Departure
97%
vs 95% ▲ 2
MY FS FLIGHTS
MY FS FLIGHTS
Seve Ballesteros-Santander Airport sits on reclaimed land beside the Bay of Santander in Cantabria, northern Spain, and is named after Cantabria's most famous sportsman, the golfer Seve Ballesteros, who was born nearby in Pedreña. It is Cantabria's only airport, operated by Aena, and offers a single long instrument runway right on the water's edge, making it a notable destination for pilots flying into northern Spain.
Seve Ballesteros-Santander Airport is the sole airport serving the autonomous community of Cantabria, located on the western side of the Bay of Santander in the municipality of Camargo. Operated by the Spanish airport authority Aena, it handles international and domestic scheduled traffic and is named in honour of golfer Seve Ballesteros, one of Cantabria's best-known public figures, who was born in the nearby village of Pedreña. For a visiting sim pilot it offers a coastal ILS approach and a runway that ends almost at the water's edge, giving a distinctive arrival over the bay.
The airport lies close to the town of Maliaño, in the municipality of Camargo, on the western side of the Bay of Santander, only a few kilometres from the city of Santander itself. It is built on land reclaimed from the bay, with runway 29 terminating close to the water and runway 11 ending near the S-10 ring road and a shopping centre on the opposite side of the field.
The airport has one physical runway, 11/29, a hard-surfaced strip 7,583 feet in length. Both ends are lit, and an ILS is provided for runway 29, giving instrument approach capability into the field from over the Bay of Santander.
Pilots can expect the following services and frequencies at the field: Approach on 118.375 MHz, Ground on 121.7 MHz, and Tower on 118.1 MHz. Runway 29 is equipped with an ILS, supporting instrument approaches from the north-west over the bay.
The Bay of Santander forms an unmistakable visual feature immediately off the end of runway 29, while the S-10 ring road and an adjacent shopping centre lie close to the runway 11 threshold, offering useful references when inbound from the south-east.
A smaller airfield was built on the site between 1947 and 1952, using prisoners from the Spanish Civil War as labour, and opened in 1953 as Aeropuerto de Santander, popularly known as Parayas, replacing the earlier Santander airport at La Albericia which had handled commercial flights from 1949. The site had been chosen from 1945 onward at Parayas in Maliaño, a few kilometres south of the city behind the bay, next to the Raos marshlands, and the field gained international status in 1957. Sea damage later required the construction of a new protective dyke, and in 1965 the airfield was formally named Santander Airport, with an Air Rescue Service outpost established there in 1967. The airport closed for three years from April 1974 for a major renovation costing over 1,100 million pesetas, reopening on 8 August 1977 with a new 2,400-metre runway equipped for both visual and instrument flight; the first flight after reopening was an Iberia DC-9, Ciudad de Santander, on the Barcelona-Santander-Santiago de Compostela route. Traffic remained modest until 2003, when an agreement with Ryanair brought a sharp increase in destinations and passengers, with numbers rising 88 percent in 2005 to reach 644,662 passengers, the largest proportional growth of any Spanish airport that year. Further terminal and apron expansion followed from 2007, and in December 2010 some 37.8 million euros was invested to prepare the airport for annual traffic beyond two million passengers. In May 2014 the Parliament of Cantabria unanimously approved renaming the airport after Seve Ballesteros, and the change was formalised in the Official State Gazette on 16 April 2015.
Seve Ballesteros-Santander Airport remains Cantabria's principal air gateway, operated by Aena and handling scheduled and charter services from airlines including Iberia, Ryanair, Vueling, Volotea, Binter Canarias and Wizz Air to destinations across Spain and Europe. The single 11/29 runway, fitted with an ILS on runway 29 and a precision approach lighting system installed in 2021, continues to support both visual and instrument operations into the field.