Trujillo
— — a desert city the spring forgot to leave.
Not only on a wall.
“Founded by Spaniards in 1534 on the dry Pacific coast of northern Peru, Trujillo sits inside a ring of sugar fields and pre-Columbian ruins. Locals call it the city of eternal spring. The yellow cathedral on the Plaza de Armas, the marinera danced in January, the adobe walls of Chan Chan ten minutes west. One of those places that holds a lot under a calm surface.
Trujillo, 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.
Trujillo is the capital of La Libertad and Peru's third-largest city, with about 970,000 residents in the metropolitan area. It sits on a coastal plain roughly 560 km north of Lima, between the Moche River and the Pacific. Diego de Almagro founded the colonial town in 1534 on the order of Francisco Pizarro, who named it after his hometown in Extremadura, Spain. The Andes rise to the east, the Atacama desert begins to the south, and the surrounding valleys grow sugarcane and asparagus on irrigated terraces.
About 5 km west of the city centre stand the adobe walls of Chan Chan, the largest pre-Columbian city in the Americas and the capital of the Chimú kingdom from roughly 900 to 1470 CE. UNESCO inscribed the 20-square-kilometre complex in 1986. South of the city, the Huacas del Sol y de la Luna are Moche pyramids from the first millennium CE, with friezes still visible inside the Huaca de la Luna. The colonial centre preserves yellow, blue, and ochre facades from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The Marinera Norteña, Peru's national dance, is honoured here every January with the Festival Nacional de la Marinera, held since 1960 and drawing competitors from across the country. In late September the National Spring Festival fills the streets with parades. Trujillo is also the hometown of the poet César Vallejo, born in 1892 in nearby Santiago de Chuco, and gives its name to the public university founded in 1824 by Simón Bolívar — the second-oldest in Peru.