Walk both of the converging streets and count the carved coats of arms on the house fronts

Go into the collegiate church cloister, which is among the finest Romanesque cloisters in northern Spain

Work out the joke about the three lies in the name and check each one

Go on to Altamira two kilometres away and the replica cave there

Come out of season or early in the morning, because this is one of the most visited villages in Spain

Sartre called it the prettiest village in Spain. The Spanish joke is that the name is three lies: it is not holy, it is not flat and it is not on the sea. What it is is a nearly untouched medieval and Renaissance street plan of two converging cobbled streets lined with noble houses bearing carved coats of arms, with a Romanesque collegiate church at one end whose cloister is among the best in northern Spain. Altamira is two kilometres away, which is the other reason people come.

Santillana del Mar: The Town of Three Lies

Walk through the Neocave — the full-scale replica built metres from the sealed original — and find the Polychrome Ceiling's herd of painted bison

Find the museum exhibit on María Sanz de Sautuola, the 8-year-old girl who spotted the bison ceiling in 1879, a decade after the cave itself was first found

Read how the paintings were dated across more than 10,000 years of use, from the Aurignacian through to the Magdalenian period

Find where the museum explains why the real cave closed to the public in 2002, and why only five visitors a week — chosen from a waitlist no longer open to new names — are ever allowed inside

In 1879, amateur archaeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola was led into this cave by his eight-year-old daughter María, who looked up and spotted the painted bison on the ceiling before he did. The original cave has been closed to the public since 2002 to protect paintings up to 36,000 years old; the Neocave, a full-scale replica built metres from the real one, is what every visitor actually sees today.

Altamira: The Girl Who Looked Up

Surf Los Locos, which is the break Suances is known for

Work out why several breaks within a few kilometres work on different swells and tides

Come in winter if you can actually surf, because that is when the Atlantic swell arrives

Take a lesson in summer if you cannot, when the same beaches are small and forgiving

Walk the clifftop between the beaches and read the water before you get in

The Cantabrian coast faces north into the Atlantic and picks up swell all winter, which is why northern Spain has a surf culture that most visitors never notice. Suances, at the mouth of the Saja-Besaya estuary, has several breaks within a few kilometres of each other — Los Locos being the best known — working on different swells and tides, so something is usually doing something. Winter is the serious season here; summer is small, crowded and mostly for learning.

Suances and the Cantabrian Surf Coast

Go into El Capricho, built 1883–85, and work out how much of the later Gaudí is already in it

Find the sunflower tiles running round the outside and work out why they are there

Walk up to the Sobrellano palace and pantheon by Joan Martorell

Find the former Pontifical University by Domènech i Montaner on the hill

Work out how a village this size acquired three major Catalan architects, and where the money came from

Antonio López y López, first Marquis of Comillas, made a fortune in Cuba and brought Catalan architects home to his village on the Cantabrian coast. The result is extraordinary for a place this size: Gaudí's El Capricho of 1883–85, one of his earliest works and one of only three he built outside Catalonia; the Sobrellano palace and pantheon by Joan Martorell; and the former Pontifical University by Lluís Domènech i Montaner. It is effectively a Catalan Modernisme colony dropped into a Cantabrian fishing village.

Comillas: A Catalan Modernisme Colony in Cantabria

Find the panel of more than fifty negative hands and work out how they were made

Work out what Dean Snow concluded from the hand proportions, and what that does to the usual assumption

Find the figure read as Corona Borealis, possibly among the oldest star representations known

Work out what the dating means: some of this may be over 40,000 years old

Go into one of the other caves on the same hill — this is a complex, not a single cave

Hermilio Alcalde del Río found the cave of El Castillo at Puente Viesgo in 1903, and it went onto the UNESCO list in July 2008 as part of the Altamira group. Its most striking feature is a panel of more than fifty hands stencilled in negative, some of them possibly over 40,000 years old and therefore among the oldest known paintings anywhere. Dean Snow's analysis of hand proportions concluded that most of them are women's — which undercuts the long-standing assumption that cave artists were men. There is also a figure read as the constellation Corona Borealis, potentially one of the oldest star maps known.

El Castillo: Fifty Hands on a Cave Wall

Ride the Rinocerontes gondola line from Station 4 and photograph the karst lapiaz formations above Lago Sexta

Ride the Elefantes gondola line to Mirador del Rubí for the panoramic view over the Bay of Santander

Walk to the Recinto de los Osos, one of Europe's largest brown bear enclosures, built into the old quarry walls

Find remnants of the 19th–20th century open-pit iron workings, mined until 1989, still visible from the park's roads

Walk one of the marked botanical routes (yew–oak, birch–beech, or chestnut–pine) through the reforested former mine slopes

Cabárceno is a 750-hectare wildlife park built inside a former open-pit iron mine, worked from Roman times until the quarries finally closed in 1989. Rhinos, elephants, bears and lions roam across the old excavation pits and karst gorges, and two gondola lines carry visitors above the enclosures instead of behind fences.

Cabárceno: Wildlife Park in a Reclaimed Iron Mine

Go into the Centro Botín, Renzo Piano's arts centre on the bay, opened in 2017

Walk round the Magdalena peninsula to the palace built for Alfonso XIII in 1909–1911

Find the royal stables of 1914, built to look like a medieval English village

Look out to the island of Mouro at the mouth of the bay

The Magdalena peninsula guards the entrance to the bay of Santander, and in 1909–1911 the town paid for a palace on it by public subscription as a summer residence for Alfonso XIII — at one point the building committee even bought a Christmas lottery ticket to cover the costs, and lost. The king and his family came every summer until the Second Republic; his stables of 1914 were built to look like a medieval English village. Juan de Borbón sold the palace to the city in 1977, and the 24.5-hectare peninsula is now a public park. On the waterfront by the old town, the Centro Botín, an arts centre by Renzo Piano and Luis Vidal, opened on 23 June 2017.

Santander: The Magdalena Palace and Renzo Piano's Centro Botín

Go into Tito Bustillo and find the main panel of horses and deer

Work out how it was found: young cavers in 1968, and who the cave is named after

Walk the seafront and find the indiano houses built with American money

Be at the bridge in August for the finish of the Descenso del Sella

Find the dinosaur footprints on the rocks along this coast, which are signposted from the town

A group of young cavers found the painted gallery at Tito Bustillo in 1968 and named it after one of their number who died on a later expedition. It holds Palaeolithic painting of the first rank — a main panel of horses and deer in red and black, and a separate chamber of vulval engravings — and it is part of the Altamira World Heritage listing. The town sits where the Sella reaches the sea, so it is also the finish of the Descenso del Sella every August, and it has a seafront of indiano mansions built with money from the Americas.