Garmisch-Partenkirchen
— — the morning the cowbells start.
Not only on a wall.
“Two old market towns the government married in 1935 for an Olympics, still half a quarrel, still half a pair. Painted houses with saints over the windows. The Zugspitze stands above everything, the highest point in Germany, and the meadow horses wear their bells whether anyone is listening. The Partnach River comes out of the gorge cold enough to make your teeth ache, and the bakery on the corner opens at six. from the studio
Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 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.
Garmisch-Partenkirchen sits in the Werdenfelser Land of Upper Bavaria, about 90 kilometres south of Munich, on the floor of a valley pinned between the Wetterstein and Ammergau ranges. The town was created in 1935 when the Nazi government forcibly merged the older market towns of Garmisch and Partenkirchen to host the 1936 Winter Olympic Games. The two halves still maintain distinct centres: Partenkirchen, the older Roman-road settlement on the Ludwigstrasse, and Garmisch, the broader resort half along the Loisach. Population is roughly 27,000.
The town is held under the Zugspitze, Germany's highest mountain at 2,962 metres, reached from Garmisch by a rack railway opened in 1930 and a cable car that climbs the north face. The Partnach Gorge, cut by glacial meltwater into the limestone south of Partenkirchen, runs about 700 metres long and 80 metres deep at its tightest. Many of the older houses carry Lüftlmalerei, the regional fresco tradition of religious scenes and figural ornament painted directly into wet plaster across the south-facing facades.
Winter holds the town from late November into April, with reliable snow on the Garmisch-Classic and Zugspitze ski areas above 2,000 metres. The annual Vierschanzentournee ski-jumping competition opens its New Year's Day round at the Große Olympiaschanze, drawing tens of thousands. Summer brings alpine pasture life, cattle drives in September when the herds come down from the high meadows, and long-day hiking on the Partnach loop and up the Höllental valley toward the Zugspitze summit.