The tranquil Bay of Santander has offered refuge to sailors from all over the world since time immemorial. Today it is home to an elegant city, the capital of the Cantabria region, but also to a natural environment that forms a privileged landscape.
Article from CruisesNews magazine no. 54 – October 2020
Cruise infrastructure in Santander. The Port of Santander has ample docking piers, with the Raos 8 West Pier being the longest, boasting 500 meters of berthing line, a 13-meter draft, and a large operational platform, enabling it to accommodate the world's largest cruise ships.
The Raos 5 and 4 docks are also suitable for large vessels. Raos 5 has a berth length of 335 m and a draft of 10 m, while Raos 4 has a berth length of 356 m and a draft of 13 m, sufficient for most large vessels.
However, the Maliaño docks are the closest to the city center, with the so-called Admiral Dock, with 290 m of berthing line and 9.5 m of draft, being the most central, with the Maritime Station and the spectacular art center designed by Renzo Piano, Botín Center, at its feet.
Between the Maliaño and Raos docks, we still have the North Bank Dock, which with its 380 m of berthing line and 9.50 m of draft offers accommodation to larger vessels, without giving up being in contact with the inhabited area of the city.
The city boasts numerous stately buildings, a legacy of its close relationship with the monarchy in the early 20th century.
It should be noted that, under normal conditions, thanks to the shelter of Santander Bay, neither cruise ships nor ferries need the use of tugboats for docking maneuvers.
The Maritime Station is a unique building, designed by the architect Ricardo Lorenzo García in 1971 in an organic expressionist style, whose undulating roofs evoke the waves of the Cantabrian Sea. It is a spacious building with all amenities: waiting room, cafeteria, shops, police station, Civil Guard station, tourist information, and Wi-Fi. It is currently undergoing renovations, and when the work is completed in November, it will house an exhibition about the Cabo Machichaco tragedy, the ship that caused the worst civilian disaster in 19th-century Spain. On November 3, 1893, while docked in port, a fire broke out on board, after which its cargo of explosives detonated, claiming the lives of 590 people.
In terms of security, the maritime station has an xy-ray scanner and a metal detection gantry, and the port complies with ISPS regulations.
Currently the maritime station is shared with the regular ferry line traffic that connects Santander with the British cities of Portsmouth and Plymouth, but from 2023 it will be for cruise ships only.
Santander Bay offers a protected environment where it is not normally necessary to use tugboats for docking maneuvers.
In 2019, the Port of Santander received 235,625 passengers, of which 29,229 were cruise ship passengers from the 21 cruise ship calls the city received. This figure represented significant growth compared to 2018, when there were 8 cruise ship calls with 12,139 passengers, figures very similar to those of 2017, with 11 calls and 12,708 passengers.
This growth was clearly due to the British shipping company P&O, which contributed eight port calls with some of its largest ships, such as the Britannia, the Ventura, and the Azura, all with a capacity of over 3,000 passengers. Luxury cruise lines like Ponant and SeaDream also chose Santander in 2019 as a port of call in northern Spain.
In 2020, the forecast was for 18 port calls with 15,073 passengers between April and October, but the pandemic obviously prevented all of them from taking place. The decline in numbers was also due to P&O, which had only scheduled two port calls in the city this year.
Santander Airport, named after the legendary Cantabrian golfer Seve Ballesteros, is located just a few hundred meters from the port docks and has recently been expanded and renovated. It has the capacity to serve 2.5 million passengers annually, although its all-time high was in 2019 with 1,174,896 passengers. Until the pandemic, Ryanair was the main operator of international flights, with destinations including London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Berlin, Brussels, and Rome.
Santander on Cruise Itineraries:
Just 560 nautical miles from Southampton, the UK's main cruise port, Santander is one of the few ports on Spain's northern coast capable of accommodating large ships. Sailing at 17 knots, the distance is covered in 33 hours, meaning a ship could depart Southampton at 4:00 PM and arrive in Santander at 1:00 AM the following day. Since this schedule is impractical, ships can sail at just 14 knots, taking 40 hours to reach Santander and arriving at 8:00 AM the following day, ready to begin excursions. This lower speed can result in substantial fuel savings.
The Port of Santander will build an LNG supply terminal by 2024.
To the west, Santander is only 90 miles from Gijón and 230 miles from A Coruña, located at the northwestern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, a gateway to the Atlantic coast, home to the ports of Vigo, Porto, and Lisbon. To the east, the neighboring port of Bilbao is just 40 miles away, while the western French coast is an endless succession of beaches, deltas, and estuaries without any significant ports until reaching Brest, at the westernmost tip of Brittany, 326 nautical miles away, making it an interesting midpoint between Southampton and Santander.
Santander, as a historic port, has been part of international maritime routes for centuries, and as a testament to its role in Spanish emigration to America, a Holland America Line sign can still be seen in Plaza Pombo advertising transatlantic routes aboard the Rotterdam from the early 20th century.
Future Outlook:
Currently, there are 10 cruise ship calls planned for 2021, two of them by the Spirit of Adventure, one of Saga Cruises' new ships, and two by the Seadream I. But in the current unstable context, the numbers could change at any time.
Aware of the growing importance of Liquefied Natural Gas in maritime transport, the Port of Santander has partnered with Repsol, Enagas and ESK to design and build a supply terminal for this new fuel, which has a much lower environmental impact than fuel oil.
The opening in 2017 of the Botín Art Centre, right in the port and in a building designed by Renzo Piano, has boosted tourism in the city.
The port project has received 6.3 million euros from the European Union, which represents 20% of the planned investment, and must be completed in four years, that is, in the second quarter of 2024.
Santander's commitment to increasing cruise traffic is firm, and to this end, the ferry docking area will be moved to the Maliaño Docks, leaving the Almirante dock and the Maritime Station exclusively for them.
As a result of this commitment, Santander Cruise Deluxe was born, a joint initiative of the Port of Santander, the city council and the regional government to promote the arrival of cruise ships to the city in a joint and coordinated manner.
The region and the city are becoming aware of their tourism potential.
Northern Spain has spent decades neglecting tourism, as the sun and beaches of the Mediterranean were considered tourist attractions, while the mountainous and verdant landscapes of the north were seen as industrial regions. Fortunately, the tourism culture has matured, and now the beautiful cities of the northern European coast are equally attractive to tourists, as are the nature destinations. This is why Santander, a beautiful city, and Cantabria, a mountainous, green region with a low population density, have a great chance of success.
The politicians who built and inaugurated Cabárceno Nature Park in 1990, 17 km from Santander, may not have even been aware of the great future that awaited it. This open-air zoo covers 750 hectares, taking advantage of the unique landscape sculpted by a former iron mine. The elephant enclosure is as large as the entire Madrid Zoo, and the brown bears feel so at home that they reproduce naturally, with the park now having as many bears as in the entire surrounding area in the wild. The park's beginnings were difficult, but over the last fifteen years its popularity has grown, attracting first visitors from all the surrounding regions and later travelers from all over Spain, reaching 600,000 visitors a year.
The Cabárceno Nature Park, with its 750 hectares, houses everything from African elephants to rhinoceroses and brown bears in enormous enclosures.
In 2017, the Botín Centre opened on the Albareda dock, just steps from the Passenger Terminal. It has become Santander's newest tourist and cultural hub, thanks to a striking design by Italian architect Renzo Piano and an engaging program of exhibitions, performances, and educational activities. To integrate the building seamlessly into its surroundings, road traffic was placed underground and the Pereda Gardens were expanded, creating a spacious area for public enjoyment by the sea.
But if there's one iconic tourist landmark in the city, it's the Magdalena Palace, built atop a small peninsula overlooking the entrance to Santander Bay. Constructed in the early 20th century as a gift from the City Council to King Alfonso XIII to serve as his summer residence, it now hosts conferences and meetings, and during the summer months the City Council lends it to the Menéndez Pelayo International University as a center for its activities. It also features a museum area open to the public, showcasing the relationship between the city and the monarchy.
The beaches along the eastern coast of the city are another of its attractions, the most famous being Sardinero Beach, with its two stately buildings, the Gran Casino Sardinero and the Gran Hotel Sardinero, also built in the early 20th century, as icons of the elegance that permeates the entire city. Indeed, behind them rises a large garden city, full of mansions and grand villas, which the Cantabrian aristocracy has been building over the last century.
The Port Authority, the City Council and the Regional Government have joined forces under the Santander Cruise Deluxe brand.
In the city centre you can visit an air raid shelter built to protect against the bombings of the Spanish civil war, in which it suffered 34 such attacks.
As for excursions, just half an hour from the port you can visit the wonderful medieval town of Santillana del Mar, the picturesque fishing village of Comillas with its Sobrellano Palace, Gaudí's Capricho, and the imposing Pontifical University, or the Altamira Neocave, an exact reproduction of the archaeological site that has provided so much knowledge about the evolution of man to humanity.
The Cantabria region is also a paradise for outdoor activities, and if you love the mountains, venturing into the Picos de Europa on the longest single-section cable car in Europe is quite an experience, not for those who suffer from vertigo.
Evolution of Cruise Ship Calls in Santander:
Santander has a certain stability in its cruise ship numbers. The number of calls is usually around ten, while the number of passengers varies substantially depending on the size of the ships. 2019 was an exceptional year, and the aim is to consolidate and improve this figure in the coming years, thanks to the increased role of tourism in the economic strategy of the city and region.
