Where to Stay in Santander, Cantabria

What is Santander known for?

Santander is known for El Sardinero, for the palace on the Magdalena, and for a summer that turns the bay into a stage. Royalty started it. Alfonso XIII took his court to the peninsula each August, the city built promenades and a casino to match, and the habit outlived the monarchy in the courses of the Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo.

Sardines built the rest. Trade off the water raised the Naves de Gamazo over the dry dock, and Renzo Piano's Centro Botín sits on the same waterfront with the Museo Marítimo del Cantábrico a walk east.

What are the main landmarks in Santander?

Santander lost its old town to fire and rebuilt on the water. The Centro Botín stands out over the bay on Renzo Piano's steel legs, half a museum and half a pier, with the Museo Marítimo del Cantábrico and the Naves de Gamazo strung along the same shore. Older stone survives above.

The Church of Santa Lucía and the Church of the Sagrado Corazón kept their towers through the blaze, the Museo de Prehistoria y Arqueología de Cantabria holds what came out of the painted caves inland, and the Centro de Arte Faro de Cabo Mayor keeps a gallery inside the lighthouse north of the beaches.

What is the history of Santander?

Santander began as the Roman harbour of Portus Victoriae Iuliobrigensium. The fleet used the sheltered bay for the Cantabrian wars, then the harbour went quiet for centuries until a medieval charter gave the town its wool trade with Flanders. Wool paid for the abbey.

The collegiate church above the water grew into the cathedral, and the four barrios that clustered under it were the whole of Santander until the eighteenth century. America changed the scale. A royal grant opened the port to the colonial trade in 1778, quays were cut into the mud, and the merchants who prospered founded the bank that still carries the city's name.

Emigrant ships left for Cuba and Mexico from these quays through the nineteenth century, and the returns that came back built the villas above El Sardinero. Two disasters mark the modern town. The steamer Cabo Machichaco blew up at the quay in 1893 with a cargo of dynamite, and in February 1941 a south wind drove a fire through the medieval streets for two days, leaving the cathedral gutted and the old town gone.

What replaced it is the arcaded grid along the Paseo de Pereda.

Where is Santander?

Santander stands on the north coast of Spain, on a peninsula that closes the Bay of Santander against the Cantabrian Sea. Water is on three sides. The bay behind the city is shallow and tidal, with sandbanks and the dunes of El Puntal opposite, while the open Atlantic swell breaks on the El Sardinero side of the same headland.

Inland the ground rises fast through green valleys to the limestone wall of the Picos de Europa.

What is the climate of Santander?

Santander lives under Atlantic fronts that the Picos de Europa wring dry before they clear the range. The calabobos drizzle rarely lets up. Winters stay mild and grey, summers rarely turn hot, and the green that covers Cantabria is the direct return on all that wet air off the Cantabrian Sea.

The exception is the sur, a dry south wind that pours down off the mountains, strips the humidity out of the streets and once carried a fire through the whole old town.

How do you get to Santander?

Santander is reached by ferry from Plymouth and Portsmouth, by rail from Madrid, and by the A-8 along the north coast. The ships dock beside the Paseo de Pereda, a few steps from the arcades, which makes this one of the few Spanish cities you can walk into straight off a boat. Rail is the slow way.

The line to Madrid climbs the Cordillera Cantábrica, the narrow-gauge track runs west to Oviedo and east to Bilbao along the valleys, and Parayas airport sits across the bay from the centre.