In 1881 the town hosted King Alfonso XII at the request of the marquis of Comillas who was a close friend. Ahead of the occasion electric light bulbs were installed, making this the first place in Spain to showcase the new invention. In addition, the house in which the king was staying for this period served as the location for a ministerial congress and since the law demanded that this take place in the capital city, for one day only Comillas became Spain’s capital.

None of this was why we chose to take this tour while our ship Ventura was docked at Santander at the start of our Iberian cruise in 2024.

Our excursion would see us visit two Spanish towns and it was the first of these, Comillas, that we most wanted to see but the reason was only lightly connected with what I’ve already mentioned. The second half of the nineteenth century saw members of the Spanish royal family regularly visit the town and this led to an explosion of monuments and buildings befitting people of their standing. We like architecture so this would be great on its own, but there was a specific building we were interested in.

We started this tour with a walk past the Sobrellano Palace – not in it, sadly, but there’s always another time – and then through a few streets of the town where eclectic but enchanting examples of design were clear to see.

When King Alfonso XII had come to visit Comillas the house in which he’d stayed had been prepared by a team of architects with whom the marquis was acquainted, one of whom – responsible for the cigar pavilion – was a relatively unknown Antoni Gaudí. A couple of years later Gaudí was commissioned to design a summer villa in the town for a wealthy client. We were familiar with Gaudí’s later work in Barcelona and had visited his home town in Reus so we were very interested to see what one of the architect’s earliest designs would look like.

This was El Capricho. It was crazier than we’d imagined.

The design of El Capricho is influenced from eastern styles and it’s easy to see some Arabian elements such as the minaret, but the heavy use of natural motifs and symbolism also points to what would eventually become Art Nouveau in Europe. Flower and leaf tiles were everywhere. It was also nice to see a distinct layering of the floors with the exterior brickwork or decorations differing between the ground, first, and top floors of the building.

The interior of El Capricho didn’t have quite the wow effect of the outside view but that’s to be expected; it was fairly plain by comparison. You wouldn’t want to live in a house that constantly challenged your senses. However, there were some lovely elements and one of the most interesting was in the windows. The client who’d commissioned Gaudí was an amateur musician so the architect designed the windows with metal pipe counterweights which emitted sounds when they were opened and closed.

As architecture fans we were not disappointed at all with this excursion to see El Capricho, one of only a very few examples of Gaudí design outside the Catalonia region of Spain.

We finished this first part of the day’s trip with a walk back through Comillas to the bus and had a chance to see and appreciate more of the late nineteenth century modernist architecture on show, including a delightful fountain with three spouts designed by Lluís Domènech i Montaner.

In the next post in this series we’ll visit a town with a different character altogether, Santillana Del Mar.

Santillana Del Mar was a marked contrast in terms of architecture, with everything we saw feeling far more medieval with its warm-toned stone walls and cobbled streets. The name of the town comes from Santa Juliana and its origins date to the eighth century when monks brought relics of the saint to this location. Donations from wealthy people, land acquisition, and being located on the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela all helped the town to grow through the Middle Ages. Despite a general uniformity in the buildings in we saw in Santillana Del Mar the ages of their construction varied widely, though.

Our guide gave us a little bit of an explanation about some of the initial buildings we passed that had some historical significance but this was largely a “look, it’s a pretty place and it’s got tourist shops” kind of visit. We didn’t have too much of a problem with that because it had been the earlier part of the tour that we’d been really interested in, and it was a pretty place, after all.

We had plenty of free time on our own to explore. While the photos here may show some steep and hilly-looking areas to the town we didn’t find it too taxing to get up and down. There had been rain before we’d arrived which gave the cobbled roads a sheen, but I don’t recall it ever feeling dangerous to walk on the surface. Something to consider with accessibility, though.

Our free time in Santillana Del Mar didn’t extend far enough to really allow us to visit anything. We wandered as far the Collegiate Church of Santillana, the former monastery where the religious relics are stored, but there was no opportunity to pop in that we could see so this trip ended up being one for the eyes rather than the brain.

On the walk back we popped into the grounds of a small museum dedicated to some of the works of sculptor Jesús Otero. Animals were his thing. That and helping rebels to hide when fighting fascism during the wars of the twentieth century.

A minor bit of activity was required at the end of the tour as our bus had been moved on by the police so our guide got me to lead everyone to where it was now waiting while he hung around for those inevitably late to return. I seem to get roped into this role more often than you’d think. I must look trustworthy with “that man has a good sense of direction” written in my expression too.

Another day might have been a completely different experience, but we didn’t feel that this part of the tour as a whole was that great. Santillana Del Mar is very pretty and has a lovely feel but from a cruise excursion perspective there wasn’t really a lot to see or do after you’d passed the first palatial house in the medieval town and after you’d passed the first tourist shop. We’d have liked more time to be able to visit some of the museums or churches, but there is that trade-off with trying to just a get a feel and some highlights of an area. So overall, for the contrast in architecture, we enjoyed the day spent in these two Cantabrian towns, but Comillas was our favourite for the dedicated look around Gaudí’s building.

In the next post in this Iberian peninsular cruise aboard Ventura we’ll return to Santander for the sail away and there will be a day at sea before the next port of call.