Santander
"Santander burned to the ground in 1941 and rebuilt itself wider and lighter, like a city that decided grief could also be an opportunity for better sightlines to the sea."
A Belle Époque resort city rebuilt from its own ashes, strung along a bay that royalty once chose over the whole rest of Spain's coast.
Santander doesn’t look like most of Cantabria, and that’s on purpose. A catastrophic fire in February 1941 — started, absurdly, by a hurricane-force wind fanning a chimney spark — tore through the old town and destroyed a huge swath of the medieval and Belle Époque city in a single night. What stands today downtown is mostly a wide, orderly mid-century rebuild, all straight avenues and generous plazas, which gives Santander a strange spaciousness that older Spanish cities don’t have. It took me a day of walking to stop expecting narrow medieval lanes and start appreciating what the city chose instead: room to breathe, and constant, unbroken views of the bay.
A Bay Built for Kings
The Bahía de Santander is the real reason the city exists in its current form. It’s enormous and nearly enclosed, calm water ringed by green hills, and in the early twentieth century it became fashionable enough that King Alfonso XIII had the Palacio de la Magdalena built on its own peninsula jutting into the bay, a gift from the city to the royal family in 1912 that turned Santander into Spain’s aristocratic summer capital for a couple of decades. I walked the Magdalena peninsula on a bright, windy afternoon — the palace itself is eclectic, part English country house, part Cantabrian stone pile, ringed by cliffside lawns where deer and seals (yes, seals, kept in a small enclosure near the peninsula’s tip) somehow coexist with sunbathing students from the university that now uses the grounds each summer.
From there the Sardinero district picks up the same Belle Époque thread — grand casino, wide promenade, two sweeping beaches (Primera and Segunda Playa del Sardinero) that fill with surfers even in decidedly un-Mediterranean weather, because this is the Atlantic coast, and the water has a colder, sharper temperament than anything you’d find in southern Spain.
Rabas, Fishermen’s Quarters, and the Cantabrian Table
Down by the port, the Puerto Chico marina and the old fishermen’s neighborhood around Calle Río de la Pila are where Santander actually feeds you. This is rabas territory — thick-cut fried squid rings, a Santander specialty distinct from the thin calamari rings you get elsewhere in Spain — and I ate a plate of them standing at a zinc bar with a glass of local sidra, watching the fishing boats work the harbor. Cantabria’s cuisine leans hard on the Cantabrian Sea itself: anchovies from Santoña down the coast, rich seafood stews, sobaos and quesada pasiega for dessert if you have room, which after rabas I mostly didn’t.
The cathedral, one of the few medieval structures that survived the fire more or less intact, sits on a low rise above the port — a squat, dark Gothic building with a crypt whose vaulted arches still show scorch marks from a much earlier fire in 1893, a city apparently used to rebuilding itself before 1941 ever came along.
Santander isn’t trying to be Spain’s most photogenic city, and after the fire it couldn’t have been even if it wanted to. What it offers instead is a genuinely different register of Spanish coastal life — cooler, greener, Atlantic rather than Mediterranean, built around a bay so handsome that a king once decided it deserved his own summer palace.
When to go: July and August bring the mildest, sunniest weather this far north on the Atlantic coast, though the water stays bracingly cold; June and September offer a quieter, still-pleasant alternative.