The town of Comillas in the Cantabria region of northern Spain has a few claims to fame.
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.