Arcos de la Frontera cliff-top town
— a town that stops where the rock stops.
Not only on a wall.
Arcos de la Frontera cliff-top town, 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.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“One of the white towns of Cádiz, set on a sandstone ridge with the Guadalete river running below on three sides. The old quarter holds itself together with cobbles, whitewash, and a Gothic-Mudéjar basilica that took four centuries to finish. The Plaza del Cabildo ends at a low wall, and the wall ends at air. This is the northern gate of the Ruta de los Pueblos Blancos, the route the kings of Castile took when they reconquered the sierra in the 13th century.
The place, in three passes.
Arcos de la Frontera sits on a sandstone ridge above the Guadalete river in the province of Cádiz, about 33 kilometres east of Jerez and roughly 60 kilometres from the Atlantic. The old town runs along the spine of the cliff at around 185 metres elevation. The Castilian crown took it from the Nasrid kingdom of Granada in 1255 under Alfonso X, and the Frontera in its name records the centuries it spent on the contested edge between Christian and Muslim Spain. It is the northern threshold of the Ruta de los Pueblos Blancos, the white-town route through the Sierra de Grazalema.
The old quarter is built out of and onto the sandstone of the ridge itself; in places the lower courses of houses are simply the cliff face whitewashed. The Basílica Menor de Santa María de la Asunción, begun in the 15th century on the site of a Moorish mosque, mixes late Gothic with Mudéjar and Plateresque additions and was not finished until the 18th century. Across the Plaza del Cabildo, the Castillo de los Duques sits on Almohad foundations from the 11th century. The whitewash is reapplied every spring, a town tradition that pre-dates any tourism.
Arcos faces roughly west across the Guadalete plain, which means the long Andalusian summer sun hits the whitewashed houses directly for the last hour of the day and the ridge turns ochre and pink before it goes blue. The Mirador de la Peña Nueva at the end of the old town gives the cleanest view, looking out toward Bornos reservoir and the Sierra de Grazalema beyond. Late spring and early autumn give the cleanest air; midsummer afternoons sit around 35°C and the streets empty until the sun is off the stone.
