Floreana Island
— — the smallest of the inhabited islands, holding the strangest story.
Not only on a wall.
“One of the smaller inhabited islands in the Galapagos, far west of Ecuador. About a hundred and forty people live here, in a single village by the harbour. The beach at Cormorant Point glints green with olivine sand and a flamingo lagoon sits behind it. Sailors have left letters in a wooden barrel at Post Office Bay since 1793, and passing visitors still carry them home by hand.
Floreana Island, 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.
Floreana, also called Santa María, covers about 173 square kilometres in the southern Galapagos, roughly 100 kilometres south of Santa Cruz and 1,000 kilometres west of mainland Ecuador. Charles Darwin landed here on HMS Beagle in September 1835. The single settlement, Puerto Velasco Ibarra on the north coast, holds around 140 residents, the smallest population of the four inhabited islands. The high point is Cerro Pajas at 640 metres, a cinder cone wreathed most mornings in the cool garúa mist.
Cormorant Point fronts a beach whose sand grades green from olivine, a silicate mineral weathered out of the island's basalt. Behind it, a brackish lagoon hosts a small breeding population of greater flamingos. Offshore, Devil's Crown, a half-submerged volcanic cone, is one of the most-loved snorkel sites in the archipelago, with parrotfish, white-tipped reef sharks, sea turtles, and the Galapagos sea lion working the kelp around the rim.
In 1793 Captain James Colnett set a wooden barrel on the beach at Post Office Bay so whalers could leave outbound letters for crews homeward-bound. Visitors still drop and carry mail by hand, the oldest informal post route in the Pacific. In the 1930s the disappearance of a self-styled Austrian baroness and the deaths of two German settlers, Friedrich Ritter and Margret Wittmer's neighbours, gave the island its other name: the Galapagos Affair. The case has never been solved.