Santander

Overview

Santander is a port city of about 175,000 people laid out along the north shore of a deep bay, with the commercial docks and ferry berths at the west end and two open Atlantic beaches at the east. Almost every street eventually turns downhill towards the water, and the walk from the cathedral to the sand is the single thing most visitors come to do.

Very little of the centre is as old as it looks. A fire that broke out on 15 February 1941 in Calle Cádiz, next to the harbour, was pushed through the medieval quarter by a strong south wind and flattened the historic centre in under 48 hours. One firefighter, sent from Madrid, died; thousands of families lost their homes. The city names the Correos building, the Banco de España and the Iglesia del Cristo as the only structures on that side of town to come through it. What replaced them is a mid-century grid of granite-faced civic blocks, which is why the casco reads as orderly rather than tangled.

The layer that does survive is the seaside-resort one. Sea bathing, the baños de ola, was first advertised in La Gaceta de Madrid in 1846; Isabel II holidayed at El Sardinero in 1861; and the city eventually handed Alfonso XIII the Magdalena peninsula and a palace on it, finished in 1912, where the royal family spent every summer from 1913 to 1930. The Gran Casino and the Hotel Real both opened in 1916 to house that crowd, the Bellavista racecourse in 1917.

The modern signature is Centro Botín, Renzo Piano’s art centre on the waterfront, opened on 23 June 2017. Santander has been the capital of Cantabria since 1983, when the autonomous community was constituted, and it still does the region’s administrative and commercial work rather than living off visitors.

In practice: walk the bay front, swim or sit at El Sardinero, eat rabas and cocido montañés, and use the city as a base for the painted caves and the Picos de Europa inland.

Neighbourhoods

The city reads as four strips: the rebuilt centre behind the port, the promenade and marina along the bay, the peninsula, and the resort quarter at El Sardinero. Inland of all of them is the residential Santander that most people actually live in.

Centro

Squares rather than lanes are what organise this district. Plaza Porticada, properly Plaza de Velarde, hosted the first Festival Internacional de Música y Danza in 1952 under Ataulfo Argenta and José Manuel Riancho, and still takes concerts and exhibitions. Plaza Pombo, a block away, holds the Casa Pombo or Club de Regatas, the oldest recreational society in the city, and keeps a Sunday-morning habit of children swapping football stickers. Plaza Alfonso XIII, known locally as the plaza of the streetlamps, has the 1918 Correos building in montañés regionalist style and the 1924 Banco de España. Most mid-range hotels and the two stations are inside this square kilometre, which makes it the default base.

Bay front and Puertochico

The Jardines de Pereda opened in 1905 as the Jardines del Muelle and took their present name in 1911 when the monument to the novelist José María de Pereda went up in them. East of them the promenade runs past Centro Botín to Puertochico, the small-craft marina, and on to the Gamazo esplanade, rebuilt around the 2014 sailing world championships together with the Zaera dune. This is the most-walked ground in Santander at any hour, and the Cañadío to Puertochico stretch is one of the city’s seven official eating zones.

El Sardinero

Holiday Santander rather than working Santander. Plaza de Italia faces the Primera beach with the casino on it, and the Jardines de Piquío, laid out in 1925 on the Piquillo rock, split the two beaches at high tide and give the best viewpoint over both. Behind Segunda beach, the Parque de Mesones sits between the sand and the Campos de Sport, home of Racing. It is a separate world from the casco, and in winter a much quieter one.

Inland and the university edge

The Vaguada de Las Llamas park opened in 2007 on former marshland at the foot of the University of Cantabria campus: 11 hectares of paths, ponds, bike lane, a café and the Escenario Santander concert hall. Around it are the ordinary residential districts, worth knowing about mainly because they explain the bus network. Further west, the Barrio Pesquero is the fishing quarter and forms one of the city’s eating zones together with Calle Castilla and La Hermida.

Across the bay

Boats run daily from the Paseo Marítimo to Pedreña and Somo on the far shore. Somo is the surf side, Pedreña the golf village, and both make a half day out of a €4 ticket. The northern edge of the municipality, around La Maruca, San Román and Cueto, is a further eating zone and the least touristed part of the city.

See & do

Everything worth a morning sits on one axis: the cathedral at the west end, the bay-front promenade running east past Centro Botín and the marina, the wooded Magdalena peninsula in the middle, and the Sardinero beaches beyond it. You can do the lot on foot in a long day.

Centro Botín

Renzo Piano’s building is two rounded, tile-clad pavilions lifted on columns over the Jardines de Pereda, the western half given to art and the eastern half to cultural and teaching activity, with two large exhibition halls, a 300-seat auditorium, a shop and a café-restaurant. General admission is €9 booked online or €10 at the desk, €5 concession, free for under-18s and free to everyone on 18 May and 12 October. October to May it opens Tuesday to Friday 10:00 to 14:00 and 16:00 to 20:00, and 10:00 to 20:00 at weekends; June to September it runs Tuesday to Sunday 10:00 to 20:00, plus every Monday in July and August.

Magdalena peninsula and the Royal Palace

Twenty-five hectares of headland closing the bay, and the most-used green space in the city. Inside it there are small beaches, a marine enclosure with seals, sea lions and penguins, the open-air El Hombre y La Mar exhibition, the Royal Stables, the Faro de la Cerda and the old keepers’ house, now a tourist office. The palace at the top was designed by Gonzalo Bringas and Javier González de Riancho and has been the main venue for the Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo summer courses since 1933. A standard guided visit of the interior is €7, reduced €5, free under 6; the theatrical and premium versions cost €16. Once a tour has started you cannot join it, so arrive early.

Museo de Prehistoria y Arqueología de Cantabria

The regional prehistory museum occupies 2,000 m² inside the Mercado del Este at Calle Hernán Cortés 4, a market building put up between 1839 and 1842 to plans by A. Zabaleta and listed in 1986. More than 1,200 pieces run from the Upper Palaeolithic to the Middle Ages, a good share of them from Altamira and Puente Viesgo. Entry is €6 for anyone 13 or over, €3 for children aged 4 to 12, and free on Sunday afternoons from 17:00 to 20:00 with last entry at 19:30.

Museo Marítimo del Cantábrico

More than 3,000 m² of exhibition on the shoreline between the San Martín promontory and Los Peligros beach, split into marine biology, fishing ethnography, maritime history and marine technology, with aquariums of Cantabrian species. It opened in 1981. Adults 13 to 64 pay €10, reduced €7; hours are Tuesday to Sunday 10:00 to 18:00 from 1 October to 31 May and 10:00 to 19:00 from 1 June to 30 September, closed Mondays.

The cathedral and the Anillo Cultural

The cathedral sits on the rise above the port, and the interesting part of it is underneath and around. Its bell tower holds an interpretation centre on the city’s history, and 70 metres of a Civil War air-raid shelter have been opened up alongside stone walls from the castle of San Felipe, the chapel of San Pedro and tenth-century remains found during works. The same municipal circuit takes in a stretch of thirteenth-century town wall under Plaza de Velarde, a second shelter under Plaza del Príncipe, and Roman remains including baths inside the Iglesia del Santísimo Cristo.

Free art, and a lot of it

The city counts 54 museums and exhibition spaces, and a large number cost nothing. The MAS, founded in 1908, holds work by Goya, Miró, María Blanchard and Luis Quintanilla; the Naves de Gamazo, former port warehouses, have housed the ENAIRE contemporary collection since July 2021; and the Palacete del Embarcadero, built in 1920 as a passenger terminal, has been an exhibition hall since 1985. The Machichaco museum in the ferry terminal covers the 1893 dockside explosion, Tuesday to Sunday 08:00 to 20:30.

Beaches, headlands and the lighthouse

Los Peligros is the closest beach to the centre; La Magdalena and Bikini sit inside the peninsula on bay water with almost no swell; La Concha, Primera and Segunda del Sardinero face the open Atlantic. Segunda is the biggest beach in Santander and, by the city’s own account, the first place anyone surfed in Spain. North of them the coast turns to cliff and small coves at Molinucos, Mataleñas, Rosamunda and La Maruca, and the Cabo Mayor lighthouse holds an art centre with three rooms and a permanent Eduardo Sanz show.

Day trips

Cabárceno, where nearly 150 species live semi-free across a former open-cast mining site, is a little over 15 minutes away by car. Altamira lies 2.6 km from Santillana del Mar; the original cave is restricted, but the replica next to the museum is not. Nine more Cantabrian caves carry the same UNESCO listing, among them El Pendo at Escobedo just outside the city and the four Monte Castillo caves at Puente Viesgo. Further out, the Picos de Europa cover some 700 km² and the Fuente Dé cable car lifts you to 1,823 metres, near Potes.

Food & drink

The city’s own tourist board calls rabas, lightly battered fried squid, the star plate of Santander, and it is not exaggerating: they turn up on nearly every bar menu, ordered by the ración to share before anything else arrives. Around them sits a short, repeatable list: bay fish and shellfish landed at the market that morning, beef from the inland valleys, and the small quesucos cheeses from the same valleys.

What to order

Beyond rabas, the two dishes that mark this coast are cocido montañés, a white bean and cabbage stew with a pork compango, and the seafood plates: clams, razor clams, seabream, red mullet, anchovies, seabass, sardines, squid and cuttlefish. For pudding, rosquillas dobles are the local sweet biscuit. Cured anchovy fillets in oil, from the canning ports along this coast, are a tinned product rather than a grilled fish; if a bar lists anchoas and you get something fresh and vinegared, you have been served boquerones, which is a different and cheaper thing.

The seven eating zones

The city divides its restaurant map into seven areas, which is a more useful frame than any list of addresses: Calderón de la Barca and Cádiz; Cañadío and Puertochico; Castilla, La Hermida and the Barrio Pesquero; El Sardinero; La Maruca, San Román and Cueto; Plaza Porticada and Pombo; and Vargas, San Fernando and Burgos. Cañadío to Puertochico is the densest for tapas and evening eating, the Barrio Pesquero the most straightforwardly fish-led, and Vargas to Burgos the one where locals outnumber visitors at lunch.

Markets

There are four covered food markets: Esperanza, México, Puertochico and Este. The Mercado de la Esperanza runs 09:00 to 14:00 on its own square, with farm produce on Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, clothing and footwear on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, and a general stall market on Sunday mornings. Go before noon or the fish counters are already packing up. The Mercado del Este no longer trades in food at all: its hall is now the prehistory museum.

Nightlife

Plaza de Cañadío is the answer to where the city drinks. It sits directly behind Plaza Pombo, was occupied by the city’s largest brewery before it was a square, and is now the main meeting point for a night out. Terraces fill from about eight, the streets running off it hold the bars, and the whole thing is walkable from any centro hotel.

Santander is a mid-sized capital and the calendar shapes the noise more than the day of the week does. Between October and April the casco carries the nightlife on its own; from June the crowd spreads east to El Sardinero, one of the seven zones the city marks for eating and drinking, and stays out considerably later.

Where each area sits on the scale

Cañadío and the lanes towards Puertochico are the busiest and the youngest. The marina and the Paseo de Pereda are quieter and later-eating rather than later-drinking, with bay views doing most of the work. El Sardinero is seasonal, built around the Plaza de Italia terraces and the casino, and largely shuts down out of season. Vargas, San Fernando and Burgos, inland from the centre, is where the local weeknight crowd goes.

The casino

The Gran Casino Sardinero, opened in 1916 as part of the building spree that followed the royal summers, still runs a gaming floor and also keeps an exhibition room, a conference room and event salons. Worth a look for the building and the position over the Primera beach even if you have no intention of playing.

Concerts rather than clubs

For anything programmed, the Palacio de Festivales de Cantabria is the venue: built in 1990 to a Sáenz de Oiza design, with three halls, the Argenta, the Pereda and a Greek-style theatre, and home to the Festival Internacional de Santander, the city’s biggest annual cultural event. Bigger touring acts play the Escenario Santander hall in the Las Llamas park. Proper late clubs are thin on the ground compared with Bilbao or Oviedo; do not build a trip here around them.

When to go

Santander runs an oceanic Cfb climate: August averages a high of 21.9°C, January 11.8°C, and the sea keeps the extremes off in both directions. Annual rainfall is about 1,198 mm, driest in July at roughly 61 mm and wettest in November at roughly 160 mm. The tourist board’s own summary is that daytime averages sit between 21 and 24°C in the good months and that nights cool down enough to sleep under a blanket in July.

March to May

Cool, green and unreliable. Rain comes through in fronts, and the city’s own warning is that the weather can change several times inside a single day, drizzle to cloud to a hard northeasterly and a clear blue sky. Bring a waterproof rather than an umbrella. Holy Week brings processions through the casco and the maritime museum extends its closing time to 19:00 from Viernes de Dolores to Easter Sunday.

June

The shoulder, and arguably the best-value month. Beaches are open and uncrowded on weekdays, hotel prices have not yet gone up, and museum summer timetables kick in on 1 June. The sea is still cold enough to be a decision rather than a pleasure.

July and August

Peak, by a wide margin. The Semana Grande fiestas grew out of the Santiago celebrations that a publican called Santiago González started staging at the Alto de Miranda around 1853, and they have been the city’s main summer event ever since. The Festival Internacional de Santander runs at the Palacio de Festivales and is the largest cultural fixture of the year. Hotel prices peak, beaches are properly busy at weekends, and the ferry sailings fill months in advance.

September

The month to aim for if you can choose. Daytime temperatures hold, the Spanish school holidays end mid-month, and the crowds thin faster than the warmth does. Museums stay on summer hours until 30 September.

October to February

Wet and mild rather than cold, with November the wettest month of the year. El Sardinero shuts down, the casco does not, and hotel prices drop hard. Museum winter timetables start on 1 October, and everything closes on 1 and 6 January and on 24, 25 and 31 December. The compensation is the clear days that arrive between fronts, when the light across the bay is the best you will see all year.

Getting there

Four ways in, and the ferry is the one that makes Santander unusual: you can drive onto a boat in England and drive off it in the middle of a Spanish city.

By ferry

Brittany Ferries runs weekly sailings to Santander from Plymouth and Portsmouth, and also serves Cork. The terminal is on the bay front in the city itself, not out of town, so foot passengers walk into the centre. Local enquiries go through 942 360 611. Summer sailings sell out early; if you are taking a vehicle in August, book months ahead.

By air

Seve Ballesteros-Santander Airport is 5 km from the centre. Air Nostrum, Binter, Iberia, Ryanair, Volotea and Vueling all operate here, with direct domestic links to Alicante, Almería, Barcelona, Granada, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote, Madrid, Málaga, Palma de Mallorca, Seville, Tenerife and Valencia, and international routes including Birmingham, Bologna, Brussels, Bucharest, Dublin, Edinburgh, London, Marrakesh, Paris, Sofia, Tirana and Venice. The S4 bus connects the airport to the city’s bus station in under 20 minutes; taxis and car hire are at the terminal. Frequencies and destinations expand noticeably for the summer season, so a route that exists in July may not exist in January.

By train

Both railways use Plaza de las Estaciones in the centre, five minutes’ walk from the bay front. Renfe connects Santander with Palencia, Valladolid, Madrid and Alicante; FEVE, the narrow-gauge Cantabrian coast line, runs to Bilbao, Oviedo and smaller places along the coast. The station handles about three million passengers a year. The narrow-gauge line is slow and worth taking for its own sake rather than to get anywhere quickly.

By bus and by car

The bus station stands opposite the railway stations, with national and international services; enquiries on 942 211 995. Driving, the two roads that matter are the A-8 Cantabrian motorway along the coast and the A-67, which climbs south to Palencia and the Castilian plateau. Cruise ships also call at the bay in season. For visa and entry basics see the country guide.

Getting around

Walking covers most of it. The centre’s distances are short, and where the ground rises the city has installed funiculars, lifts, escalators and mechanical ramps to take the climb out of the steeper streets. They are free, they are marked on the city’s accessibility documents, and they turn several “uphill, forget it” streets into shortcuts.

Buses

The municipal operator, TUS, sells a single at €1.30, valid on one line with no transfer. The rechargeable card is much better value: it costs €1.00 from tobacconists and kiosks, brings the fare down to €0.66 a trip, and includes a free transfer to a different line within the hour, with a €6 minimum top-up. Two rides pay for the card. Line information is on 942 200 771 and the customer office is on Calle La Paz.

Boats across the bay

Los Reginas runs the regular Santander to Pedreña and Somo service from the Paseo Marítimo, next to the Palacete del Embarcadero. A single is €4.00 and a return €6.50, with separate weekday and weekend timetables. The same company runs bay tours and a trip up the Cubas river. For a beach day on the far shore this beats driving round the bay, and the crossing itself is the best view of the city you will get.

Bikes

Santander has 18 km of bike lane, and the ground along the bay is flat enough for anyone. There are racks on the Paseo de Pereda by the tourist office and at the Centro Botín amphitheatre, and the city also lists electric bike hire and carsharing among its transport options.

Taxis and driving

Taxi ranks are spread across the centre; the two nearest Centro Botín are at Paseo de Pereda 22 and Calvo Sotelo 16 by the post office, and the radio numbers are 942 369 191 and 942 333 333. If you are driving in, use the central car parks rather than hunting for a space: Alfonso XIII, Cachavas, Pombo and the Ayuntamiento are all within 600 metres of the waterfront.

Getting to the day trips

A car is worth hiring for one day rather than the whole trip. Cabárceno is a quarter of an hour out; Santillana del Mar and Altamira sit west along the coast; the Pasiego valleys are about 40 minutes inland; the Picos and the Fuente Dé cable car are a longer haul south. The Camino Lebaniego, a 72 km World Heritage route inscribed in 2015, links the coast to the monastery of Santo Toribio and can be joined in sections.

Where to stay

Base yourself in the centre unless the trip is specifically about the beach. Everything a first visit wants is inside a twenty-minute walk of Plaza Pombo: the bay-front promenade, Centro Botín, the eating zones around Cañadío and Porticada, the ferry terminal and both stations.

Centro and the bay front

This is where most of the mid-range stock sits, including a cluster on Calle Cádiz, Calle Burgos, Calle Hernán Cortés and the Paseo Menéndez Pelayo above the bay. Rooms facing the water cost more and are worth it only if you will actually be in them at the right hours. Expect roughly €100 to €180 for a mid-range double in high season and appreciably less between November and February.

El Sardinero

The resort end, and the grander end. The Hotel Real opened in 1916 in the same wave of building that produced the Gran Casino, put up to accommodate the crowd that followed the royal family to the Magdalena. Around it are beach hotels and holiday apartments on the streets behind the two Sardinero beaches. Reaching the casco means a bus or a long walk along the bay, and outside summer the immediate surroundings go quiet.

Around the stations

Cheaper hotels and hostales sit close to Plaza de las Estaciones, useful for a late train arrival or an early ferry, with the casco five minutes away on foot. Hostel dorm beds and simple guesthouse rooms are the budget end; the area is practical rather than pretty.

Apartments, and the two weeks to avoid

Short-term rentals are plentiful, and Cantabria has tightened the rules on them, so look for a tourism licence number on the listing and cross-check it against the official accommodation guide. The pinch points are Semana Grande, the summer fiestas that grew out of the Santiago celebrations of the 1850s, and the Festival Internacional de Santander, which fills the Palacio de Festivales through its run. Book those two to three months out or stay somewhere else in Cantabria and come in by bus.

Rural bases nearby

If the trip is really about the mountains, the inland valleys make a better base than the city, with the Pasiego valleys about 40 minutes away and the Liébana valley further south towards the Picos.

Practical info

Currency, plugs, tipping and tap water are covered in the country guide. What follows is specific to Santander.

Tourist offices and phone numbers

The main city tourism site is turismo.santander.es and the switchboard is +34 942 203 000. There is a tourist office inside the Magdalena peninsula, in the old keepers’ house. Numbers worth saving before you arrive: airport 942 202 100, bus station 942 211 995, Brittany Ferries 942 360 611, bay boats 942 216 753.

Accessibility

Santander has worked at this harder than most Spanish cities of its size. Every traffic light carries a device for visually impaired pedestrians, adapted taxis are increasing, and the town hall has an accessible entrance, a hearing loop, braille signage, lowered counters and an adapted toilet. The Magdalena palace, the sports palace and the exhibition centre all have easy entrances, reserved parking and adapted toilets, and the Anillo Cultural sites carry QR codes with audio and sign-language guides. The prehistory museum has an accessible entrance and lift; the maritime museum has a ramp, a lift and reserved parking.

Museum planning

Both regional museums close on Mondays and on 1 and 6 January and 24, 25 and 31 December, and both advise arriving at least 45 minutes before closing. The prehistory museum runs free general guided tours at 10:30, 12:00, 17:15 and 17:45, with a single afternoon tour at 17:30 on Tuesdays and none on Sunday afternoons; booking is on 942 209 922. The maritime museum only sells same-day tickets at the desk, subject to availability, so book ahead on 942 274 962 in summer. Centro Botín cuts its hours to 17:00 on 5 January and on 24 and 31 December, and closes on 1 January and 25 December.

Toilets, wi-fi and left luggage

The bus station, the railway stations and the ferry terminal all have public toilets, and cafés are the normal solution everywhere else. Centro Botín’s ground-floor space has free wi-fi, toilets, baby-changing facilities and a quiet room for feeding infants, and does not require a ticket to enter. For anything left on a bus, TUS runs a lost property line on 942 200 689.

Safety and what to expect

This is a low-drama city by Spanish urban standards, with the usual caveat about crowds: keep a hand on your bag during the summer fiestas and on packed beach-bound buses. The one genuine local hazard is the sea. The Sardinero beaches face the open Atlantic, swell can build quickly, and the northern coves at Molinucos, Mataleñas and La Maruca are natural, unpatrolled and reached down cliff paths. Swim off the lifeguarded urban beaches, which the city equips with lifesaving services, showers and adapted facilities in season.