Comillas: the marquis and his modernist palaces: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
The shipping marquis and his architects
Antonio López, born into a humble family, made a fortune in Cuba, turned his birthplace into a summer court for King Alfonso XII and hired Catalan architects to do it: Martorell built his palace and tomb, Gaudí furnished the chapel and designed El Capricho for a relative, and Domènech i Montaner shaped the town's fountain, park and cemetery.
The stops
After Antonio López died in 1883, the people of Comillas gave money by subscription for a great monument to the marquis, finished in 1890 on a meadow that his friend Ángel Bernardo Pérez gave the town. The marquis made his fortune in Cuba, in shipping and, according to English Wikipedia, in the slave trade, though the town's mayor has said it is not certain he was a slave trader, since the charge came from his brother-in-law. The pedestal is shaped like a ship's prow and once carried bronze allegories of his voyages to the Philippines and the Antilles, cast from the bronze of ships of his shipping line and melted down in the Civil War, and Domènech i Montaner laid out the park around it as a lookout over the sea.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0 The cemetery stands on the ruins of an old parish church, which tradition says the villagers abandoned in the 1500s after a quarrel at Sunday mass with the steward of the Duke of the Infantado. Lluís Domènech i Montaner enlarged it, keeping the ruins inside a stone wall topped with pinnacles and crosses and adding the entrance front, a protected monument since 1983. On the remains of the old church stands Josep Llimona's Exterminating Angel, dated 1894 to 1895 and a symbol of the town, which had lost its sword many years before the archpriest had it returned in the 1980s.
Photo: Robles Aurora — CC BY-SA 3.0 es The Duke and Duchess of Almodóvar del Río had this house built between 1899 and 1902 by the architect Francisco Hernández-Rubio y Gómez of Jerez. Its English-style historicism, with asymmetry, several axes and work in wood and brick, sets it apart from the eclectic Sobrellano and Gaudí's modernist Capricho. The town knows it as El Duque.
Photo: Pericles FC — CC BY-SA 4.0 Gaudí designed this gate in 1904 as the garden gate of the unfinished Chalet Graner in Barcelona, where it was later pulled down. A few years afterwards the mason Julián Bardier Pardo, who had worked for Gaudí at Park Güell and whose uncle was the contractor of El Capricho, copied it for Paulino Moro's house here. Built of rough stone waste laid irregularly, it has one opening for carriages, one for people and a round one that Gaudí called the door of the little birds.
Photo: Gonzalo P.M.G. — CC BY-SA 4.0 Building began in 1640, after the villagers fell out with the steward of the Duke of the Infantado in the old church, and the new church was consecrated in 1695 in the Cantabrian baroque style. The tower you see was rebuilt after the Civil War, which had destroyed an older and much lower one. In the late 19th century the marquis paid for repairs inside, and Martorell added the choir railing, some stained glass and the pulpit grille.
Photo: Rodelar — CC BY-SA 3.0 Lluís Domènech i Montaner designed this fountain, built in 1889 as a tribute to Joaquín del Piélago, the marquis's son-in-law, for bringing running water to the town. Comillas was one of the first towns in Spain with water in its houses. The stonework is rich in plant motifs and angels, with a coiled dolphin at its heart and inscriptions of thanks.
Photo: Jl FilpoC — CC BY-SA 4.0 Alfonso XII spent the summers of 1881 and 1882 in Comillas as the marquis's guest, and the royal family stayed in this mansion, whose interiors Catalan decorators and craftsmen had remodelled to the taste of the day. A meeting of the Council of Ministers was held here in 1881, which is why Comillas is said to have been, symbolically, the capital of Spain for a day.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0 Gaudí, who had assisted Joan Martorell at Sobrellano, designed this summer villa for Máximo Díaz de Quijano, a lawyer made rich in Cuba and related by marriage to the Marquis of Comillas. It was built between 1883 and 1885 under his former classmate Cristóbal Cascante, and its tower, about 20 metres high and often compared to a minaret, is clad in tiles that alternate sunflowers with green leaves. Gaudí never saw the house, and music runs through it, down to the tower's railing, which has treble clefs among its motifs.
Photo: Coralma* — CC BY-SA 4.0 Joan Martorell designed this Neo-Gothic palace for Antonio López y López, born into a humble family in Comillas and grown rich in Cuba, who was made the first Marquis of Comillas in 1878. It was built between 1881 and 1888, so the marquis, who died in 1883, never saw it finished. It was the first building in Spain with electric lighting, installed for a visit by Alfonso XII, though the king stayed elsewhere because the work was not ready in time.
Photo: Jl FilpoC — CC BY-SA 4.0 Joan Martorell's chapel-pantheon was built between 1880 and 1881 as a miniature cathedral, with gargoyles and an ambulatory, after the Marquis of Comillas lost his eldest son in 1876 and, soon after, a daughter. Inside, the seating, prayer stools and pews were designed by Gaudí, among his earliest commissioned works, and the López family tombs carry sculptures by Josep Llimona and by Agapito and Venancio Vallmitjana. It was inaugurated in 1881 during a visit by King Alfonso XII, with the family's chaplain, the poet Jacint Verdaguer, taking part.
Photo: juantiagues — CC BY-SA 2.0
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