Catacaos

This weekend we visited the market town of Catacaos, it is such a beautiful town with lots of things to buy from fine jewellery, to pottery, wooden utensils, weaved baskets, hammocks, stuffed animals, leather goods and so much more.  

Street  after street has more artesian goods.

We also visited the food market, which included streets selling vegetables, fruits and grains, an indoor strip of fishmongers and then a hall of butchers.

As Catacaos is known for its crafted goods we were lucky to find a little workshop of gentlemen who were creating metal goods; the kindly showed us some of their methods.

My favourite method was when he took a small piece of metal and began putting it through an Italian machine with grooves in. This machine made the piece of metal elongate and become a perfect cylinder. 

He then used the other side of the machine, a laminator, which flattened the metal and also elongated it. It took many goes of passing it through the machine for it to reach a thin piece of metal. However he then heated it with a gas blow torch attached to a foot pump, by heating up the metal it made it become much more flexible and when it was put through the laminator is became incredibly thin and long – a material that was now much more suitable for jewellery creating.