Ibiza
— — a white town on a limestone hill above the sea.
Not only on a wall.
“Eivissa town climbs a fortified hill above the harbour, the walls finished in 1585 and still ringing the old quarter inside. Below, the salt flats at Ses Salines have been worked since the Phoenicians traded here in the seventh century BCE. Es Vedrà rises 400 metres straight out of the western Mediterranean. Most of the island is quieter than the postcards suggest — pine forests, calas, almond groves, white churches at the end of dirt roads. from the studio
Ibiza, 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.
Ibiza, in Catalan Eivissa, lies in the Balearic Islands off the eastern coast of Spain, about 80 kilometres from the mainland near Valencia. The island measures roughly 572 square kilometres, with a permanent population near 160,000 that swells sharply in summer. The capital, also called Eivissa, sits on the south coast around a deep natural harbour. UNESCO inscribed the island's biodiversity, the salt flats at Ses Salines, and the fortified upper town of Dalt Vila on the World Heritage List in 1999 under the title Ibiza, Biodiversity and Culture.
Dalt Vila, the upper town of Eivissa, holds one of the finest surviving Renaissance fortifications on the Mediterranean. The walls, designed by the Italian engineer Giovanni Battista Calvi and completed in 1585, ring the hill in seven bastions. The cathedral of Santa Maria d'Eivissa sits at the summit, a Gothic structure begun in the fourteenth century on the site of an earlier mosque and Phoenician sanctuary. The Phoenicians founded the original settlement around 654 BCE; the necropolis at Puig des Molins preserves more than 3,000 tombs from that period.
The Mediterranean light on Ibiza shifts hour by hour. Mornings on the eastern coast read clean and sharp over the pine cliffs at Cala Mastella and Cala Llonga. Afternoons turn the salt pans at Ses Salines pink as the sun crosses west. Es Vedrà, the 400-metre limestone islet off the south-west coast, catches the last hour of the day and turns gold. Even in August the sea holds a quiet light at dawn before the day's wind arrives.