Parícutin
— — a mountain that grew in a cornfield.
Not only on a wall.
“A cinder cone the colour of dry ash, rising from farmland that used to be flat. Parícutin began on a February afternoon in 1943, when a farmer named Dionisio Pulido watched a fissure open in his maize field. Within a year it had buried two villages. The bell tower of San Juan Parangaricutiro still stands above the cooled lava, half-swallowed, a small white shape in a black field. The eruption stopped in 1952 and the mountain has been quiet since.
Parícutin, 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.
Parícutin is a cinder-cone volcano in the Mexican state of Michoacán, about 320 km west of Mexico City. The cone rises roughly 424 metres above the surrounding plateau to a summit near 2,800 metres. It is one of the youngest volcanoes on the planet, and one of the few whose entire life cycle was witnessed and recorded from first day to last. The vent opened on 20 February 1943 in a cornfield belonging to Dionisio Pulido and his wife Paula. Activity ceased in March 1952, after nine years of eruption.
The lava that buried San Juan Parangaricutiro covered the village but left the upper church standing. The twin towers and apse of the Templo de San Juan Parangaricutiro now rise out of a frozen black sea of basaltic andesite, the nave-floor sealed under metres of rock. Locals call the surviving fragment San Juan Viejo. It has become a place of quiet pilgrimage; a stone altar inside the half-buried nave is still used for mass. The contrast — white limestone above, black lava below — is the image most visitors carry home.
The cone sits within the lands of the Purépecha community of Angahuan, about 35 km from Uruapan. From Angahuan visitors hire local guides, who lead a roughly 20-kilometre round trip on horseback or on foot across the lava field, past the buried church, and up the scoria slopes to the rim. The climb is steep and loose. Most parties leave before dawn to reach the summit by mid-morning and descend before the afternoon thunderheads build over the Sierra. The trip is run by the comuneros of Angahuan; no public road reaches the cone.