Spain · Andalusia · Córdoba
Santuario, Córdoba — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Ranks of five blocks run back from Avenida Virgen del Mar in Santuario, an eastern barrio of Córdoba built from 1968 in the Distrito Sureste.
About Santuario
Where to stay in Santuario
Each area has its own feel; here's who each one suits.
Santuario was built as housing and holds few beds for visitors, so most people sleep in Córdoba's historic centre and travel out to it. Cars park between the blocks. Choose it if you want a four-storey street with a garden under the window, a primary school inside the barrio, and the Mezquita-Catedral about two kilometres west.
Shops here sit in their own parade rather than under the flats. The city buses call at Calle San Martín de Porres and Avenida Virgen del Mar, and the Autovía del Sur, part of European route E05, carries traffic out to the national network.
About Santuario
What are the main landmarks in Santuario?
Santuario's public buildings gather along Calle Nuestra Señora de Belén, where the Club Santuario opened its sports ground and social rooms in 1973. The Iglesia de San Rafael serves the northern blocks. Two primary schools sit inside the estate, one of them the CEIP Fernán Pérez de Oliva, and the Centro Cívico Municipal Fuensanta stands among the flats.
The Santuario de Nuestra Señora de la Fuensanta stands just outside the western boundary, a gothic-mudéjar shrine of the later fifteenth century raised to parish church in 1973, with a stuffed caiman hung beside a whale rib. The caiman arrived as a votive offering.
What is the history of Santuario?
Santuario was projected in 1968 and built by the Constructora Benéfica de Viviendas of the Caja de Ahorros de Córdoba, with money from the Instituto Nacional de la Vivienda. Fifty-six blocks went up, four storeys each, and fifteen or sixteen flats to a block. The plan set them in ranks of five, perpendicular to Avenida Virgen del Mar, with parking and gardens alternating between.
Community quotas pay for the gardens. The Feria de la Fuensanta, held around the sanctuary each September, is far older than the blocks, and a royal decree of 1789 suspended it along with the other fairs of Córdoba.
Where is Santuario?
Santuario lies in eastern Córdoba, with Fuensanta along its north-western side and El Arenal between it and the Guadalquivir.
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More areas in Córdoba
Updated September 2026