Santander travel guide

Top 10 sights in Santander

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© Fernandopascullo · CC BY 3.0

   Palacio de la Magdalena

   A palace on a peninsula at Santander, paid for by public subscription and given to Alfonso XIII in 1912 as a summer residence. The headland around it is a public park, and the palace now hosts a summer university.

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2. 

   2© Fernando · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Santander Cathedral

   The cathedral of Santander in Spain, dedicated to the Assumption. Its frame is Gothic, with later enlargements and alterations mixed into it.

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3. 

   3© Josep Panadero · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Sardinero

   Santander's grand beach, some 1,300 metres of golden sand between the Magdalena peninsula and Matalenas, cut in two by the Piquio gardens. A wide promenade runs its full length past hotels, restaurants and the casino of 1916.

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4. 

   4© Codigowiki · CC BY-SA 3.0 es

   Cueva de El Pendo

   A prehistoric cave in Cantabria, Spain. It was inhabited from the Middle Palaeolithic, around 82,000 BC, until roughly 1500 BC.

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5. 

   5© Samu · CC BY 2.0

   Cabarceno Natural Park

   A zoo and nature reserve at Penagos, seventeen kilometres south of Santander in Spain. It occupies 750 hectares of karst on the site of an abandoned open-cast iron mine, which has been left as it was found.

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6. 

   6© Angel de los Rios from Valladolid, Spain · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Botin Centre

   An art centre on the Santander waterfront designed by Renzo Piano and opened in 2017, two tile-clad volumes lifted on columns so that the park runs underneath and out to the bay.

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7. 

   7© Mario modesto · CC BY-SA 3.0

   La Garma cave complex

   A cave system north of the village of Omoño in Cantabria in Spain. Its Palaeolithic floor levels are among the best preserved anywhere, with four thousand fossils and more than five hundred wall paintings recorded.

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8. 

   8© AVANTI · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Museo de Arte Moderno y Contemporáneo de Santander y Cantabria

   An art museum in Santander in Spain, also known as the MAS, dealing with modern and contemporary art.

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9. 

   9© Emilio Gómez Fernández · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Playa de los Bikinis

   A small beach below the Magdalena palace at the eastern end of Santander bay, sheltered by the peninsula. It took its name in the 1960s, when the first bikinis on this coast were worn on its sand.

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10. 

    10© AxelPresno · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Cantabrian coast

    The roughly 150-kilometre coastline of Cantabria in northern Spain, a run of cliffs, sandy beaches and river mouths one after another.

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1. 

   1© Luis Rogelio HM · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Arnía

   A beach in Cantabria in Spain between Piélagos and Santa Cruz de Bezana, inside the Liencres dunes and Costa Quebrada natural park. Rock stacks more than ninety million years old stand out of the sea in front of it.

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2. 

   2© Codigowiki · CC BY-SA 3.0 es

   Castle of Pedraja

   A castle that stood on Mount La Picota above Liencres in Cantabria in Spain. Garcilaso de la Vega appears to have built it in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century to hold the lordship of La Vega, and from 1403 it was the administrative and judicial centre of the Vega family.

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