Santillana Del Mar, Spain

A finished bull

Charcoal outline

Altamira, November 23rd- We headed out early so we could have time in Altamira, Spain where the famous cave of the bulls was found and where now there is a museum and cave reconstruction devoted to the find. The drive was stunning, past farms and hills and tunnels through mountains. We drove from about 1,010 meters to nearly sea level in the last 30 minutes of our 3 hour drive. As we drove into Santillana Del Mar and to our beautiful Hotel Colegiata we all breathed a sigh of relief (and Eilidh spotted a monkey puzzle!). The hotel looked out over the quaint medieval town and over a field with cows and horses. The yard was filled with birds and the room was full of character. We were all hungry from the drive and didn’t feel like searching out a restaurant so we headed downstairs towards the wonderful smells. We ordered 2 3 course meals and split some very nice entrees but were overjoyed to see a chocolate mousse and a decadent chocolate pie for an early birthday celebration. The nice thing for me was the robust red wine that came with the meal as well as the surprise complimentary two glasses of champagne- so hard to take one for the team and drink them up!

Happy and goofy, we all headed straight out to the Altamira museum, just a 5 minute drive away. We were the only people in the museum for most of the time- a splendid feeling. The cave reconstruction was nice (better than not seeing the cave at all) and interpretive but it did seem a little Disney-esque. The museum was more child-friendly than most prehistoric museums that we have visited, offering some chances for the kids to experiment with early forms of musical instruments and to see the step-by-step way in which the caves were painted (first carving a form into the rock, then using charcoal to outline the form, then ochre paint to fill in the forms). There were a couple cute cartoons for the kids which involved grunting Paleolithic families which made us roll our eyes but allowed the kids to realize that the society that created these paintings were normal with regular family dynamics.

Sven liked the way that the cave reconstruction was interpretive and realistic at the same time. As we walked into the cave we were able to view through a window what the cave entrance must have looked like (low open entrance before an earthquake sealed the cave off for 18,000 years), then we wound our way through an interpretive scene of archaeological work in progress, a diorama of a family around a fire (looking Spanish) and then to the wide open space where the bulls adorned the ceiling. As we had the room to ourselves we just laid ourselves out on the floor to relax and to sketch.

The strange and elusive monkey puzzle tree.

View over Santillana from our hotel.

tickets for Altamira museum

After Altamira we decided to explore Santillana Del Mar a bit, having read about how popular of a destination it is. We got ourselves a map and walked around the town, enjoying the peace and quiet. You could see the infrastructure in the town to accommodate summer tourists (there was room in the car park for 20 buses and 50 cars but when we parked our car there were only 4 other groups of tourists). All of us decided later that this stop was one of the highpoints of the trip, maybe because of the timing and how good it felt to be in a small town, but also because of the wonderful sights:
-The medieval church Collegiata functioned hundreds of years ago as a monastery. Now you enter through a very inauspicious entrance into a quiet, low-lying, stunning cloister decorated with Celtic designs and then into the simple (yet massive) church. Through the church and up some stairs we explored a beautiful illuminated manuscript exhibit and Sven was excited to discover a large page (probably a couple hundred years old and used for proselytizing) filled with the lord’s prayer in at least 25 languages, including Navajo, Apache, Haida and even Alutiiq in Cyrillic text.
-The villages’ winding medieval streets were gorgeous and full of character, lined with high walls (and mostly closed doors). Near the church we saw a gushing stream overflowing down a narrow street which made us stop and marvel, also allowing us to notice an exhibit in an old stone building that floored us. Jesus Otero’s sculptures, both stone and wood, featured Altamira-inspired sculptures of animals and religious subjects. His sculptures were sensitive and thoughtful, and all was made better by the fact that we walked around in the space in total quiet through the garden in the gentle mist. For dinner we did the usual thing- walk around for an hour looking for something that served dinner and was non-smoking. In this town there was just nothing open, and when we drove to the next town we finally gave up on finding a non-smoking place and ate burgers in a little smoky place before heading home to bed. Happy to be in the country...

The abbey cloister.

The work of Jesus Otero