Terceira Island
— — a town the colour of a painted box.
Not only on a wall.
“Terceira sits roughly halfway between Lisbon and Newfoundland, one of nine volcanic islands in the Azores. Angra do Heroísmo, on the south coast, was the first town in the Atlantic islands listed by UNESCO, its grid of pastel houses laid down in the sixteenth century around the harbour. Inland, the road climbs through pasture to Algar do Carvão, a volcanic chimney you walk down into. from the studio
Terceira Island, 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.
Terceira is one of the nine islands of the Azores, the Portuguese autonomous region in the mid-Atlantic, about fifteen hundred kilometres west of mainland Portugal. The island covers roughly four hundred square kilometres and is centred on the dormant Santa Bárbara stratovolcano, which rises to just over a thousand metres. Its main town, Angra do Heroísmo, on the south coast, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1983 as one of the earliest planned port towns in the Atlantic, founded as a stopover on the route between Europe and the New World.
Angra is built of black basalt trim against whitewashed walls, with shutters and window frames painted in primary colours, set on a regular grid that climbs the hill behind the harbour. Monte Brasil, a tuff cone connected to the town by a low isthmus, shelters the bay and carries the seventeenth-century walls of the Fortress of São João Baptista, one of the largest surviving Portuguese fortifications in the Atlantic. Inland, Algar do Carvão is a volcanic chimney you descend on a staircase, with a small lake at the bottom.
The island's calendar turns around the Sanjoaninas in late June, ten days of street parades, marching bands, and the touradas à corda, a Terceiran tradition in which a bull on a long rope runs the streets while crowds dodge from doorways. The Holy Ghost festivals, the Festas do Espírito Santo, run in pastel-painted chapels called impérios in nearly every parish through the summer. Bullfights on the rope happen on weekday afternoons from May into October.