Ciudad Juárez
— — a border city that keeps its own time.
Not only on a wall.
“A Chihuahuan border city of roughly 1.5 million, settled along the south bank of the Rio Grande where the river bends west and the desert opens out toward the Sierra Madre. The old Misión de Guadalupe still anchors the downtown plaza, four centuries on. Streets carry the smell of mesquite smoke and carne asada near dusk, and the bridges over the river thread thousands of crossings a day between two countries that share one valley. The light here is hard and clear, the colour of dry stone. from the studio
Ciudad Juárez, 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.
Ciudad Juárez sits in the far north of Chihuahua state at about 1,137 metres elevation, directly across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. The two cities together form one of the largest binational metropolitan areas in the world, with roughly 2.7 million people across the valley. Juárez itself was founded in 1659 as El Paso del Norte and renamed in 1888 for President Benito Juárez, who held the federal government here during the French intervention. The Franklin Mountains rise on the Texas side; the Sierra de Juárez frames the Mexican one.
The Misión de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, completed in 1668, still stands on the Plaza de Armas in the historic centre. Its adobe and stone walls predate the founding of El Paso on the north bank by more than two centuries. Beside it sits the later Catedral de Ciudad Juárez, completed in 1957, with twin bell towers in pale stone. The mission is one of the oldest continuously operating Catholic churches on the continent and the symbolic origin point of the city.
The Chihuahuan Desert reaches its northern edge here, and the air carries the particular dryness of high desert at sub-tropical latitude. Summer afternoons climb past 38°C; winter nights drop below freezing. Late summer monsoon rains arrive in short, vivid storms that wash creosote and mesquite smell across the valley. The Rio Grande runs low much of the year, narrow and dust-coloured, threading between the two cities under the bridges that connect Juárez to El Paso along the international line.