Comillas

Comillas is a municipality in Cantabria on the Bay of Biscay, one of the most architecturally remarkable small towns on the Spanish north coast. Its concentration of late nineteenth-century Catalan Modernista and eclectic architecture is the result of its adoption as a summer residence by the Marquis of Comillas, a wealthy industrialist whose patronage brought some of Spain’s leading architects to this remote Cantabrian coastal town.

The principal monument is El Capricho, designed by Antoni Gaudí in 1885 and one of only two buildings by Gaudí outside Catalonia. The building is a fantasy of Moorish, Japanese, and Art Nouveau influences clad in ceramic tiles and topped with a minaret-like tower. Adjacent to it stands the neo-Gothic palace of the Marquis, designed by Joan Martorell, and a Modernista cemetery with work by Lluís Domènech i Montaner.

For pilgrims on the Camino del Norte, Comillas is one of the architecturally most surprising stops on the entire route, its exotic fin-de-siècle buildings rising unexpectedly above the green Cantabrian hillside.