El Norte (Día #2): Llanes, Comillas, and Santander…

We started out our morning going to Llanes, another city in Asturias right along the coast of the Cantabric Sea…

This was, by far, my favorite city of our excursion (besides San Sebastián–which I’ll talk about later)…Oy, now I know how Mrs. Lovett feels when she talks about a life by the seaside…

As you can tell by these photos, Llanes is absolutely magnificent–My favorite part were Los cubos de la memoria (The Cubes of Memory), a work of abstract art by renowned Basque artist Augustín Ibarrola, inaugurated in 2001…

…This is sidra (cider–the hard kind)…At first I didn’t like it at all (it wasn’t really sweet), but then I got used to it…

Then it was off to Comillas, a small town in the autonomous community of Cantabria…

There were three things here that stood out to me…First there was El Capricho de Gaudi (“Gaudi’s Whim”)…Commised by the brother-in-law of the Marqués de Comillas, this place is one out of the only three buildings by Gaudi that you can find outside of Cataluña/Barcelona…Once the site of an extremely expensive restaurant, it’s now owned by some Japanese company…

Second, there was the awesome Cemetary of Comillas, situated on the former site of a 15th-century church (I’m not trying to sound morbid, here) that overlooked the ocean…

Lastly, there’s La Universidad Pontificia–I didn’t get to go in (it was closed for the day), but I still got some nice pics of the outside…

And let’s not forget my lunch for the day…

…Chipirones encebollados con risotto de queso (Squid with onions and cheese risotto [once again, yes, it was delicious])…

Our last stop of the day was Santander, of which I don’t really remember much, besides some nice views of the ocean…

And for dinner, we had paella at some famous local hole-in-the-wall…Granted, I’m not going to say it was the best paella I’ve ever had (if you don’t know me that well, note that I’m quite fastidious in my tastes), but, it was still riquísima…