San Cristóbal de La Laguna
— — the colonial grid the Americas were drawn from.
Not only on a wall.
“La Laguna was laid out in 1500 on the high plain above Santa Cruz de Tenerife. It was the first unwalled colonial Spanish town, and its grid — wide straight streets running off a central square — became the template every city the Spanish later built in the New World was drawn from. The old quarter still holds its pastel facades, its wooden balconies, and the slow evening walk between the cathedral and the Iglesia de la Concepción. from the studio
San Cristóbal de La Laguna, 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.
San Cristóbal de La Laguna sits on the Aguere plain, roughly nine kilometres inland from Santa Cruz on the island of Tenerife, at an elevation of about 543 metres. Founded by the Adelantado Alonso Fernández de Lugo in 1496 and laid out from 1500, it served as the capital of the Canary Islands until 1723. UNESCO inscribed the historic centre as a World Heritage site in 1999, citing it as the first example of an unfortified colonial Spanish town and the direct prototype for the urban grids of Cartagena, Havana, Lima, and San Juan.
The old quarter is built around two long axes that meet at the Plaza del Adelantado. The Catedral de La Laguna and the Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, with its sixteenth-century mudéjar tower, anchor the main streets. Calle San Agustín and Calle Carrera hold rows of low, lime-washed townhouses with carved Canarian pine balconies and tiled inner courtyards open to the sky. Many of the original house plots survive intact, which is why UNESCO recognised the town as a living example of the gridded colonial model exported to the Americas.
La Laguna is a working university town, home to the Universidad de La Laguna, founded in 1792. The trade-wind cloud, the panza de burro, often sits over the plain in summer, so the air is cooler and damper than the coast. Most visitors come up by tram from Santa Cruz, a thirty-minute ride that climbs out of the port, and walk the old quarter in the late afternoon when the cathedral opens and the shaded streets fill. The Romería de San Benito Abad, the town's main pilgrimage, runs in July.