Huaynaputina
— — the mountain that erased itself.
Not only on a wall.
“A volcano with almost no cone left. What sits on the altiplano now is mostly a long scar and three small vents, set into pale ash that the wind keeps rearranging. In February of 1600 it produced the largest eruption in the recorded history of South America. The sound carried to Lima. The sulphur haze cooled summers in Europe and Asia for two years. Today the road in from Quinistaquillas is rough, and most afternoons there is no one at the rim but the wind.
Huaynaputina, 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.
Huaynaputina sits in the Western Cordillera of southern Peru, in the Moquegua Region, about 80 km east of the city of Arequipa. It stands roughly 4,850 metres above sea level, but the climb from the valley floor is only a few hundred metres, because the volcano is built into a much older volcanic plateau. There is no classical cone. The summit is a broken amphitheatre with three vents, opened by the 1600 eruption. The nearest villages — Quinistaquillas and Omate — sit in the deep Río Tambo gorge below.
On 19 February 1600 Huaynaputina began an eruption that lasted nearly three weeks and rated VEI 6, the largest volcanic event in South American recorded history. Roughly 11 cubic kilometres of tephra fell across the southern Andes, burying villages around Omate under several metres of ash. The sulphur aerosols cooled the Northern Hemisphere for two summers; tree-ring records and Russian and Chinese chronicles note the failed harvests and famines of 1601. Lima recorded the ashfall in its colonial archives. Recovery in the Tambo valley took the better part of a century.
The altiplano around Huaynaputina is high, dry, and treeless. Daytime temperatures in the dry season swing from near freezing at dawn to the mid-teens by midday, and the air at almost 5,000 metres is thin enough that visitors arriving from Arequipa (2,335 m) feel it within a few steps. Vicuña graze on the ichu grass below the rim. The wind moves the 1600 ash constantly, so the surface of the scar looks slightly different from one season to the next, like a page that has not yet been written on.