Zaragoza Basilica del Pilar over the Ebro
— four towers and a river that carries them.
Not only on a wall.
Zaragoza Basilica del Pilar over the Ebro, 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 basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar sits on the south bank of the Ebro, in the centre of Zaragoza. Four corner towers and eleven domes rise from a long baroque body, mirrored in the water when the river runs full. The pilgrimage feast on the twelfth of October fills the square with flowers from across Spain. The stone bridge upstream has stood, in some form, since the fifteenth century.
The place, in three passes.
Zaragoza is the capital of the Aragón region, in northeastern Spain, with a population of about 675,000. The city sits on the Ebro, the largest river by volume on the Iberian Peninsula. The Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar — Basílica de Nuestra Señora del Pilar — stands on the south bank in the Plaza del Pilar. The current baroque building was begun in 1681 to designs by Francisco Herrera the Younger and completed in stages through the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. The shrine itself is older, tied by tradition to a Marian apparition to Saint James in the first century.
The basilica is one of the largest baroque churches in Spain — about 130 metres long, with eleven domes and four corner towers framing a central cupola. The Coreto, the small chapel inside the basilica that holds the venerated pillar, was designed by Ventura Rodríguez in the eighteenth century. Goya, who was born in nearby Fuendetodos and trained in Zaragoza, painted two of the dome frescoes between 1772 and 1781. The exterior cladding mixes brick and stone in the Aragonese mudéjar tradition. The four corner towers were completed only in the twentieth century.
The basilica opens daily, with free entry to the nave; the tower lift to the south-east mirador and the museum of the Pillar charge a small fee. Mass is celebrated several times a day. The Fiestas del Pilar, the city's patronal festival, run for nine days around the twelfth of October — the largest gathering in Aragón, with the Ofrenda de Flores covering the square in floral mosaics. Zaragoza is on the AVE high-speed line, about ninety minutes from Madrid and Barcelona. The Mercado Central and the Aljafería palace are a short walk west.
