Veraval
— — the harbour that wakes before the sun.
Not only on a wall.
“A working fishing port on the Saurashtra coast, a few kilometres west of the Somnath temple. The fleet is one of the largest in India — trawlers stacked gunwale to gunwale, drying nets along the jetty, ice trucks queued for the morning haul. The air carries salt and diesel and the long sound of gulls. Inland, the old town keeps its pace; on the seawall, the day starts in the dark.
Veraval, 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.
Veraval sits on the southern coast of the Kathiawar peninsula in Gujarat's Gir Somnath district, on the Arabian Sea. It is the headquarters of the Gir Somnath district and lies about six kilometres west of the Somnath temple at Prabhas Patan, one of the twelve Jyotirlinga shrines of Shiva. The town is reached by the Western Railway and by state highway from Junagadh. Its identity has been the sea since the medieval period, when it served as a port for pilgrims and for the Sultanate trade with the Persian Gulf.
The port is among the largest fishing harbours in India by landed catch, working a fleet of several thousand trawlers and dhows that move between Veraval and the deep grounds off the Saurashtra shelf. The principal landings are pomfret, ribbonfish, croaker, and shrimp, much of it processed on the strip of frozen-seafood plants north of the jetty for export to Southeast Asia and the Gulf. The monsoon ban from June into August empties the harbour; September brings it back to a full waking roar.
Mornings on the seawall carry the working smell of a fishing port — wet rope, ice, diesel, the iodine note of the catch on the concrete. Gulls and Brahminy kites circle the unloading. South of the jetty, the Somnath shore is quieter: the long Arabian Sea horizon, a temple bell carrying across the surf, the call to prayer from the older quarter behind the dock. Light comes off the water early; by midday the heat flattens the colour into a single soft white.