Cantabria on Spain’s north coast is presented as a place where visitors can move through time, from prehistoric cave art to medieval streets and literary references to Jean-Paul Sartre. Alyssa McMurtry wrote that exploring the area west of Santander feels like being in a time machine and that within a half-hour drive of the Cantabrian capital on Spain’s green northern coast, travelers can find prehistoric cave art, a perfectly preserved medieval town and a laid-back beach resort.
Who Gets to Enter the Past
The trip began at the Cave of Altamira, a Unesco world heritage site, where the original cave was largely closed to the public decades ago to protect fragile paintings and visitors instead enter the Neocueva, a painstakingly reconstructed replica built beside it that costs €3 to enter. The arrangement is familiar enough: the real thing is sealed off, the public is routed through a managed substitute, and access comes with a fee. The cave’s paintings of bison and deer were made by hunter-gatherers who lived there 13,000 to 36,000 years ago, using the cave’s natural bumps and hollows to give the animals a three-dimensional presence.
The cave’s main entrance was sealed around 13,000 years ago by rockfall. It was discovered in 1868 by a local hunter and brought to wider attention by amateur archaeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola. In 1880, Sautuola first presented the paintings to the scientific community, and many experts dismissed them as fakes. Even here, the gatekeepers of legitimacy had to be convinced before the past was allowed into the official record.
What the Route Is Selling
Santillana del Mar, described as the small medieval town that serves as Altamira’s gateway, traces its origins back to the ninth century, when monks carrying the relics of Saint Juliana settled there and built a small hermitage. Around it grew a monastery, then homes, farms and workshops. During the middle ages, the town flourished as part of the Astur-Leonese kingdom and became an important stop for pilgrims traveling along the Camino de Santiago.
In 1209, King Alfonso VIII granted the town a charter. The town sits close to the start of the Camino Lebaniego, a less well-known pilgrimage route that winds inland to the monastery of Santo Toribio de Liébana in the Picos de Europa mountains. Cantabria is the only region in the world crossed by two Christian pilgrimage routes recognized as Unesco world heritage sites. The article presents this as heritage and wonder; the machinery underneath is a long chain of religious authority, royal privilege and institutional recognition.
The piece says that in 1935 Jean-Paul Sartre visited Santillana with Simone de Beauvoir, and that a few years later Santillana appeared in Nausea, Sartre’s first novel, where the narrator points to a photograph and describes it as “the prettiest town in Spain” during a conversation about the nature of adventure. The article also quotes the Self-Taught Man in Nausea: “Getting on the wrong train. Stopping in an unknown city. Losing your briefcase, being arrested by mistake, spending the night in prison,” and “Monsieur, I believed the word adventure could be defined: an event out of the ordinary without being necessarily extraordinary.”
The Leisure Economy Keeps Moving
The travel piece also says the family stopped at Casa Quevedo bakery, where the same family has served fresh milk and cakes since the 1950s. From Santillana, it is a 10-minute drive to Suances, where the family checked into Costa Esmeralda Suites, a five-star hotel offering generous off-season discounts, with red carpets, a Ferrari theme and enormous whirlpools. Nearby places mentioned include Playa de la Concha, Playa de Los Locos, the Marcelo Gourmet bar and restaurant, Bonito Verde, Suka and Castillo de Los Locos.
A resident named Inma said, “Other surf towns in the area are dead in winter, but Suances is always full of life.” Surfers paddle out in wetsuits out of summer, sometimes with views of the snow-capped Picos de Europa mountains behind them. The article says the writer ordered rabas and squid-ink croquetas at Bonito Verde and visited Castillo de Los Locos for breakfast.
On the last morning, the writer walked along the thin peninsula between Playa de Los Locos and La Concha, listened to birdsong, watched waves crash against the cliffs and said, “Standing there, breathing the salt air and feeling the sun, I relaxed.” The article ends with Sartre’s line from Nausea: “But you have to choose,” followed by “Live or tell.”
The choice on offer here is the familiar one: consume the curated past, pay for the replica, admire the chartered town, and move along the route laid out by heritage, tourism and prestige. The article wraps all of it in literary romance, but the structure is plain enough. The past is packaged, access is managed, and the region is sold back as an experience.