Santillana del Mar

Like Santander a few kilometres away, Santillana is a hagiotoponym of translated relics. The martyr Juliana of Nicomedia, a Christian virgin executed in Asia Minor around 304 during the persecution of Diocletian, saw her relics dispersed across Christian Europe; a fragment reached the Cantabrian monastery in the 9th century. The formula Sanctae Iulianae (genitive: 'of Saint Juliana') was compressed in medieval speech as Sant Illana → Santillana, with the same elision and fusion mechanism we already saw in Sansol, Sahagún, Santander and Donostia. The qualifier del Mar, added in the 16th century, is geographically debatable —⁠the town lies three kilometres inland⁠—⁠. The traditional explanation, upheld by local historiography, is that the qualifier referred to the council's old maritime jurisdiction, which reached the Suances coast. The slope of the Collegiate Church of Santa Juliana, Romanesque of the 12th century, still presides over the best-preserved medieval centre of Cantabria: a museum-town barely touched since the 16th century, where the pilgrim walks among blazoned houses, cobbled streets and the silence Sartre described in Nausea after spending two days here in 1932 — 'le plus joli village d'Espagne'.