Last week, I traveled by train to Santander, capital of the autonomous community of Cantabria, for the annual mid-year meeting for Fulbright grantees. One of Spain’s smallest autonomous communities, Cantabria lies along the east-west mountain range that runs parallel to Spain’s Atlantic coast, wedged between the Basque Country to the east and Asturias to the West. 
Unlike the Mediterranean climate that bakes the much of the peninsula in scorching sun and sparse rain for the better part of the year, the Atlantic climate of the northern coast is known for heavy cloud cover and frequent rainfall. Cantabria is so green and mountainous that its inhabitants are known within Spain as los pequeños suizos, or the lesser Swiss.
Thanks to the additional support of the Universidad de Cantabria and the Fundación Marcelino Botín, the Fulbright grantees stayed at the posh and brilliant white Hotel Real, a structure built at the start of the last century to house visiting nobility when the royal court accompanied the king to his summer residence at the Palacio de Magdalena. Between presentations of our work, the grantees were invited on two daytrips. 
The first daytrip took us to the visitor center at Altamira, to see the full scale recreation of its famous cave – which the general public may no longer enter – and its famous Neolithic paintings, and to the well-preserved medieval town of Santillana del Mar where we were treated to a traditional lunch of hearty bean stew and cod fish. 
The second daytrip took us to Comillas, a small beach town in short viewing distance of the towering silhouette of the Picos de Europa, where we were invited to a sneak peak of the soon-to-open Fundación Comillas, a new center for the study of Hispanic language and culture housed in a remodeled modernist masterpiece by the Catalan architect Lluís Domènech i
Montaner.
No comments:
Post a Comment