Santander
Cantabria’s bayside capital, rebuilt after the 1941 fire, with Renzo Piano’s Centro Botín on the waterfront.
Destination
Bermeo
Capital of Bizkaia from 1476 to 1602 and still the Basque Country’s leading fishing port, with Gaztelugatxe inside the same municipality.
Zarautz
At 2.5 km, Zarautz is the longest beach on the Basque coast — an everyday seaside town and one of Europe’s best places to learn to surf.
Getaria
The village where Elcano was baptised and Balenciaga was born, under a headland shaped like a mouse, with fish grilled on the pavement.
Zumaia Flysch
Cliffs at Itzurun beach record about 60 million years of seabed in readable layers, including the asteroid-impact extinction boundary.
Bilbao
Bilbao is not on the coast — it sits 16 km inland up a tidal estuary, behind the museum that rewrote the rules for post-industrial cities.
Picos de Europa
Spain’s first national park, declared in 1918: 66,030 hectares of limestone rising to 2,648 m less than 30 km from the Asturian coast.
Playa de Gulpiyuri
A 40-metre beach roughly 100 metres inland, fed by the Cantabrian through underground galleries and ringed on every side by grazing fields.
Llanes
A walled medieval town with a thirteenth-century tower, a harbour breakwater painted by Agustín Ibarrola, and around forty beaches in one municipality.
Cudillero
A fishing village stacked in painted tiers up a ravine above its harbour, protected as a Conjunto Histórico since 2006 and with its own dialect.