The San Millán neighborhood has long been the heart of pottery in this UNESCO World Heritage city, where workshops were historically carved directly into the clay hillsides. Today, only six active artisan workshops remain in this quarter. In one of them, the Alameda brothers continue a tradition passed down from their father, Paco Alameda, blending the ancient Hispanic-Arab methods of the ninth century with the disciplined patience required for reductive firing.
While the city is famous for its distinct green glaze—a translucent finish achieved by adding copper oxide to a lead base—Alberto has turned his attention to a silence in the local record. For three hundred years, the art of tin-glazed ceramics (cerámica estannífera) was absent from Úbeda’s kilns. By mixing tin oxide into the glaze, Alberto creates an opaque white surface that masks the natural red of the terracotta, providing a clean canvas for intricate metallic decorations.
This revival is not merely a technical feat but an act of historical recovery. To achieve the necessary opacity, the kiln must be pushed to a second firing between 900 and 1,000 degrees Celsius. It is a volatile process where the chemistry of the earth meets the precision of the hand. Historically, the raw copper for these glazes was scavenged from discarded cooking pots and smithing scraps, a humble origin for vessels that eventually defined the aesthetic of the region.
The recognition of Alberto as a Maestro Artesano by the Junta de Andalucía arrives as the city prepares for the European Craft Days. Amidst the wider celebrations of the Hola Cerámica initiative across Spain, the Alameda workshop remains a quiet site of continuity. Here, the thirteenth-century walls of the city overlook a man who is ensuring that a technique lost in the age of the Enlightenment is once again a living part of the present.