Guanajuato
— — a town painted to be seen from above.
Not only on a wall.
“A colonial silver-mining town in central Mexico's Bajío, painted in lemon yellow, magenta, and cobalt up the walls of a narrow ravine. Streets are too steep for most cars, so much of the through traffic runs underneath in the old river tunnels. The funicular climbs to the Pípila statue and the whole town opens out below — terracotta, sandstone, and washing on the line.
Guanajuato, 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.
Guanajuato is the capital of the state of the same name, set at roughly 2,000 metres in a narrow ravine of the Sierra de Guanajuato in central Mexico's Bajío region, about 365 km northwest of Mexico City. The town was founded in 1559 and grew on the silver veins of La Valenciana and La Cata, which by the late eighteenth century produced a large share of the world's silver. UNESCO inscribed the historic town and its adjacent mines on the World Heritage List in 1988.
The colours come from a long municipal practice of painting house fronts in saturated lime washes — magenta, lemon, ochre, indigo, sage. The terrain forced houses to climb the canyon walls, so what reads as a façade from one alley is a roofline from the alley above. Bougainvillea and morning glory thread between balconies. The light is high-altitude clean: at midday it bleaches the walls, in the late afternoon it warms them to the colour every postcard of Guanajuato carries home.
The civic calendar is built around the Festival Internacional Cervantino, held every October since 1972 and grown out of a tradition of staging short Cervantes plays in the city's plazas. For three weeks the city fills with theatre, dance, and concert programs from a featured guest country and Mexican state. The other anchor week is Semana Santa in spring, when processions descend the callejones from the Templo de San Diego. Estudiantinas walk the lanes most evenings of the year in nineteenth-century student dress, singing for visitors.