Zamboanga City
— — the Spanish fort, the pink sand, and a language no one else speaks.
Not only on a wall.
“The city the Spaniards called Asia's Latin town and still does. A Chavacano-speaking port on the southwest end of Mindanao, where Fort Pilar has held the seafront since 1635 and the vinta sails come into the bay in bands of orange and yellow. An hour offshore, Santa Cruz Island runs a beach the colour of pale salmon from crushed red organ-pipe coral. The light here is hot, the air smells of salt and grilled fish. From the studio.
Zamboanga 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.
Zamboanga City sits on the southwestern tip of the Zamboanga Peninsula on the island of Mindanao, facing the Sulu Sea and the Basilan Strait. It is a chartered highly-urbanised city with a population of roughly 977,000 (2020 census), making it the sixth-largest city in the Philippines and the regional centre of Region IX. The city's working language is Chavacano, a Spanish-based creole that emerged in the seventeenth century around the fort and the garrison, and the only Spanish-based creole in Asia still spoken as a first language by hundreds of thousands of people.
Fort Pilar, formally the Real Fuerza de Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Zaragoza, was built by the Spanish in 1635 to guard the strait against Moro raiders and Dutch ships. Its coral-stone walls still stand on the seafront downtown; the east wall now holds an open-air Marian shrine where worshippers light candles all day. The fort has been declared a National Cultural Treasure of the Philippines and houses a regional museum of the National Museum of the Philippines with collections on Subanen, Tausug, Yakan, and Sama-Bajau material culture.
About a thirty-minute pumpboat ride from the city seafront, Great Santa Cruz Island holds one of the few pink-sand beaches in the world. The colour comes from crushed fragments of red organ-pipe coral mixed into the white quartz sand, washed up over centuries from the reef offshore. National Geographic listed it among its best beaches. Visits run through the city tourism office on a permit basis; the boats leave from Paseo del Mar in the morning. The same waters carry the colourful vinta outrigger sails that have become the city's emblem.