Santander: the royal peninsula and El Sardinero

A devastating fire in 1941 razed much of Santander's historic center: most of what is visible today is postwar reconstruction rather than truly ancient architecture.

The center can be explored on foot along the bay.

The Botín Centre, a 2017 cultural center designed by Renzo Piano, overlooks the bay with its white structure suspended on pillars, open in the middle to allow the view toward the sea to pass through.

Continuing along the coast you reach the Magdalena Peninsula, where the royal palace built in 1912 for Alfonso XIII today hosts summer university courses and is open for guided visits.

Around the palace, a small park with enclosures for seals and penguins recalls the use that the royal family once made of these gardens as a private zoo.

Toward evening, Sardinero Beach, with its early twentieth-century hotels and casino, closes the day in the city's most elegant atmosphere.

The Botín Center was built on stilts precisely to not occupy the historic garden in which it stands: from certain angles it seems literally suspended above the Pereda gardens.

The 1941 fire, starting from an almost trivial accident, destroyed in a few hours a historical heritage that the city has never truly recovered, replaced by a more modern center than a visitor would expect.