Destinations

Three Cantabrian valleys of summer pasture, where families still move uphill with the cows.

A sheltered green basin under the Picos de Europa, with a monastery, a cable car and Cantabria's best cheese.

A Gothic cathedral in Santander built over an earlier Romanesque church, with a preserved medieval crypt.

A refined Atlantic port city that serves as a perfect hub for exploring the Cantabrian coast

Santander’s elegant grand beach, framed by Belle Époque architecture and scenic coastal paths

The market town of Liébana, with stone bridges, towers, and the road up to the Picos.

A monastery holding a fragment of the True Cross, once one of Christianity's four holy places.

The main village of the Pas valley, and the home of the sobao pasiego.

A cable car that lifts you 750 metres into the Picos de Europa in four minutes.

The Sistine Chapel of prehistoric art featuring exquisite ancient bison paintings

A perfectly preserved medieval village in Cantabria serving as the gateway to ancient cave art

The highest of the Pasiego villages, up a dead-end valley of pastures and stone cabañas.

The anchovy town of the Cantabrian coast, backed by marshes full of birds.

A wild, dune-backed beach within the Dunas de Liencres Natural Park near Santander.

A cave of eccentric stalactites above the Rionansa valley, discovered by miners following a lead seam.

An early 20th-century royal summer palace on a peninsula overlooking Santander's bay.

A long sandy beach across the Bahía de Santander, reached by ferry from the city, popular for surfing.

A port town on the Cantabrian border with a Gothic church, a castle doubling as a lighthouse, and a good beach.

A cave above Puente Viesgo whose painted walls include the oldest known art in Europe, made by Neanderthals.

A wildlife park in an old open-cast iron mine, where animals range across 750 hectares of karst.

The Miera valley village on the pass road over to Burgos, surrounded by beech woods.

Beech and oak forest in Cantabria's western valleys, with the highest concentration of Cantabrian brown bears.

A fishing town at the mouth of a tidal ría, with a 28-arch medieval bridge and the Picos de Europa behind it.

Cantabria's ski area, on the southern slopes of the Cordillera above Reinosa, with runs from 1,650 metres.

The best-preserved medieval village in Cantabria, at the end of a valley road inside the Saja reserve.

A broken coast of sea stacks, arches and beaches between Santander and Liencres, protected as a geosite.

Gaudí's first commission outside Catalonia: a sunflower-tiled villa built for a Comillas emigrant in 1883.

A small coastal village with a Gaudí house, a palace by Domènech and a university built by returning emigrants.