Which wealthy client used El Capricho as a summer villa?

Máximo Díaz de Quijano commissioned El Capricho as a summer villa. The house stands in Comillas, Cantabria, and is also known as Villa Quijano.

Gaudí designed the building between 1883 and 1885 for this wealthy client, who had made his fortune in Cuba. Díaz de Quijano was related by marriage to the influential López family of Comillas, a connection that helped bring Gaudí into the circle of patrons and projects associated with the town. He died shortly before the villa was completed and therefore enjoyed little of the finished residence.

El Capricho belongs to Gaudí’s early Orientalist period. Its design combines exposed brick, vivid ceramic tiles, ironwork and forms influenced by Gothic, Islamic, Mudéjar and other Eastern traditions. Sunflower-patterned tiles and the tower’s minaret-like appearance are among its most recognisable features.

The villa is often confused with Gaudí’s Barcelona houses because it shares the architect’s decorative exuberance, but it is outside Catalonia and is one of his relatively few works beyond the region. After periods of neglect and reuse, it became a museum in 2009.