Soria castle ruins overlooking the Duero
— stones the river has watched empty out.
Not only on a wall.
Soria castle ruins overlooking the Duero, 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 castle hill rises above the old centre of Soria, the Duero looping below in a wide bend before the river turns west toward Burgo de Osma. Only fragments of wall and keep remain, the rest carried off and broken during the Peninsular War. From the ruins the meseta opens in every direction, pale gold most of the year, the river a single dark line drawn through it.
The place, in three passes.
The Castillo de Soria stands on the Cerro del Castillo, the hill above the old town at about 1,090 metres on the high Castilian meseta. The fortress was held by the Crown of Castile through the medieval and early modern periods, and was largely destroyed during the Peninsular War in the early nineteenth century. The Duero, the third-longest river in the Iberian peninsula, runs immediately below the hill before turning west across Castilla toward Portugal. The Parador Nacional Antonio Machado was built within the castle grounds in 1966.
What remains is rough sandstone and rubble walling, the bulk of it medieval in origin. The hilltop holds fragments of the keep, sections of curtain wall, and the foundations of a small chapel. The stone is the same warm cream as the Monasterio de San Juan de Duero and the Templar ruins of San Polo, both on the riverbank below, quarried locally and weathered by centuries of meseta wind. Antonio Machado, who taught in Soria from 1907 to 1912, walked here often and made the hill and the river his recurring subjects.
The castle is reached by a steep walk up Calle del Castillo from the old town, or by car to the Parador. The grounds are open through the year at no charge, the views over the Duero loop the reason to climb. The Monasterio de San Juan de Duero, with its famous open Romanesque cloister, sits at the foot of the hill across the river. Soria is about two and a half hours north of Madrid by road, set high enough on the meseta that snow falls most winters.
