Margarita Island
— the warm green water at the end of a long pier.
Not only on a wall.
“Two old volcanic blocks joined by a long, low strip of mangrove and salt flats called La Restinga, drifting in the southern Caribbean about 40 kilometers off the Venezuelan mainland. The eastern half holds the colonial capital of La Asunción and the white-sand resort beaches of Porlamar and Pampatar. The western half is drier, harder, almost desert, with the Macanao peninsula rolling down to small fishing coves. The trade wind blows almost every afternoon. from the studio
Margarita 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.
Margarita Island, in Spanish Isla de Margarita, is the largest island in the Venezuelan state of Nueva Esparta, lying in the southern Caribbean about 40 kilometers north of the country's northeastern coast. The island covers roughly 1,070 square kilometers and is shaped like two distinct landmasses joined by a narrow isthmus of mangrove lagoon called La Restinga. The eastern half holds the colonial capital La Asunción along with Porlamar and Pampatar, while the drier western half forms the Macanao peninsula. Total population is about 420,000. Spanish navigators reached the island in 1498 during Columbus's third voyage.
The Caribbean here is warm year-round, averaging around 27°C, and the island sits south of the main hurricane belt so the water stays calm even in late summer. La Restinga National Park, established in 1974, protects a roughly 100-square-kilometer system of mangrove channels and salt lagoons between the two halves of the island. Local boatmen pole flat-bottomed peñeros through the channels at dawn, when scarlet ibises lift off the mangroves. Playa El Agua on the northeastern coast carries a four-kilometer arc of pale sand.
The Castillo de Santa Rosa, perched above La Asunción, was completed by Spanish colonial authorities in 1683 to defend the pearl trade against Dutch and English privateers. The island had been one of the Spanish Crown's earliest pearl fisheries; the wealth of those banks gave Nueva Esparta its name, the New Sparta of the Republic, later applied for the independence-era heroism of the islanders against royalist forces. The fortress's coral-stone walls still command the valley, and the cathedral of La Asunción, begun in 1571, is among the oldest in Venezuela.