Hengam Island
— — the beach the sand turns silver at.
Not only on a wall.
“A small island off the southern shore of Qeshm in the Persian Gulf, reached by a short ferry from the port of Shahid Zakeri. The beach is famous for its silver sand, and the dolphins come into the shallows at dawn and dusk. Gazelles step out of the brush at the centre of the island. The British kept a coaling station here once. The ruins are still there, white in the heat.
Hengam 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.
Hengam Island lies about two kilometres south of Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz, in Iran's Hormozgan Province, with a land area of roughly thirty-seven square kilometres. The island has two small villages, Hengam-e Qadim and Hengam-e Now, populated mainly by Sunni Arab Iranian fishing families. It is reached by a short passenger ferry from the port of Shahid Zakeri on Qeshm, and the crossing takes about twenty minutes when the gulf is calm enough to run.
The shallows around Hengam are one of the few reliable places in the Persian Gulf to see Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins, which come close to the boats in the early morning and at dusk. The island's silver beach takes its colour from fine mica-bearing sand that glitters at low tide. Coral reefs lie offshore on the southern side, and small fishing dhows still work the channel between Hengam and Qeshm, hauling for hamoor grouper and sobaity sea bream into the afternoon.
Inland the island is quiet and almost empty: low salt scrub, a thin road, herds of Persian gazelle that the local communities have come to protect. Ruins of a British coaling station from the late nineteenth century still stand near the eastern shore, white stone bleached by the sun. There are no hotels of any size, only homestays in the two villages and a handful of seafood huts along the sand. Most visitors come for the day and return to Qeshm by evening.