Huacachina
— — a green eye in the dunes.
Not only on a wall.
“A small green lagoon ringed by palms and held inside the largest dunes in South America, five kilometres west of Ica in southern Peru. The village around the water has perhaps a hundred residents and a steady traffic of sandboarders and dune-buggy drivers who come for the late afternoon. The dunes change colour through the day. The lagoon, fed now mostly by pumped water, holds its green through the hottest hours. from the studio
Huacachina, 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.
Huacachina sits in a natural depression in the desert about five kilometres west of Ica, in the Ica Region of southern Peru. The oasis formed around a small lagoon ringed by huarango trees and palms, with sand dunes — some over a hundred metres high — closing it on every side. The settlement has a permanent population of roughly a hundred and appears on the back of the Peruvian 50-soles banknote. It lies about 300 kilometres south of Lima and 70 kilometres inland from the Pacific.
The lagoon was originally fed by underground aquifers that surfaced naturally in the depression. Heavy groundwater extraction across the Ica Valley for industrial agriculture reduced the natural inflow through the 1990s, and the lagoon shrank visibly. Since the early 2000s the village has supplemented it with pumped water from local wells to maintain the level. The colour comes from algae and the mineral content of the spring water — a slow green that holds even under direct sun at 406 metres above sea level.
The dunes around Huacachina are part of a long stretch of the Peruvian coastal desert and rise as high as 150 metres in places. The wind moves their faces daily, and tracks left by buggies in the afternoon are gone by the next morning. The temperature swings sharply — hot in the afternoon, cool soon after the sun drops behind the western dunes. Most visitors come for the late hour, when the sand turns through orange to rose to a long blue.