Chihuahua City
— a colonial grid the desert keeps clean.
Not only on a wall.
“Capital of the largest state in Mexico, set on a high plain between the Sierra Madre and the Chihuahuan Desert. Pink-stone cathedral on the main square, an 18th-century aqueduct walking out toward the hills, and a house on Calle Décima where Pancho Villa lived until 1923. The afternoon light here is dry and very long.
Chihuahua City, 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.
Capital of Chihuahua, the largest Mexican state by area. The city sits at about 1,440 metres on the high plains where the Sierra Madre Occidental meets the Chihuahuan Desert, roughly 375 kilometres south of the El Paso border. Founded in 1709 as San Francisco de Cuéllar and renamed Chihuahua in 1718, it grew on silver from the nearby Santa Eulalia mines. Today it is the seat of state government and a hub of the Mexican automotive and electronics industries, with a metropolitan population above 900,000.
The Metropolitan Cathedral on Plaza de Armas is the city's anchor. Construction began in 1725, paid for by a tax on the Santa Eulalia silver miners, and finished in 1826. Its pale rose sandstone façade is one of the northernmost examples of Mexican Baroque, with twin towers about 40 metres tall. A few blocks away the Acueducto de Chihuahua, built between 1751 and 1763 by the Jesuits, once carried water from the Chuviscar river into the colonial centre. Several arched sections still stand in Parque del Acueducto.
The city is the southern terminus of the Chihuahua al Pacífico railway, the Chepe, which climbs west through Copper Canyon to Los Mochis on the Pacific. The full run is about 656 kilometres and takes a long single day. In town, the Quinta Luz on Calle Décima is the house where Pancho Villa lived with his widow Luz Corral until his assassination in 1923; it is now the Museo Histórico de la Revolución. Spring and autumn are dry and mild; July and August bring brief afternoon storms.