Esmeraldas
— — the green coast where the marimba carries.
Not only on a wall.
“The green province. Mangroves along the Cayapas and Santiago rivers, black-sand beaches running north toward the Colombian border, and a culture rooted in the Afro-Ecuadorian communities that have held this coast for four centuries. The marimba is named patrimony here. The cacao grows wild. The Pacific does most of the talking.
Esmeraldas, 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.
Esmeraldas sits at the mouth of the Esmeraldas River on Ecuador's northwest Pacific coast, capital of the province of the same name. The city was founded in its modern form in 1847 and the province covers roughly 16,000 square kilometres of coastal plain, mangrove estuary, and Chocó rainforest. Afro-Ecuadorian descendants of shipwrecked and self-emancipated Africans have shaped the region's culture since the sixteenth century, and the marimba tradition was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2015.
Three rivers — the Esmeraldas, the Cayapas, and the Santiago — drain the western Andes into the Pacific through one of South America's largest mangrove systems. The Cayapas-Mataje Ecological Reserve protects roughly 51,300 hectares of estuary and includes some of the tallest mangroves on the continent, with red mangrove trees reaching above 60 metres. The coastline runs from Mompiche north to San Lorenzo near the Colombian border, with black-sand beaches at Las Palmas and Atacames.
The marimba esmeraldeña season runs through the summer months, with festivals concentrated in August and a provincial heritage week observed each November. The instrument is built from chonta palm and tuned across twenty-four bars; the music is paired with the cununo drum, the bombo, and the guasá rattle. The Festival Internacional de Música y Danza de Marimba in Esmeraldas city has gathered communities from across the Pacific coast since the early 2000s, and it carries the music to a new generation each year.