Empuriabrava marina canals
— a town where the front door opens onto water.
Not only on a wall.
Empuriabrava marina canals, 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 planned marina town on the Costa Brava where most houses sit on their own canal. Roughly thirty kilometres of navigable waterways run through Empuriabrava, built out of the Empordà salt marshes from 1967 onward. Boats moor at the back garden. The Mediterranean is a short cruise away. In winter the canals go quiet and the herons take the docks.
The place, in three passes.
Empuriabrava sits inside the municipality of Castelló d'Empúries in the Alt Empordà comarca of Catalonia, on the northern shore of the Bay of Roses. Developers Joan Gaspart, Pere Esteva, and Fernando Tusquets broke ground in 1967, draining roughly 1,100 hectares of coastal marsh to lay out the canal grid. The waterways run about 30 kilometres in total length and are kept saltwater by sluices to the sea. Roughly 7,000 mooring slips serve resident and visiting boats. The town sits at the mouth of the Muga river.
The canals are saltwater, flushed twice daily by the Mediterranean tide through the marina entrance at the Bay of Roses. Most plots are arranged so that one façade fronts the street and the opposite façade fronts a private mooring. Sailing draft is limited to about four metres in the main channel and less in the smaller arms. The Aiguamolls de l'Empordà natural park borders the development to the south and west, holding flamingo, heron, and migrant raptor populations through autumn and early spring.
Empuriabrava lies about 50 kilometres north of Girona and 160 kilometres from Barcelona along the AP-7 motorway. There is no train station in the town; bus connections run from Figueres, 15 kilometres inland. The marina operates year-round; high season runs from June through early September, when the resident population of roughly 8,000 rises several times over. Sky-divers also use the small Empuriabrava aerodrome on the inland edge of town, in operation since 1985 and host to a long-running annual boogie.
