La Granja royal palace fountains
— water that only runs three days a year.
Not only on a wall.
La Granja royal palace fountains, 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 summer palace Philip V built in the hills above Segovia, with twenty-six baroque fountains fed by gravity from a reservoir higher up the mountain. Most days the basins are still. Three feast days a year the whole system runs in full — San Fernando, Santiago, San Luis — and the parterres turn into theatre. Clipped boxwood, lead figures gone dark, and a long view back toward the Guadarrama.
The place, in three passes.
The Royal Palace of La Granja de San Ildefonso sits in the foothills of the Sierra de Guadarrama, about eleven kilometres southeast of Segovia and 1,192 metres above sea level. Philip V — grandson of Louis XIV — commissioned it in 1721 as a homesick echo of Versailles, on the site of a Hieronymite monastery. The gardens were laid out by the French designer René Carlier and continued by Esteban Boutelou. Patrimonio Nacional has managed the site since the end of the monarchy and runs it as a public museum and grounds.
Twenty-six fountains feed entirely by gravity from El Mar, a reservoir higher up the slope of Peñalara, with no pumps anywhere in the system. The tallest jet, on the Fuente de la Fama, can throw water nearly forty metres into the air. Because the reservoir is finite, the full display runs only on the three royal feast days, when the fontaneros open the valves in sequence and the gardens fill with sound. On ordinary days a small subset runs briefly in the late afternoon.
The gardens and palace open most of the year through the Patrimonio Nacional gate near the village of San Ildefonso. The three full-fountain days are San Fernando on 30 May, Santiago on 25 July, and San Luis on 25 August; smaller partial displays run on weekends in late spring and summer. Segovia, with its Roman aqueduct, is a short drive west. The Guadarrama summits behind the palace stay snow-streaked into June, which is part of why the Bourbons came here to escape the Madrid heat.
