A walk along Spain's northern coast
Miles: 6.1 miles, from 56 to 387 feet, 459 feet up, 696 feet down
Gaudi fantasies visited: 1 (separate post)
Baby animals: lots: horses, sheep, cows – the calves were yesterday, a nice thing about walking in the spring
Markets strolled through: 1
Tonight we are in Comillas. According to the sign at the beginning of town, it is “one of the most beautiful towns in Spain”. We are charmed by it.
Antoni Gaudí, of Barcelona cathedral fame, designed a house for a rich lawyer here. It is called El Capricho de Gaudí, which means “Guadí’s Whim.” We were able to tour it this afternoon.
Guadí was still young when he created this estate. It’s whimsical but not nearly as much as his cathedral in Barcelona that he did when he was older.
Here are some photos.
A couple more stories about our visit:
Admission was €10. However, they said if we were over 65 years old it was €5. We were a little disappointed they didn’t ask for our IDs when they charged us €5.
The stairs to go between floors were tiny spiral staircases with thin wedge steps. It had been raining and the bottom of our shoes were still slightly wet. As we were going down one of them I slipped and slid down a few steps. Yikes. It was scary. Luckily I caught myself. Nothing broken except my pride. A little sore in the knee and little finger. I’m pretty sure nothing serious. It did take me a while to recover from the shock of it.
The above large beautiful church (iglesia in Spanish) was in the tiny town of La Iglesia. Below we see it after leaving town.
In the next tiny town we saw this tiny church:
To our surprise, it was open. So, we went inside. It had some beautiful, I think new, stained glass. Joe, you would have liked this.
Today on the walk we passed this mailbox. The photo hides it but it was mounted on a pole at about the height of a typical US rural mailbox. But note that it was pointed upwards instead of sideways so it caught my attention. And it looked like a typical rural US mailbox. Then I noticed that it said “US Mail” on top. Cool. For some reason I (totally unconsciously) opened it up. And to my shock, there was a loaf of bread inside! That’s when I realized I was looking inside someone’s private mailbox. I quickly closed it and hoped no one in the house saw me do that.
We get a kick out of the fact that people in Spain get bread delivery just like we in the US get newspaper delivery. In the photo I posted yesterday of the older woman waving out the window, her bread delivery person had just left bread in her window sill. We often see bread in a bag hanging on gates and such.