La Abayalde Ceramic Tiles
tile_shop_orgiva_resized.jpgTILEMAKER HAS MOORISH DESIGNS ON EXPORTS

CERAMIC tiles have been synonymous with Spain since the Moors brought the craft to Al Andalus courtesy of their Arabian ancestors who learned it from the Persians. Azulejos, tiles, and azulejos alicatados, panels of tile mosaics, have never fallen out of favour in Spanish homes, public buildings and businesses.

Spain makes nearly a twelfth of the world’s ceramic tiles each year, most of them mass-produced in factories in the regions of Valencia and Andalucía. In 2007, the country turned out around 585 million square metres and sold 4.2 billion euros worth, sales in Spain reaping near 1.9 bn euros and the rest coming from exports.

Delia McGrath’s share of the market is a drop in the ocean. But this ‘fifty-something’ English woman is proud to be one of a shrinking band that makes tiles the way the Moors would have recognised - slowly, by hand, and to a high standard.

Former teacher Delia rated Ceramica Albayalde (www.albayalde.eu) so highly that in 2006 she bought the workshop and showroom at Órgiva in the Alpujarra valleys south of Granada’s imposing Sierra Nevada.

She sells throughout Spain and is now ready to export. “We are eyeing up the United Kingdom and other European markets. We may look at the Gulf States too. It would be great to sell Moorish tiles to Arabia!”

New product lines include mosaic kits for the tourist and gift market. “They’ve been selling well on the Costa and we have high hopes for them,” says Delia.

Mass produced azulejos are tough competition for the likes of Delia. They offer consistent colours, shapes and patterns, and tend to be cheaper, thinner and lighter than hand-crafted ones, so are cheaper to freight.

“But factory ones are too perfect,” she maintains. “There’s something about hand-crafted that you just can’t beat - subtle variations in shapes and hues, and there’s an antique-look craze in the glaze.”

“We’ve gone to great lengths to recreate the shapes and subtleties of the Moorish designs and colours in our core products. But everyone including ourselves is also doing more modern designs and using brighter hues these days. We’ve all got to make some concessions to current tastes, but without compromising quality.”

Authenticity, subtlety, uniqueness and robustness are reasons why the hand-made version is much sought after by interior designers, architects and more discerning home owners and hoteliers.

When we visit Delia, more than 4,000 diamond shaped mosaics are cooling after the ‘furniture’ in which they are placed for firing has been removed from the kiln. The hard wearing glazes - ochres, ivory, reds and Moorish blues - gleam in morning sunlight streaming into the unit from an olive grove behind the workshop.

This technicolour harvest is the fruit of a laborious process that produces what Delia likes to call ‘slow tiles’.

Hand-made tilemakers source clays from around Spain, notably from Tarragona, and blend them to adjust porosity to the end use – outdoors, indoors, in a wet or dry environment. Plain, unglazed tiles can be waterproofed to withstand the elements.

At Ceramica Albayalde, tiles and mosaics are cut by hand then dried naturally. Drying can take a few days in summer, but weeks in winter. Customers may wait three months from order to delivery, but deem the product worth the wait. Some tilemakers take even longer.

High quality materials and slow drying create another point in favour of hand-crafted tiles. They can be thicker, making them more resistant to large variations in temperature and humidity. Many people will remember their factory-tiled floors lifting and cracking in the Andalucía heat wave of 2003.

A first firing at above 1000 Celsius produces plain, clay tiles with a characteristic creamy pink to beige biscuit colour, hence their Spanish name, bizcochos. Delia’s workshop shelves are full of rectangles, squares, stars, diamonds, ovals and other shapes in various stages of drying

She hand-paints them carefully on one side with dull, pigmented pastes that she blends herself with oxides and minerals from Manises. This Valencian town has been a major centre of tile making since the advance of Christian forces in the late 15th century ended Málaga’s dominance over azulejo technology in Al Andalus.

The 1050 Celsius kiln heat of a second firing transforms the pastes into vivid lustres: pink becomes deep turquoise, rust turns golden yellow, grey begets light blue, dark brown deepens to black, another grey mutates into jade.

Most glazed  tiles are ready to box, sell and dispatch as soon as they are cool. A very small number need a little grinding and polishing to remove any imperfections that might make a tile-fitter’s job harder.

Mosaics for larger panels are numbered on the back, laid out in the design that was ordered, and kept in place with a plastic film that can be peeled off at journey’s end.