Santander

When I worked for PwC, one of my last clients was the US arm of a Spanish bank. They started in 1857 in a town off the northern coast of Spain, Santander. They've since moved their headquarters to Madrid, but a part of me has always (well, for the last 10 years that I've known about them) wanted to visit the area where they started. We never could quite figure out a business purpose for me to fly over from Texas, though my boss always told me that if I could, he wanted it to be there while encierro in Pamplona is taking place and he would run with the bulls. Some day, I'm going to call his bluff on this one.

Fast forward to planning of this vacation and I very early on put Santander on the list of places to visit. It also helped that we needed a half way point between Porto and Bordeaux to break up the drive, and though it's not exactly a straight line, it does take it from 9 1/2 hours of driving to 6 and 4 1/2 hours so I thought it was worth the detour.

We got in around dinner time and enjoyed walking around the town during the evening.

We even found the original bank building!

It's me in the red shirt in front of the building

The panorama function on the iPhone doesn't work well with moving buses

It's covered in scaffolding. Sigh. Story of my travels.

The next morning we drove out to the Bay of Santander (which leads out to the Bay of Biscay). If you could go ahead and forward my mail to whatever address this is, I will spend the rest of my time here. What a view!!

We got out and walked along the beach for awhile because it's not a proper summer vacation if you don't get your toes sandy!

I think we now have a clear winner in the family vacation challenge.

Allllllllllll the tile of Porto

We all had some favorite parts of Porto.

The girls loved the swing in our AirBnB.

Adam loved the port.

I loved the tile. Literally every building façade was tile. Each one different to the next.

Even the McDonalds was in a tiled building.

Before I interest/overwhelm/bore you (pick your own adjective here) with 10,000 pictures of tile, let me tell you a few of the sights we visited in Porto.

The Palácio da Bolsa (Stock Exchange Palace) is now the headquarters of Porto’s Commercial Association. This building was established on the ruins of St Francis Convent after a classic church vs state battle. The impressive marble and granite staircase takes visitors to the Golden Room, which is completely covered with gold-leaf, the General Assembly Room, completely decorated in wood, and the Arab Room, decorated in Moorish style.

We did a guided tour instead of our usual self-paced ones. One of us got bored at the first stop: the grand staircase.

The celling above the grand staircase

The Arab Room

The General Assembly Room

Even the wood floors look like tile!

The Arab Room

We also toured Livraria Lello & Irmão, a bookshop in the heart of Porto housed in a neo-gothic building from 1906 with its exquisitely decorated wood facade. The bookstore has two floors with shelves packed with books of all shapes and sizes covering every wall and touching the ceiling. An elegant wooden and red velvet staircase stands in the middle of the library connecting both floors, while the stained-glass window at the top fills the shop with natural light bringing the room to life. There is an urban legend that J.K. Rowling was inspired by the Lello & Irmão to write the Harry Potter series. Though beautiful, I found this place to be a bit of a tourist trap. You pay to go in; timed reservations required, usually selling out 2-3 days in advance. However, they allow way too many people in at a time & you cannot walk through, browse the books, enjoy the architecture without being squashed by a couple hundred other tourists trying to do the same.

Needing to escape the claustrophobic feeling, we decided to walk along the port area which started the name of the city.

Then these charmed faces used their special eyes to convince Dad they needed a snack.

And it worked.

Thoroughly refreshed, everyone then had the energy to explore the side streets, main streets, train stations, and market squares in search of the azulejo tiles. In all, I took 46 photos of tiles in 2 days (I consider this restraint). I have narrowed it down to my favorites below (also restraint).