The next stop on our Euro tour was also the most obscure, but it had solid reasoning behind it. Two years prior to this trip, I spent 8 weeks studying Spanish at an international university in Santander, as had the third member of our little travel party. It’s more of a travel destination for other Spaniards and has apparently become more popular with other European countries over the past few years, but I had never even heard of it before I started looking into my study abroad options. That being said, since I knew I was already going to be in Spain, I wanted to go back, and I was eager to show off my “Spanish hometown” to Ashley.
We took a morning bus from the Madrid airport to Santander, which took about 5 hours and cost $35 each. I picked Hotel NH Ciudad de Santander mainly for it’s fairly central location within the city, and because I knew everything that I wanted to do was walkable from there. We were there for two nights, and only splitting the hotel between two of us as our other friend was both staying with her host mother and staying longer than we were, and it cost us each $71 total.
As we got into Santander mid-afternoon, we spent the rest of that evening walking through el Centro, the more “downtown” area of the city. I made sure to walk past the big cathedral, which is gorgeous and part of one of the paths of el Camino de Santiago, and to walk along the harbor area of the city. It wasn’t built yet when we were there, but there is now an art museum called Centro Botin that has become a big draw to the city. After finding a little place that offered traditional Spanish tapas and sangria, and failing to find a specific little street of bars that I had gone to during my study abroad, we ended up calling it a fairly early first night in Santander.
We spent our second day exploring the other half of the city. There’s an underground vehicle and walking tunnel called Tunel de Tetuán that gets you from the beaches to el Centro without having to walk the steep hills of the city, and I tend to think of the two sides of the tunnel as the two sides of the city. We started our day walking to and around Sardinero, the main beach of Santander. From there, we walked along the cliffs and bluffs, past Playa de las Mataleñas, and up to the lighthouse, Faro de Cabo Mayor. We joined back up with our third friend and her host mother, who treated us (well, Ashley, because I don’t like seafood) to paella, the traditional Spanish dish, at a restaurant near the lighthouse called Restaurante El Barco.
Our final stop of the day – excluding the house that I lived in and the university I attended, which are of no importance to anyone else – was el Palacio de la Magdalena. The palace used to be the summer home of the Spanish royal family, but is now owned by and hosts classes provided by the Universidad Internacional Menendez Pelayo. Both the palace itself and the peninsula it sits on are beautiful and definitely worth exploring. It costs about $5 to get into the palace and take the guided tour (which is only offered in Spanish), but it’s a tour worth doing if you understand the language. I did it when I was originally in Santander, and this time we got a bit of an added tour as our friend’s host mother worked for the UIMP and had special access to the Palacio.
Total cost for Santander (including transportation there, but not food/taxis/souvenirs/etc): ~$110
