Chula Vista
— the view the city was named for, still there.
Not only on a wall.
“South of San Diego, north of the Mexican border. The city's name is Spanish for beautiful view — what the founders saw from the mesa, looking west across the bay to Point Loma. The bayfront is being rebuilt around the old salt works; the Olympic training fields run east toward Otay Mountain; the coast birds work the salt marsh at the Living Coast. The view holds.
Chula Vista, 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.
Chula Vista sits on the south curve of San Diego Bay in San Diego County, California, about 12 kilometers north of the international border at Tijuana. With a population near 280,000, it is the second-largest city in the county and the fifteenth-largest in the state. The land rises from the bayfront marshes east through the South Bay terraces toward Otay Mountain, with the Sweetwater and Otay Reservoirs framing the city's eastern edge. Incorporated in 1911, it took its name from the Spanish for beautiful view.
The Sweetwater Marsh and the south end of San Diego Bay define the city's western edge — tidal flats, old salt ponds, and the channels worked by the Living Coast Discovery Center on Gunpowder Point. The Chula Vista Bayfront redevelopment, approved in 2012 and breaking ground a decade later, is rebuilding the old industrial waterfront into Sweetwater Park, the Gaylord Pacific resort, and a public return route to the water the city was named after. The salt marsh remains the loudest part of the city at dawn.
The Chula Vista Elite Athlete Training Center on Wueste Road, built as one of three US Olympic training sites and reopened under city management in 2017, hosts archery, rugby, and field-event athletes through the calendar. The Living Coast Discovery Center on Gunpowder Point, reached by a free shuttle from E Street, keeps the bayfront's salt-marsh ecosystem in public view. The Bayshore Bikeway runs north along the bay toward downtown San Diego, a flat 15-kilometer ride to the Embarcadero past the salt ponds and the marina.