Iloilo City
— — the light the strait keeps polishing.
Not only on a wall.
“A Visayan port city on the southeast coast of Panay, looking across the strait to Guimaras. Calle Real still wears its Spanish-era arcades, the Jaro Cathedral keeps its bell tower across the street, and Molo's white stone church holds the saints carved by Ilonggo hands. The dialect is Hiligaynon, soft on the consonants. In January the Dinagyang drums come down the river.
Iloilo City, 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.
Iloilo City is the regional centre of Western Visayas in the central Philippines, on the southeast coast of Panay Island, facing Guimaras across the narrow Iloilo Strait. It has a population of roughly 457,000 within a metropolitan area of about a million. Founded as a Spanish settlement in the 1560s and chartered as a city in 1937, Iloilo grew prosperous through the nineteenth-century sugar and textile trades, leaving behind the colonial mansions and churches of Jaro, Molo, and the Calle Real district along the Iloilo River.
The four Baroque churches of the Philippines were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1993, and one of them, Miag-ao Church, stands forty kilometres southwest of the city. Its yellow sandstone façade carries a relief of Saint Christopher beneath a coconut palm, carved by local masons between 1786 and 1797. Closer in, Molo Church in the city's old Chinese-Filipino district is built in coral stone and is locally called the feminist church for the row of women saints along its nave.
Dinagyang, held the fourth weekend of January, fills the city with tribal dance troupes performing in honour of the Santo Niño. The festival traces to 1968 and was named by the Ilonggo writer Pacifico Sudario from the Hiligaynon word for revelry. Performances spill from the Iloilo River esplanade into the city plazas, and the food stalls run on bowls of La Paz batchoy, the noodle soup invented in the La Paz district market sometime in the 1930s and now eaten across the islands.