Lanzarote Timanfaya volcanic plain
— the ground still remembering the fire.
Not only on a wall.
Lanzarote Timanfaya volcanic plain, 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 plain of black and rust that came up out of the earth between 1730 and 1736, when nearly a quarter of the island reshaped itself. César Manrique drew the visitor route so the land could speak first. At the Islote de Hilario, a bucket of water poured into a vent still returns as a column of steam. The route runs by coach, slowly, with the windows down. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Timanfaya National Park covers about 51 square kilometres on the western side of Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands. The landscape was made by six years of eruptions between 1 September 1730 and 16 April 1736, recorded in the diary of Andrés Lorenzo Curbelo, the parish priest of Yaiza. The park was declared a Spanish national park in 1974 and sits within the wider Lanzarote Biosphere Reserve, named by UNESCO in 1993. The Montañas del Fuego rise to about 510 metres at the Timanfaya summit, surrounded by lapilli fields the islanders call malpaís.
The ground is basalt and scoria, dark and porous, broken into ridges the wind has not yet rounded. The 1730 flows left lava tubes that still extend kilometres under the surface; one of them surfaces at the Cueva de los Verdes on the island's north end. Olivine crystals show up green in the black where the rock has fractured. The surface looks fragile and is not — it is the youngest hard stone in the archipelago, less than three centuries old, and walking on most of it is not allowed.
Access is controlled. Almost the entire park is reached only by the Ruta de los Volcanes, a fourteen-kilometre coach loop that leaves from the Islote de Hilario visitor centre. The coach runs continuously through the day; there is no private-car access to the core route. At the centre, park staff demonstrate geothermal heat by pouring water into a ground vent and grilling over an open pit fed by rock measured near 400°C a few metres down. The restaurant on site, El Diablo, was designed by César Manrique in 1970.
