Santa Cruz de Bezana

The tide chart matters more than the train timetable here. At low water, Covachos beach doubles in width and the limestone ribs that give the Costa Quebrada its name—“Broken Coast”—rear up like half-submitted dinosaur bones. Half an hour later the sand is gone, the car park is full of day-trippers from Santander, and the only thing left to do is retreat to the bar on the cliff for a coffee that still costs less than two euros.

Santa Cruz de Bezana is not a village that announces itself. It spreads across five separate nuclei (the council prefers the word “parishes”) between the A-67 and the Cantabrian sea, a place of commuter estates, dairy meadows and 1970s apartment blocks that somehow still smell of new paint. The population swells to 12,000 on paper, but at 22:00 the streets are empty and even the dogs observe the Spanish timetable: late breakfast, long lunch, solemn siesta, then a reluctant evening stroll.

Where Santander Ends and the Sea Begins

Geography does the marketing the tourist office can’t be bothered with. Bezana sits five minutes beyond Santander airport’s perimeter fence; the first Ryanair descent rattles the windows of the Lago Hotel at 07:10 sharp. That closeness explains the rental-car bays in every garage: most visitors collect a set of keys, punch “Liencres” or “Suances” into the sat-nav and never realise they’ve driven through a municipality with 11 km of coastline. The ones who stay do so for convenience rather than romance—free parking, a handily placed Lidl, and an ALSA bus every thirty minutes that reaches the city centre in twenty.

The coast itself is a sequence of small coves cut into 30 m cliffs. Covachos is the only one with anything approaching infrastructure: a pay-and-display car park that malfunctions in the rain, a seasonal lifeguard hut, and a chiringuito selling oversized chorizo bocadillos. Steps hacked into the rock descend in two flights; trainers are advisable because the stone turns slick with salt and cow dung blown in from the pastures above. At spring tides the beach vanishes entirely and the locals treat the resulting rock platform as a private solarium, spreading towels between tide pools that harbour the occasional clingfish.

Five minutes west, Playa de la Arnía is reachable only by lane so narrow that two Fiat 500s constitute a traffic jam. The reward is a half-moon of ochre sand backed by fractured karst that geologists photograph more enthusiastically than sunbathers. There’s no bar, no lavatory, and the phone signal drops out halfway down the cliff path—bring water, shade and a sense of self-sufficiency.

Fields, Friesians and a Church that Keeps its Doors Open

Inland Bezana is textbook Cantabria: stone houses with wooden balconies, maize plots walled by chestnut rails, and Friesian cows that stare at passing cars with the weary tolerance of daily commuters. The council has signposted a 7 km “Ruta de los Molinos” that links three restored watermills, but the arrows are sporadic and one has already been repurposed as a garage. Better to ignore the branding and follow any track that heads uphill; within ten minutes the housing estates thin out and the only sound is the Atlantic wind flattening the grass.

The parish church of Santa Cruz stands at a crossroads in the original village core. It is 18th-century, whitewashed, and locked only when the priest forgets to unlock it after Mass. Inside, the altarpiece is painted a shade of salmon that would make a Devon estate agent blush, but the cool darkness smells of candle wax and damp stone—the authentic fragrance of rural Spain. Thursday evening is choir practice; visitors who sit at the back will be handed a hymn sheet and expected to join in, even if the words are in Cantabrian dialect.

Eating Between Milkings

Santa Cruz will never threaten San Sebastián on the culinary scoreboard, yet it feeds reliably and cheaply. Mesón Santa Cruz serves a €12 menú del día that starts with a tureen of fabada thick enough to support a spoon upright and finishes with rice pudding flavoured with lemon zest. Ask for “pollo a la plancha, sin patatas” and the waitress will swap chips for a salad the size of a steering wheel without charging extra. Locals arrive at 14:00 sharp; arrive at 15:30 and the kitchen is hosing down the floor.

Evening options are thinner. La Farola does batter that tastes like a Yorkie’s cousin and will grill a hake fillet plain if pushed. Pizzeria Monari fires its oven at 20:30 and will box up half a quattro stagioni for beach consumption the next day. After 23:00 the only thing open is the Chinese on the roundabout, which has learned to stock Branston pickle for the British ferry crews overnighting at the Bezana Lago.

When to Come, When to Leave

May and late-September give you empty beaches, temperatures in the low twenties and accommodation at two-thirds the August rate. The sea is still chilly—16 °C in May, 19 °C in early October—so bring the wetsuit if body-boarding is non-negotiable. July and August are dominated by the Santander exodus; by 11:00 Covachos is at capacity and the police close the coast road when the car park hits 120 vehicles. Early birds who arrive before 09:00 can still bag a parking space and three hours of relative solitude before the city invades.

Winter is for walkers. Daytime highs hover around 12 °C, Atlantic lows roll in on a weekly cycle, and the meadows turn a green so vivid it looks artificial. The upside is having the cliffs to yourself; the downside is that every bar closes on Monday and Tuesday, and the evening light has vanished by 18:15. Snow is rare at sea level, but the Picos de Europa occasionally poke their white tops above the horizon like distant icing.

Practicalities without the Bullet Points

Santander airport is ten minutes by taxi (€20) or twenty on the ALSA bus (€1.65, exact change only). If you land after 22:30 the buses have stopped—pre-book a cab or walk four hundred metres to the Bezana Lago, where rooms start at €65 including a breakfast strong enough to stun a fisherman. Car hire desks stay open for the late Stansted arrival, but request a compact: the lanes to Arnía and Somocuevas were designed before wing mirrors were invented.

Shops shut at 14:00 and reopen anywhere between 17:00 and 18:00; if you need groceries for a self-catering dinner, finish the supermarket run before lunch or you’ll be staring at metal shutters until siesta ends. Sunday morning everything is closed except the 24-hour petrol station, which sells overpriced milk and surprisingly good Rioja. Fill up on Saturday night if you have an early ferry to catch.

Buses along the coast are patchy: one mid-morning, one mid-afternoon, none on feast days. A car is the only reliable way to link Bezana with Liencres dunes or the surf schools at Somo. Parking is free almost everywhere; ignore the creative manoeuvres of locals who abandon cars on verges—traffic wardens patrol on summer weekends and fines start at €80.

The Honest Verdict

Santa Cruz de Bezana will never make the front page of a glossy brochure. It is a working municipality where the bins are emptied before dawn and the mayor worries more about school places than Instagram hashtags. Yet for travellers who want a cheap bed near the airport, a cliff walk that ends in an empty cove, or simply a café con leche that costs less than the airport departure lounge charges for water, it delivers without fuss. Come for convenience, stay for the tide charts, and leave before the Sunday shutdown traps you with nothing but a packet of crisps for supper.