Indigo, the King of Dyes: From the Maya to the Hills of Deià

Indigo has been called the king of dyes, and the dye of kings. After years of studying it, wearing it, and now dyeing with it in a hillside village in Mallorca, I think it's a lot more than that. Indigo is one of the threads that ties the whole story of Casa de Stela together, from Guatemala to Spain and back again.

This is the first of a short series about the workshops we did with our friends at dada~days on our Made in Mallorca retreat. It felt right to start with the blue.

A blue that was sacred long before it was fashionable

Before I ever sold a single piece of clothing, I was an archaeologist working in Guatemala. So when I think about indigo, I think about the Maya first.

The Maya used the native indigo plant, Indigofera suffruticosa (xiquilite, or ch'oh in Yucatec Maya), to make one of the most remarkable colors of the ancient world: Maya Blue. They combined indigo with a rare clay called palygorskite and heated it, often with copal incense, and the result was a turquoise pigment so stable that it still glows on murals, pottery and sculpture more than a thousand years later. It resists acid, sun and time in a way plain indigo never could. Scientists have spent nearly a century trying to understand exactly how the Maya made it.

Maya Blue wasn't decoration. It was the color of the rain god Chaak. At Chichén Itzá, offerings, and sometimes people, were painted blue before being given to the Sacred Cenote. Indigo was also used as medicine. For the Maya, this blue was about water, life and the sacred.

"Blue gold": how Central America dyed Europe

When the Spanish arrived, they recognized indigo's value immediately. By the 1700s, the Kingdom of Guatemala (which included what is now El Salvador) had become one of the great indigo producers of the world. During the boom from roughly 1760 to the 1790s, the region was exporting up to two million pesos' worth of dye to Europe every year. People called it oro azul, blue gold. Indigo built cities, fortunes and a powerful colonial elite, and much of the hard work in the indigo fields and processing works fell on Indigenous and African laborers. That is part of the story too, and I think it is important to tell it.

And the dye never left the Highlands. Maya women still weave indigo into the cortes (wrapped skirts) worn across Guatemala today. When I lived in Antigua for 13 years, I saw indigo every single day: in the market, on the women walking to church, in the huipiles that eventually became the heart of our vintage textile collection in our shop.

I first learned to dye with indigo in Guatemala from the textile artist Olga Reiche, and I was in awe from the very first dip. I couldn’t get over the transformation: how a green, leafy plant could become such a deep sea of blue, and how the color appears right in front of you as the cloth meets the air. I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since

Añil: the word that traveled

Here's where the story turns toward Spain. In Spanish, indigo is añil. The word comes from the Arabic al-nil, which comes from the Sanskrit nila, meaning dark blue. Spanish carried an Arabic word to Central America, and Central America gave the word back to Europe as one of its most valuable exports.

Mallorca is part of that story. The island was under Islamic rule for more than three centuries before the Catalan conquest in 1229, and that history is still in its farming, its architecture and its language. Before tropical indigo reached Europe in quantity, Europe got its blue from woad, a plant still called herba pastel in Catalan. Once indigo from Asia and the Americas started arriving, it slowly won out over woad, even though woad growers fought hard to protect their trade.

For most of the colonial period, only a few ports in southern Spain were allowed to trade with the Americas. That changed in 1778, when the Crown opened direct trade with the Americas to more ports, including Palma de Mallorca and Barcelona. That was right in the middle of Guatemala's indigo boom. I love imagining crates of Central American añil making their way into the same Mediterranean world where we were standing over a dye vat this September.

The blue in Mallorca's own cloth

If you've been to Mallorca, you've seen roba de llengües, the "cloth of tongues." It's the island's own ikat, with blurry, flame-like patterns made by dyeing the threads before weaving. Its traditional colors are blue, red and green. Mallorca is now considered the last place in Europe where ikat is still woven, in a handful of family workshops, some of them working on 19th-century looms. The island has even started the process of seeking UNESCO recognition for it.

Ikat is also woven in Guatemala, where it's called jaspe. (You'll find it in our own Paloma Pants.) Two places on opposite sides of the world, both tying and dyeing threads by hand, both in love with blue. That's exactly the kind of connection I build our retreats around.

Dyeing in the hills of Deià with Gabriela Sans

Our indigo day was led by Gabriela Sans, a Mallorca-born designer who teaches from her family home in Deià, up in the Tramuntana mountains. Gabriela studied art in Madrid, San Francisco and Paris, then went to Japan on a grant to study textiles, which is where she learned indigo. Back home, she runs GAADART, a sustainable label that reworks local wool and vintage Mallorcan fabrics. Her whole practice is about patience, ritual and slowing down, which is exactly what we wanted for our group.

Each of us dyed a cotton bandana using shibori, the Japanese art of folding, twisting, binding and clamping cloth so the indigo can't reach certain parts. That's the same idea as ikat, just applied to the finished cloth instead of the thread.

We walked into Gabriela’s traditional home on the hillside of Deià and were met by the smell of homemade cake. Not only did she teach our class, she had taken the time to bake for us and brew rosa de Jamaica (hibiscus) tea. And she taught the whole thing very coolly, dressed head to toe in white. As an indigo dyer, that would make me so nervous... but now I kind of want to try it.

If you've never seen indigo oxidize, it feels like magic. The cloth comes out of the vat yellow-green, and right in front of you it turns blue as it meets the air. The Maya knew that magic. So did the dyers of Guatemala, Japan and Mallorca. Standing in Gabriela's garden with our blue hands, it felt like we were part of a very long line.

Come make something with us

This is why we travel the way we do: not to watch a craft, but to learn it from the people who keep it alive, in the places it belongs.

Next up in this series: lost-wax casting silver jewelry, and arranging Mallorcan flowers. And if this story speaks to you, our next retreat goes right back to where indigo started for me. Guatemala: Craft + Culture, November 3–9, 2027, in Antigua and Lake Atitlán.

Always ethical. Always loved.
— Jess

Thank you to dada~days and Gabriela Sans for a beautiful day. Learn more about Gabriela's indigo workshop at dada-days.com.