La Ceiba
— — a port town the rainforest leans into.
Not only on a wall.
“La Ceiba sits on the north Caribbean coast of Honduras, with Pico Bonito rising green and almost vertical just behind the town. It grew up around the banana wharves at the end of the nineteenth century and still works as a port, sending boats out to the Bay Islands and the Cayos Cochinos. Mornings, the rainforest on the mountain holds cloud until the sun cuts it; afternoons, the trade wind comes in off the sea. The third week of May the city gives itself over to the Carnaval, with parades down Avenida San Isidro. from the studio
La Ceiba, 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.
La Ceiba is the capital of the Atlántida Department on the north Caribbean coast of Honduras, the country's third-largest city with a population of roughly 220,000. It sits between the Caribbean and the steep wall of the Nombre de Dios range, with Pico Bonito rising to 2,436 metres directly behind the town. The Standard Fruit Company built the port in the 1890s around banana exports, and the wharf still operates ferries to Roatán and Útila in the Bay Islands and small boats to the Cayos Cochinos archipelago offshore.
The town sits at sea level, but the air it lives under is set by the mountain behind it. Pico Bonito National Park covers more than a thousand square kilometres of cloud forest and lowland rainforest, with the peak only fifteen kilometres inland from the coast. The combination of warm Caribbean water and a near-vertical wall of green generates almost daily afternoon cloud build-up; annual rainfall in the lowland zone is around 3,000 millimetres, and the upper forest is wetter still. The Cangrejal River runs out of the park to the eastern edge of the city.
La Ceiba's calendar turns on the Gran Carnaval de la Amistad, held in the third week of May to honour the city's patron, San Isidro Labrador. The main parade fills Avenida San Isidro on the Saturday with floats, brass bands, and dancers, and draws hundreds of thousands of visitors from across Honduras and the Bay Islands. The dry-ish season runs roughly February through May, which is the standard window for the offshore trips to Cayos Cochinos and the climbs into Pico Bonito; the wetter back half of the year brings reliably bigger surf to the coast.