If you drive on a mountain road into Cantabria from Asturias, you’ll notice at the first village there are no hórreos and there’s no cider for sale in the bar. But although Cantabria is also undoubtedly the more economically developed and less pristine of the two, it also shares with its cousin many features: spectacular mountains and coast, cows grazing in lush pastures and picturesque fishing villages.

It is also shares with Asturias the spectacular Picos de Europa, together with León.

Traditionally, Cantabria is divided into three geographical areas: La Montaña, La Marina and Campoo.

Santoña marshes

The Santoña marshes are the most important wetland for waterbirds on the coast of northern Spain. Between 10,000-20,000 winter here every year.

The marshes are formed at the confluence of several river estuaries in Santoña, together with the contiguous salt marshes of Joyel and Victoria. There are also extensive mudflats. This mosaic of habitats attracting more than a hundred species of waders and other waterbirds.

A visit is recommended most between September and March.

Monte Candina and Playa de Sonabia

The 400m sea crags of Monte Candina near Liendo are home to a colony of Griffon Vultures, making the gorgeous Playa de Sonabia one of the very few places you can see vultures from a beach in Europe. Egyptian vultures and other mountain birds cohabit the limestone massif here with shags and other seabirds.

The vultures, some 100 pairs, live in part from the carcasses of local livestock breeds which still graze these wild coast: shaggy carrazana sheep and threatened monchina cattle, a squat and still in many ways wild cow, of which perhaps some 1200 remain.

Dunas de Liencres

The largest dune system is northern Spain behind the Playas de Valdearenas and Canallave.

River Ebro

Cantabria is also the source of the River Ebro on the slopes of Pico de los Tres Mares – the Peak of the Three Seas. It is an apt name: on its western face is born the River Nansa, which rushes for just 46 once salmon-rich kilometres into the Cantabrian Sea; to the south rises the Pisuerga which flows across the dry cereal plains of northern Castilla, before joining the great Duero and ending its life in the Atlantic; while a third small stream is born on the mountain’s northern slopes. Quickly growing into a river, it makes its way across Castilla-León, País Vasco, La Rioja, Navarra, Aragón, engorged by Pyrenean rivers on the way, and into Catalonia, where 930 kilometres later it finally reaches the Mediterranean.

See the remarkable cave paintings of Altamira