Tangier
— — a white city looking across the strait at Spain.
Not only on a wall.
“The northernmost city of Morocco, set on a bay where the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea meet across the Strait of Gibraltar. From the kasbah above the medina you can see the Spanish coast 14 kilometres away on a clear afternoon. Phoenician traders founded a settlement here nearly three thousand years ago. Matisse painted from the Hôtel Villa de France. Paul Bowles stayed for fifty years. The light coming off the strait is unusually white, the way it is in port cities that face two seas at once, and the old town still climbs the hill above the harbour in tight whitewashed lanes. from the studio
Tangier, 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.
Tangier is a port city of around 1.2 million people at the northern tip of Morocco, on a bay where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Mediterranean across the Strait of Gibraltar. The Spanish coast lies about 14 kilometres away across the strait, visible on most clear days from the kasbah heights. Phoenician traders established a settlement on the site in the first millennium BCE; the city later passed through Roman, Arab, Portuguese, English, and Spanish hands before becoming an international zone from 1923 to 1956. It joined independent Morocco in 1956 and remains the country's main northern gateway to Europe.
Henri Matisse spent the winters of 1912 and 1913 at the Hôtel Villa de France, painting the view from window 35 across to the Anglican church of Saint Andrew and the bay beyond. The light off the strait is unusually white, with the long afternoon hours that drew painters and writers — Delacroix in 1832, Matisse twice, and later the long line of Beat-generation writers who stayed at the Hôtel El Muniria. Paul Bowles, the American composer and novelist, settled in Tangier in 1947 and lived there until his death in 1999.
The medina climbs the hillside above the port in tight whitewashed lanes, capped by the kasbah — the old citadel — and the 17th-century Dar el Makhzen, the former sultan's palace, now a museum of Moroccan arts. Below the kasbah, the Grand Socco and Petit Socco squares mark the medina's twin hearts. The old American Legation, established in 1821, was the first piece of real estate ever acquired abroad by the United States government and remains an active museum. The Cape Spartel lighthouse, eight kilometres west, has guided ships into the Strait of Gibraltar since 1864.