Ardentia Silver Jewellery from Galicia: Love at First Sight

You pick up a silver ring from Galician jewellery workshop Ardentia with an anemone: its delicate tentacles slightly spread, the tips polished to a mirror shine, and everything else covered in such a deep red that you can't quite understand how silver can even look like that.

Next to it, Baroña, a deep, rounded pendant with an almost unreal blue-green gradient framed by delicate leaves. Or there's Gorgonia: earrings, bracelets, pendants, all with that same deep red nestled inside perfectly polished silver.

And somewhere around twenty minutes in, you realise the problem is no longer whether to buy anything, but what on earth to choose from all these extraordinary forms and colours.

What is Ardentia: silver jewellery from Galicia

Ardentia is a jewellery workshop that over thirty-five years has reached eighty-eight countries without turning into a factory churning out identical, forgettable pieces to a mass-market template.

The collections are still conceived by one person, the singular Luis González from A Coruña, and made by much the same team as from the very beginning.

Ardentia has over fifty active silver collections, from traditional Galician filigree with jet stone and Camino de Santiago symbols to thoroughly contemporary lines with vivid galvanic plating, nanoceramic coatings, sculptural patinas and mirror-polished finishes, and not a single boring piece among them.

If it can't be done, find a way

Luis González was nineteen when he made his first pieces of jewellery, with no jewellery school behind him and no family tradition in the craft.

He tried to learn from books: read, tried, failed, tried again. Then he found a master craftsman who let him into his workshop on Friday afternoons. Luis would ask questions, go home, spend the whole week practising, and come back on Friday with new questions.

He simply didn't know that many of the things he wanted to make were technically impossible or extremely difficult. But he wanted them that way, so he kept trying until he got what he wanted.

Then came Munich, Paris, Frankfurt, Las Vegas: twelve years on the international fair circuit, and admiration from fellow jewellers and buyers alike.

That's how Ardentia's jewellery gradually reached eighty-eight countries without losing what mattered most: creative integrity, original techniques and impeccable quality.

How it's made

At trade fairs and exhibitions, jewellers come up to Luis and quietly ask: how do you do it? How do you get such a saturated colour? How does the silver shine like that?

The answer probably lies in the same place it always did: when you don't know something is impossible, you just figure out how to do it.

Ardentia's signature deep red is a galvanic plating technique partly borrowed from the manufacture of spectacle frames, and before Ardentia, nobody had applied anything like it to jewellery.

The mirror shine of the silver, which neither tarnishes nor clouds over the years, comes from extraordinarily careful hand-polishing, with no chemical baths involved. Even experienced jewellers sometimes find this hard to believe, but it's true.

Ardentia has always had an appetite for technology. Its jewellery incorporates nanoceramic coatings, patinas borrowed from sculptors for achieving artistic effects on metal, and 3D design, which Ardentia was already using when craft workshops had barely heard of it.

And during the crisis years of 2011–2012, when orders dried up, Luis started teaching others: eighty-five jewellery workshops from north-western Spain passed through his studio.

Galicia through a jeweller's eyes: Ardentia silver collections

Luis doesn't draw from nature directly. He looks at a gorgonian coral, a sea anemone or an oak leaf, and makes something of his own: similar, but not a copy.

Anemona is a sea creature. Its tentacles radiate from the centre, each one ending in a polished tip. Everything else is red galvanic plating, that same technique borrowed from spectacle frame manufacturing.

Gorgonia is an Atlantic coral. Each piece consists of two invisibly soldered parts, with vivid red galvanic plating hidden inside.

How it's done is hard to grasp. Luis half-jokingly says the collection took him thirty-odd years to make, not the pieces themselves, but everything he needed to know and be able to do in order to make them.

Baroña: what do you think this is? An animal? A plant? Neither.

It's a Celtic hill fort, circular in plan, of the kind found along the Atlantic coast of Galicia. The jewellery echoes its form: a polished circle with a border of miniature leaves, and inside, a patina with blue or copper pigments.

Carballo is jewellery in the shape of oak leaves. In Galicia, these carry particular meaning: carballo is a sacred tree, a symbol of Celtic culture.

The leaves in these pieces are slightly naive, not hyperrealistic, clearly an oak leaf, but not an exact copy. As always with Luis, an elegant interpretation.

The collection started with four or five pieces and now has twelve or fourteen, with new ones added every year. People buy them one by one, gradually building a collection, or give them as gifts to those they love and cherish.

Folerpa is a Galician word for snowflake, and the jewellery is inspired by the magical effect of tiny snowflakes falling softly from the sky.

But again, not a copy of a snowflake, rather a reinterpretation of the crystal it's made of.

These folerpas come in three versions: gold with chocolate galvanic plating, or silver with blue or copper patina.

Organic is jewellery inspired by wasp nests, those papery, cellular panels you sometimes come across on a walk in the woods.

A matte, aged surface on the inside and mirror polish around the edge. Earrings, pendants, rings and a bracelet that never fails to draw attention.

And then there's a separate thread: pieces that play with local and Spanish cultural references.

Variations on traditional Galician filigree with black jet, the pilgrims' stone of the Camino de Santiago; silver scallop shells with coloured enamel; Velázquez's Meninas; and tributes to Antoni Gaudí.

Where to buy Ardentia jewellery in Galicia

Three flagship stores of Ardentia, all in Galicia: in Santiago de Compostela, near the Cathedral of Saint James, where the Camino ends and pilgrims finally allow themselves a well-earned reward; in A Coruña, in the heart of the old town; and in Vigo, opposite the Casa de las Artes museum.

And one more thing worth knowing: the workshop keeps the moulds for every piece it has ever made.

So even if you lose one earring twenty years from now, they'll reproduce it exactly. It's the kind of service you rarely find even from premium brands.