La Gomera Garajonay laurel forest
— a forest the trade winds keep wet.
Not only on a wall.
La Gomera Garajonay laurel forest, 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.
“The high spine of La Gomera, where the trade winds catch on the ridge and leave the laurel canopy dripping for most of the year. Moss on every trunk. Tree heath and laurels older than the cathedrals on the mainland. The light comes through grey, sometimes green, and the trail through El Cedro stays cool when the coast below is hot.
The place, in three passes.
Garajonay National Park covers about 40 square kilometres across the central highlands of La Gomera in the western Canary Islands. The high point is Alto de Garajonay at 1,487 metres. The park was declared in 1981 and inscribed by UNESCO in 1986 for its laurisilva, a subtropical evergreen forest that survives here as a relict of woodlands once spread across the Mediterranean basin. Access is from San Sebastián de La Gomera by ferry from Tenerife, with the main visitor centre at Juego de Bolas above the village of Agulo.
The mar de nubes — the sea of clouds — sits against the island's northern flank for most of the year, pushed in by the northeasterly trade winds. The laurel canopy strips water directly from that mist, so rainfall figures understate how wet the upper forest actually stays. Step a hundred metres in from the ridge and the temperature drops several degrees off the coast below. The air smells of laurel leaf, wet moss, and the bay tree (Laurus novocanariensis) that gives the forest its name.
The El Cedro trail, the most-walked route through the park, still empties by mid-afternoon. Beyond the first kilometre the only sound is water dripping off leaves and the call of the Bolle's laurel pigeon (Columba bollii), endemic to these islands along with the white-tailed laurel pigeon. La Gomera itself was, until the 1950s, mostly cut off from the other Canaries; whistled Silbo Gomero, recognised by UNESCO in 2009, was the way shepherds spoke across the ravines.
