Comillas

Comillas doesn’t look like it should have a Gaudí building. It’s a modest fishing-town-turned-resort on the Cantabrian coast, population barely a few thousand, the kind of place you’d expect to hold a nice church and a decent beach and not much else. But in the 1880s the town became the summer retreat of Antonio López, the first Marquis of Comillas, a man who’d made an enormous fortune in shipping and — depending on which local historian you ask — the transatlantic slave trade, a fact the town doesn’t advertise on its tourist plaques but that shadows the wealth on display everywhere here. López brought architects to Comillas to build his legacy, and one of them was a young, largely unknown Antoni Gaudí, commissioned to design a summer villa for the marquis’s brother-in-law.

The result, El Capricho, is one of only a handful of Gaudí buildings outside Catalonia, and it is exactly as strange as his Barcelona work, just quieter about it. Sunflower-patterned ceramic tiles wrap the exterior in bands of green and yellow that catch the light differently by the hour. A minaret-like tower, iron sunflower balconies, windows shaped to track the sun through the day like a plant would — Gaudí was already thinking in organic logic before Barcelona made him famous for it. I walked the gardens around it slowly, in a light drizzle, and kept catching new details: a column shaped like a bamboo stalk, a covered gallery meant for watching the sunset with a drink in hand.

The Palace on the Hill

Above the town, on a hilltop with sweeping views of the Cantabrian Sea, sits the Palacio de Sobrellano and the extraordinary Universidad Pontificia — a seminary-turned-cultural-center designed in a neo-Gothic style by Joan Martorell, Gaudí’s own teacher, with Gaudí himself contributing to some of the interior work. The Panteón de los Marqueses next to the palace, with sculptures partly attributed to a young Josep Llimona, functions as the family’s private funerary chapel — an almost absurd amount of architectural ambition for one shipping family’s private worship and burial needs. Whatever one thinks of how that money was made, the physical result left Comillas with a concentration of late-19th-century Catalan Modernisme rarely found this far from Barcelona.

Beach, Cliffs, and a University Town’s Second Life

Down at sea level, Comillas is simpler and better for it. The main beach curves in a wide crescent below the old town, backed by a promenade where I watched local families set up for entire afternoons with folding chairs and thermoses of coffee, entirely unbothered by the grey Cantabrian sky that never quite commits to sun or rain. West of the beach, a walking path along low cliffs leads toward smaller coves and a view back at the town’s skyline — the pontifical university’s spires competing with the church tower for who gets to dominate the silhouette.

I ended the day the way most people seem to here — with a plate of rabas (the local squeeze on fried calamari, cut into thin strips rather than rings) at a bar just off the main square, watching the fishing boats that still work this stretch of coast come in as the light went from grey to a deep evening blue. Comillas manages a trick a lot of grander places don’t: it wears its wealth strangely and its ordinariness comfortably, at the same time.

When to go: July and August bring warm days and a lively beach scene but also the summer crowds from Santander; June and September offer the gardens and coastal walks at their best without the peak-season traffic.