Roque Nublo basalt monolith Gran Canaria
— a basalt thumb above the cloud floor.
Not only on a wall.
Roque Nublo basalt monolith Gran Canaria, 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.
“Roque Nublo rises about 80 metres straight up from a plateau in the middle of Gran Canaria, the volcanic plug left when softer rock around it weathered away. The summit plateau sits near 1,800 metres, often above the trade-wind cloud, with Teide on Tenerife floating clear on the horizon to the west. The pre-Hispanic Canarians held the rock sacred. A walking trail of about 1.5 kilometres climbs to the foot of the monolith from a parking area on the GC-600. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Roque Nublo is a volcanic rock formation in the central highlands of Gran Canaria, in the municipality of Tejeda, within the Canary Islands. The summit plateau on which it stands sits at about 1,813 metres above sea level, and the monolith itself rises roughly 80 metres above that plateau, putting the tip near 1,890 metres. The formation is the eroded plug of a stratovolcano dated to about 4.5 million years ago, exposed as the softer surrounding pyroclastics wore away. The rock sits inside the Parque Rural del Nublo, a protected area covering about 26,000 hectares, and was declared a Natural Monument in 1987.
The rock is basalt and basaltic breccia, the eruptive material that filled the throat of the ancestral stratovolcano now called the Roque Nublo edifice. As surrounding ash and tuff weathered, the more resistant plug remained. Two companion features stand on the same plateau: La Rana, a frog-shaped block, and El Fraile, a tall pillar that from some angles reads as a hooded figure. For the pre-Hispanic Canarians, the indigenous people of the island before the 15th-century Castilian conquest, Roque Nublo was a sacred place tied to ritual and astronomical observation, a status reflected in its current heritage protection.
The trailhead, La Goleta, sits beside the GC-600 road between Ayacata and the Cruz de Tejeda, about 90 minutes by car from Las Palmas. The walk to the foot of the monolith is roughly 1.5 kilometres each way with about 200 metres of elevation gain, on a well-maintained gravel path. It is open and unticketed, though the small parking area fills early on weekends and holidays. The plateau is often above the trade-wind cloud sea known locally as the mar de nubes, with the cone of Teide on the neighbouring island of Tenerife visible across the water. Take sun protection: shade is non-existent at altitude here.
