were never completed because the foundations could not bear their weight. Across the square stands El Sagrario, the Old Cathedral, begun in 1567 a decade after the city was founded and now restored as a museum of religious art and music. The two churches face each other across the same plaza.
The four rivers of Cuenca rise in the Cajas páramo to the west and run east through the city. The largest, the Tomebamba, was the namesake river of the Inca city and still divides the historic centre from the newer El Ejido neighbourhood along a steep grassy embankment called the Barranco. Hat weavers from the surrounding villages bring their toquilla-straw work into the markets along the river — the so-called Panama hat is in fact Ecuadorian, and the finest grades are still woven within an hour's drive of Cuenca.