Bardenas Reales badlands desert
— the wind doing the work of water.
Not only on a wall.
Bardenas Reales badlands desert, 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.
“A semi-desert of clay, chalk, and sandstone covering about 42,000 hectares between Tudela and the Aragón border. No permanent residents, almost no trees, and a shape carved by rain that arrives a few weeks a year and leaves canyons behind. The signature is Castildetierra, a lone chalk pinnacle on a clay base, often photographed at the first hour of light. UNESCO declared the whole area a Biosphere Reserve in 2000. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Bardenas Reales is a semi-arid natural region of roughly 42,000 hectares in southeastern Navarre, bounded by the Ebro depression to the west and the foothills of the Aragonese Pyrenees to the north. The landscape is divided into three sectors — El Plano, Bardena Blanca, and Bardena Negra — formed by erosion of soft Tertiary clays, sandstones, and gypsum over millions of years. It was declared a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO in 2000 and a Natural Park by the regional government in 1999.
The classic Bardenas shape is the cabezo — a flat-topped hill capped by a harder sandstone layer that protects the soft clay beneath. Castildetierra, the most photographed pinnacle in Bardena Blanca, stands about 50 metres tall and loses material every winter as runoff cuts new channels at its base. Geologists project that these spires have a finite life of decades, not centuries, because the cap rock is thin relative to the rate of erosion below.
The park is open and free, accessed mainly from Arguedas via the NA-8712 road and a network of pistas open to cars, bikes, and walkers. The visitor centre at the Information Centre near Arguedas opens daily and provides updated track conditions, which change after rain. Camping is not allowed inside the park, and water is essentially absent on the routes, so most visitors carry their own. The lower hours after sunrise and before sunset give the clay its strongest red.
