Photographers in Cantabria

Cantabria is the short stretch of green Atlantic coast between the Basque Country and Asturias, and Santander is its front door — about an hour from Bilbao, with its own airport and the ferry from England. The city is built around a bay, and the photographs start on the Magdalena peninsula: a summer palace built for the royal family in the early 1900s, standing on a headland of lawns and pines with the sea on three sides and the beaches of El Sardinero curving away beyond it. The promenade there, the gardens of Piquío and the lighthouse at Cabo Mayor on its cliff are a short drive apart, which makes Santander an easy one-hour session. Half an hour west, Santillana del Mar is a village of golden stone houses and cobbles, closed to traffic and built around a twelfth-century collegiate church; it is best early, before the day visitors arrive. A little further on, Comillas has Gaudí's El Capricho — a villa covered in sunflower tiles — beside a neo-Gothic palace, and San Vicente de la Barquera ends the coast with a long stone bridge, a tidal estuary and the Picos de Europa standing behind the town. Inland, the Liébana valley climbs from Potes into those mountains, with a cable car at Fuente Dé that rises about 750 metres in under four minutes. The trade-off is the weather: this is a mild, rainy coast, the beaches change completely with the tide, and a grey morning often clears by the afternoon. June to September is the season; September keeps the warm sea and loses the crowds.