Cartes

Overview

Cartes is a village of 1,299 people in the Besaya valley of Cantabria, built as one long row of stone houses along the royal road that carried trade from Castile down to the port of Santander. That street is the reason to come: masonry facades built between the 15th and the 18th centuries, kept to a single homogeneous style, and a pair of Gothic towers that the road passes straight through the middle of.

The village was declared a Bien de Interés Cultural in the conjunto histórico category on 29 March 1985, for preserving the medieval layout it inherited from the Camino Real. Riocorvo, 1.3 km down the same road and part of the same municipality, has held the identical status since 1981. Two protected ensembles inside a municipality of 5,874 people is unusual, and the municipal tourism office leads with it.

Set your expectations to match the size of the place. Nothing in Cartes is ticketed, nothing is staffed, and neither the town hall nor the tourism site publishes opening hours or admission prices for a single monument in the municipality. The old street takes twenty minutes to walk properly; add Riocorvo and the Romanesque church at Yermo and you have a solid half day, which is exactly what Cartes is good for.

History

Cartes was the administrative head of the condado de Castañeda, held by the marqueses de Aguilar de Campoo, who were also the feudal lords of the village itself. The Manrique family, then counts of Castañeda and marquises of Aguilar, began the tower complex in 1421 as a defence against the neighbouring lords of la Vega, whose seat is now Torrelavega. By 1432 the building had become the seat of justice for the valle de Toranzo, serving as courtroom and prison, and later as the residence of the count’s corregidor.

What survives is two rectangular ashlar towers of two storeys, one taller than the other, standing on either side of the road and joined by thick walls pierced with pointed arches. The ground floors are blind to the street; you entered from the courtyard the arches enclose.

The houses grew along the road, each one built up against the next in a continuous terrace, because the road was the business. Hilario Alonso de Jorganes, director of the Camino Real, reformed the route in 1789, and the four-arched stone bridge with buttresses that carries it over the Besaya is from the same century. Water power went with the traffic: eight mills in the municipality were entered into the General Inventory of the Cultural Heritage of Cantabria in 2003, among them La Aceña in Cartes, the survivor of the group that once worked this stretch of river, and the Molino del Salto in Riocorvo, a flour mill later turned over to textiles.

Benito Pérez Galdós set his 1878 novel Marianela in the village, which is why the name Socartes turns up in Spanish reading lists rather than travel ones.

Visiting

Leave the car at the town hall end and walk the Camino Real from one end of the ensemble to the other; the protected street is registered under the code RI-53-0000332 and is about as long as a village street gets. The buildings run from the 15th to the 18th centuries and hold a consistent look thanks to their masonry fronts, so the interest is in the detail: coats of arms over doorways, balconies, the joins where one century’s house meets another’s.

You pass under the Torreón rather than into it. The complex was rehabilitated this century as an exhibition space, the Torreón de la Física, a University of Cantabria project built around practical experiments for secondary school students; it started in January 2004, shut for a year after the 2008 to 2009 school year and restarted in October 2010. No current timetable is published, so ring the information point before you count on getting inside. Then carry on to the 18th-century bridge over the Besaya, which is the other piece of the Camino Real still doing its original job.

Riocorvo

Riocorvo is 1.3 km away, holds 160 residents and was declared a conjunto histórico on 24 April 1981. It is a second dose of the same thing at a smaller scale: baroque casonas of the 17th and 18th centuries with family arms on the front, among them the Alonso Caballero house of the mid 18th century, the Velarde house of 1752 and the 18th-century Casa de los Púlpitos, plus a modest parish church finished in 1804.

Santa María de Yermo

The Romanesque church at Yermo is the best single building in the municipality and has been protected since 4 July 1930, when it was declared a national artistic treasure. A consecration plaque dates it to 1203 and credits the work to Pedro Quintana; it is a single nave closing in a semicircular apse, with a south portal of pointed arches, carved capitals and corbels, a tympanum showing what may be Saint George fighting a dragon, and round-arched windows crowned with lion heads and a lioness with cubs.

All of the carving that matters at Yermo is on the outside, which is convenient given that no visiting hours are published. Beyond the three set pieces, the town hall’s tourism pages list signposted walking routes in the municipality and three orienteering circuits, graded yellow for low difficulty, orange for medium and red for high.

Tips

• Nothing here costs anything. The historic street, the arches of the Torreón and the exterior of the Yermo church are all public and open at any hour; there is no ticket office to find.
• The tourist information point is inside the lobby of the town hall at Camino Real 98, 39311 Cartes, on +34 942 81 94 47. No hours are published for it, so phone before you plan a visit around it.
• Come by car if you can. The nearest Renfe station is Viérnoles, 1.5 km from Santiago de Cartes, and the nearest FEVE station is Torrelavega, 4 km away; buses are the ALSA Reinosa to Santander line and the Juan Ruiz San Felices to Torrelavega line.

• There is one taxi in the village, Taxi de Cartes on 657 87 88 98, and Santander airport is 30 km away. Do not assume you can flag a ride out of here in the evening.
• Sunday is the busiest day locally: Santiago de Cartes has held a weekly market every Sunday of the year since 1996.
• Other dates on the municipal calendar worth knowing: a medieval market in Cartes in June, San Roque in the village on 16 August, which carries Fiesta de Interés Local status, Santa María at Yermo on the first Sunday of September, and a living nativity in Cartes in December.
• Treat Cartes as a stop rather than a destination. The municipal tourism office pitches it as a base roughly 15 minutes from the Altamira museum, Cabárceno and the Saja-Besaya natural park, and that is a fair description of what it is good for.
• Bring a rain layer whatever the month. This is oceanic Cfb country, mild winters and cool summers with no sharp seasonal breaks, and rain falls in every season.
• For eating and sleeping, check the municipal listings at turismocartes.es rather than turning up hungry. The historic street is short and its bars are not guaranteed to be serving.