Travels in the North: Cantabria

This past week, a few friends and I took advantage of our fall break to travel to Northern Spain. From my perspective, this part of the country is often overlooked by travelers because it's not Barcelona, Madrid, Sevilla or any of the other famous destinations and isn't included as part of the quintessential "Spanish" experience. For me, however, the region is a dream come true: everything is lusciously green and dotted with cows and sheep, the coastline is jagged and rocky and the temperature is much more moderate. While Southern Spain is the world of Spanish stereotypes (flamenco, bulls, paella and gazpacho), Northern Spain is home to hiking trails, the Atlantic Ocean and breathtaking views of nature. I knew that I wanted to visit this region even before I got to Spain, because I knew it would be incredibly different from Granada and I was interested in seeing what else the country had to offer. 

Since we only had a week, we decided to focus our travels on two autonomous communities: Cantabria and Pais Vasco (Basque Country in English). I have a lot of photos from each, so I'm going to split the journey into two posts based on location. 

Our flight from Malaga brought us to Santander, the Cantabrian capital. Santander sits right on the coast of a large bay, and includes a peninsula that juts out into the water and is lined with sandy beaches and rocky shores. The city itself has a very different feel from Granada: without the Muslim influence of Al-Andalus, it's a lot more similar to other Western European cities like London and Paris. In a way, it also reminded me of the Oregon Coast with the green trees, crashing waves and misty climate. 

While in Santander, we visited the Centro Botin, a large modern art museum overlooking the water that only had one exhibit (with the work of Alexander Calder, who is actually American), the cathedral and the city center. On our last full day in Santander, we rented city bikes and spent over four hours riding around the peninsula and exploring the coast. 

During the three days we spent in Santander, we took a day trip to Santillana del Mar, a tiny town about an hour from the city that probably at least doubles it population size in tourists each year. The village is absolutely filled with cows - at one point we were walking down a residential street and two giant cows rounded the corner and started to slowly follow us. We hiked to the top of the hill to visit the Cave of Altamira, which has giant prehistoric cave paintings, ate our picnic lunch on a bench overlooking the town, wandered the streets and took pictures of horses and cows and for some reason visited the Museum of Torture (which graphically showcases all of the ways people were tortured during the Spanish Inquisition).

Since we didn't have a car, our method of transportation was almost exclusively bus. The bus system is Spain is pretty elaborate and popular, so it was relatively easy to find tickets and stations, even in small places like Santillana. The hard part was finding the buses themselves, since the destinations on the tickets didn't always match up with the destination listed on the bus, and at a lot of stations the platform wouldn't be shown on the screen until the minute the bus pulled up. After something like seven buses in five days and several Spanish conversations with strangers and drivers because we were confused, I was glad to take a break from the bus life. 

Overall, I'm overjoyed that I had the chance to visit Cantabria, especially since it wasn't originally on my list of northern regions. I would 100% recommend it to anyone who is thinking of traveling to Spain and wants to experience the true and gorgeous nature of the country.