We arrived in Santander on June 27th. We got a couple inexpensive flights through Ryan Air from Dublin via London. We had 6 days until we had to be in Granada, so we decided to land in northern Spain, see some of the sites in Green Spain and then work our way down to Granada by train. Santander is the capital of the Cantabria province and sits on the Bay of Biscayne.
Green Spain – the provinces in northern Spain that border the Atlantic Ocean – has temperate summer weather and is a vacation spot for many Spaniards that want to escape the heat of southern Spain. We found an inexpensive pension near the bus station. It was OK. I’ve stayed in better, but the price was right – 27 Euros for two people for two nights. We only did a little sightseeing the night of the 27th, because we were tired from traveling. However, we were out late enough to happen upon a plaza where about 5000 people were watching a World Cup match on a giant, outdoor TV screen.
The next morning, we headed out for some sightseeing before catching our bus for San Sebastian. The area near the bus station and our pension wasn’t the most picturesque in town. For that, you had to walk north from bus station along a pathway that runs along an inlet of the Bay of Biscayne. It was there that we found the quainter neighborhoods and the old mansions. As we kept walking north, there was a small peninsula, which contained the vacation palace for Spanish royalty.
