Montserrat monastery on jagged peaks
— the rock that taught itself to stand up.
Not only on a wall.
Montserrat monastery on jagged peaks, 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 Montserrat massif rises out of the Llobregat valley in a hundred conglomerate fingers, pale grey, named one by one over centuries — Sant Jeroni at the top, the Cavall Bernat to the south, the Magdalenes ridge. The monastery itself is tucked onto a ledge halfway up the eastern face at about 720 m. From the valley floor the buildings read as a small straight line of windows against an entirely vertical wall of stone.
The place, in three passes.
The Montserrat massif rises from the Llobregat river valley in Catalonia about 48 km northwest of Barcelona. The mountain is conglomerate rock, pebbles and cobbles cemented in a sand matrix, eroded over millions of years into the rounded vertical pillars that give it its serrated profile and its Catalan name (montserrat means serrated mountain). The high point is Sant Jeroni at 1,236 m. The Benedictine monastery, founded in 1025, occupies a natural ledge on the eastern face at roughly 720 m elevation.
The conglomerate of Montserrat formed in the Eocene from alluvial fan deposits that washed down from older mountains to the north. The cobbles in the matrix are typically rounded quartzite and limestone, set in calcareous sandstone. Centuries of differential erosion have stripped the softer matrix from the harder pillars, leaving the bulbous fingers that climbers and pilgrims have named for hundreds of years. The most famous are Sant Jeroni, Cavall Bernat, the Miranda de Sant Jeroni, and the Aresta de l'Aliga.
The monastery terrace sits at 720 m, well above the haze that often pools in the Llobregat valley below. On clear days the view reaches east to the Mediterranean and northwest to the Pyrenees. Cloud frequently caps the upper ridge in the morning and lifts by midday, so the pillars appear and disappear from the terrace through breakfast. A funicular climbs the remaining 250 m from the monastery to Sant Joan, where trails fan out across the upper massif.
