Argoños

The water arrives before you do. Cross the A-8 and the ría de Treto is already halfway up the lampposts, salt wind flattening the grass on the central reservation. Argonos sits two minutes south of the motorway, a single traffic-light village that most ferry traffic shoots past at 120 km/h. Slow down. The tide here rises eight metres, enough to turn the football pitch into a mirror and the main street into a whiff of seaweed and diesel. Time your visit wrong and you'll park beside a glittering lake; time it right and you'll walk across cracked mud that smells like a Whitby slipway.

A village that faces the other way

Argonos turns its back on the Cantabrian hills and looks squarely at the water. The church of San Pelayo sits exactly one block inland – close enough to hear halyards clink, far enough to stay dry – and every lane slopes gently towards the ría. Houses are low, rendered in sugar-cube white with the occasional glass balcony tacked on in the 1980s. There's no medieval core, no stone arcades, just a grid of streets wide enough for a tractor and a boat trailer. The effect is oddly Scandinavian: bright, flat, functional. Elderly residents still hang fishing nets over their garden walls, the orange float line dripping on the pavement.

Walk east for four minutes and asphalt gives way to oyster-shell track. Here the marsh begins: a sheet of cord-grass that turns from olive to silver as the breeze changes. On spring evenings the surface seems to smoke with waders – redshank, greenshank, the odd avocet – and the only sound is the suction of mud against your boots. Bring binoculars; without them the birds are punctuation marks. With them, the horizon fills with wings.

Lunch where the lorry drivers stop

Food choices are thin. The lone café open year-round is the Bar Ruta 8, grafted onto the petrol station by the junction. It does a respectable bocadillo de calamares for €4.50 and serves beer at seven in the morning for ferry foot-passengers who have been on the overnight coach from Madrid. For anything more ambitious you drive three kilometres to Colindres, where the riverfront asadores will grill a chuletón the size of a steering wheel. Locals treat lunch as a movable feast: if the tide is low they'll stay out collecting clams; if it's high they eat early and sleep until the water retreats. The rhythm is contagious – after a day you'll check your phone less and the exposed mud more.

Between two beaches, belonging to neither

Berria and Trengandín, the nearest sandy stretches, lie five minutes north by car. In August both are jammed by 11 a.m., Spanish number plates fighting for space under the pines. Argonos itself never quite floods in the same way; its flats are rented to nurses from the Laredo hospital, its front doors used as storage for surfboards and ferry ramps. That makes it handy: you can stock up at the Lidl in Colindres, be on the sand by nine, and retreat to the village before the traffic marshal starts turning cars away. Out of season the beaches empty and the village reclaims them – dog-walkers from Santander appear at dusk, coats zipped against a wind that tastes of Bordeaux.

Winter mud, summer haze

Climate is a maritime coin-toss. January brings horizontal rain that finds every gap in your waterproof; the marsh glows pewter and the only colour comes from yellow chiringuito umbrellas rattling in the closed beach bars. May and October are the sweet spots – clear, still, warm enough to sit outside the Bar Ruta 8 without a jacket. In July the air thickens; by mid-afternoon the ría looks like hammered tin and even the gulls go quiet. The village copes by shutting everything between two and five. Try to arrange your day around the same hours and you'll avoid sunstroke and closed doors.

A walk that changes every forty minutes

Forget sign-posted loops. The best route starts at the church, drops past the bakery (open 6 a.m.–1 p.m.,palmeras 80 c) and follows the lane that smells of diesel and wet rope. Ten houses later the tarmac ends; keep straight, boots squelching, until the path kinks left beside a ruined stone hut. This is the caserío of La Pedrera, abandoned in the 1960s when the estuary began to eat the fields. From here you can see the motorway bridge – a thin grey line – and below it the channel where fishing boats idle, engines ticking over until the lock gates open. Turn back when the water starts lapping at the reeds; if you wait too long the path disappears and you'll re-emerge with trousers soaked to the knee.

Total time: 45 minutes there, 35 back if the tide is pushing you on. Distance: irrelevant – it's the height difference of the water that measures your outing.

When the village parties (briefly)

Festivals are short, loud and rooted in the calendar of boats. San Pelayo, the last weekend in June, involves a brass band, a paella for 400 cooked in the square, and a firework that ricochets off the church tower shortly after midnight. The following morning silence returns; locals sweep coloured paper into black bags and by Monday the only evidence is a greasy ring on the pavement where the pan stood. August hosts a low-key verbena with bouncy castles and a roaming orquesta playing 1990s Europop. British visitors often stumble on it by accident, lured from the beach by the sound of badly amplified Bon Jovi. Stay for one drink; leave before the dodgems pack up and you'll still be in bed before the ferry check-in opens.

The honesty check

Argonos will not make anyone's "top ten prettiest" list. The architecture is mostly 1970s brick, the supermarkets are elsewhere, and if you arrive expecting cobbled romance you'll drive away disappointed. What it offers is utility: free parking, a bed near the port, a front-row seat on one of Spain's least showy wetlands. Use it as a staging post, not a destination. Load the car, walk the marsh while the kettle boils, then point north for Santander and the boat home. The tide will still be coming in long after you've sailed, rewriting the village outline twice a day, every day, with or without an audience.