Bonaire
— the island the wind never lets go of.
Not only on a wall.
“A flat coral island in the lee of the trade winds, ringed by a reef the locals have protected since 1979. The west coast drops straight off the shore into clear water; the south end goes pink in the salt pans where the flamingos feed. Cars are dusty. The light is steady. Nobody on Bonaire seems to be in a hurry.
Bonaire, 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.
A flat coral island in the Leeward Antilles, about 80 kilometres north of the Venezuelan coast. Bonaire has been a special municipality of the Netherlands since 2010, when the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles brought it under direct Dutch administration. The land area is roughly 294 square kilometres, the population near 24,000, and the capital is Kralendijk on the western leeward shore. The northern third is the rugged Washington Slagbaai National Park; the southern third is salt pan and mangrove. The east coast takes the full trade wind; the west coast is calm.
The fringing reef around Bonaire has been protected since 1979 as Bonaire National Marine Park, one of the oldest marine reserves in the Caribbean. The park covers the waters from the high-tide line to the 60-metre depth contour around Bonaire and the small uninhabited Klein Bonaire. STINAPA, the local foundation that manages it, marks more than eighty named dive sites with yellow stones along the coastal road. Most are reached by walking in from shore. A nature fee, paid annually, is required of every diver and snorkeler.
The trade winds come in from the east almost without pause, which is why the southern salt pans evaporate so reliably and why kiteboarders gather at Atlantis Beach on the south coast. Salt has been worked here since the seventeenth century; Cargill operates the modern pans, and the pink colour comes from the same Dunaliella algae and brine shrimp the flamingos feed on. A breeding colony of several thousand Caribbean flamingos uses the Pekelmeer sanctuary, one of only four such sites in the world.