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The Bay

The Santander Bay surrounds the entire city and offers and exceptional natural setting. It is no wonder that is a member of the “Most Beautiful Bays in the World Club”.

The poet José Hierro (1922 to 2002) wrote:


"Love, the more passionate, the more absurd, exaggerates, deforms. Like my mother's potato stew, nobody has excelled it.... To love is to deform. And I say that not believing in love, since love does not exist; it is invented by lovers.

I have wandered many places and many continents. Naples, Acapulco, Rio de Janeiro. I now remember those superb bays, so charged with evocations, with women, with tourist literature.

It is not a question of comparison because what you love is always incomparable, but the comparison is inevitable even though it is useless: my mother's potatoes, never excelled by the most expert cook.

What this bay of ours (Santander) has - and this is from someone not born on its shores - is its musical structure. Gerardo Diego compared the line of Peña Cabarga - the back of a bison - with an aria by Bach.

Following the master of us all I believe that it is, in contrast to full orchestral Wagnerian bays like Rio, a chamber bay. It is the same relation that exists between Parsifal and a quartet by the Beethoven of the last years: neither better nor worse, just something else.

To look out over the bay of Santander is like returning to the maternal cloister. The thing is that every return is, in some way, a disappointment. Memory idealises. Reality brings us back to... nature without time. Or with time's grievances.

And one who has little time left is glad because when he dies he will keep the memory of these lines whose two reference points are - seen from the wharf - the peak of Solares and Peña Cabarga.

And here I am, struggling with the peak of Solares, striving to see who will get there first, in the amphitheatre of the most beautiful chamber bay in the world. Younger every day, as if it were bathed by the waters of eternity".

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