Isla de las Muñecas
— — a small island that watches back.
Not only on a wall.
“A small chinampa island in the canals of Xochimilco, reached by trajinera through narrow waterways south of Mexico City. For some fifty years Don Julián Santana Barrera hung weathered dolls from the trees here, in memory, he said, of a girl who drowned nearby. He died in 2001 and the dolls stayed. Visitors arrive by flat-bottomed boat, the colour from the canals reflecting up under the branches. from the studio
Isla de las Muñecas, 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.
Isla de las Muñecas — the Island of the Dolls — is a small chinampa in the canal system of Xochimilco, in the southern borough of Mexico City. The chinampas are the surviving remnants of the Aztec floating-garden agriculture that once filled the shallow lakes of the Valley of Mexico, and the wider Xochimilco wetland was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, jointly with the historic centre of Mexico City, in 1987. The island sits about an hour by trajinera from the main embarcaderos at Cuemanco and Nuevo Nativitas.
The island's story is held in the figure of Don Julián Santana Barrera, who lived alone on the chinampa from the 1950s until his death in 2001. He told visitors he had found the body of a girl who drowned in the canal, and began hanging dolls — pulled from the canal, gifted by neighbours, scavenged from rubbish — in the surrounding trees as a way of keeping her spirit company. By the time he died there were hundreds. The dolls have remained, weathered now by more than two decades of sun and rain.
Reaching the island takes a longer trajinera ride than the standard Xochimilco tour, usually three to four hours round-trip from the Cuemanco embarcadero, and is best arranged in advance. The flat-bottomed boats are poled through the narrower southern canals past working chinampas of lettuce, radish and flowers grown for the Mexico City markets. The island itself is privately held by Don Julián's family, who maintain a small admission and a modest collection of the older dolls in a covered shelter near the dock.