Santander Maritime Museum

Nice to see Damian on the site and moving the discussion backward chronologically. In honor of Damian’s recent sojourn in Santander (and his affinity for odd museums), I dug up this old email about the Museo Marítimo.

Thurs. Aug. 3, 2000
I have found in my wanderings a museum that surpasses in sheer weirdness even the crinkled, stuffed and preserved animals in the Monasterio de Santo Tomas in Avila. I´m referring to the Museo Maritimo de Santander.

I´ve been looking for this place for days, because I always love a good marine museum. I realized today that I had walked right by it a handful of times and never recognized it. This is not a museum that jumps out at you. It´s tucked under some trees near the waterfront, beyond the little marina, beyond the bulk of the town. It´s rather non-descript and announces itself with a small faded sign. You don´t wander in off the street to check it out. You kind of have to be looking for it. I found it after following the seawall past rows of fishermen (who have yet to catch anything of substance in my presence, by the way. I´m beginning to suspect that they´re just subsized by the tourist board to pose for visitors), down a little side street littered with the refuse of the previous night´s sexual activity and boom, I was there.

The main floor is rather boring. Displays and explanations on the history of shipbuilding in Santander will only take you so far. Some of the models were really cool, but most of it looked kind of thrown together. Walk downstairs, though, and you enter a wonderland of oddities. Vast quantities of local and non-local sea life float preserved in bottles of formaldehyde, some as big as aquariums. Sea snails, clams, mussels, worms, eels, a sardine (caught in 1918. For the life of me I could not understand why a sardine captured in 1918 merited preservation), sponges, jellyfish, two jars of dolphin fetuses and a whale fetus. It didn´t specify what kind of whale, but there it was, looking pale and ghostly, wondering why it only saw the light of day sealed in a jar. Reminds me of a teacher I knew in sixth grade who sponsored the elementary school science fair. She had a human fetus floating in a jar, cut in half lengthwise so you could see the development of organs and things. Every year she had one of her students do a booth with the fetus for the science fair.

Anyway, along with the floating exhibits there were quite a few mounted and stuffed fish some of which looked like models. A sturgeon definitely was not a model, nor were many of the more withered examples of the local fauna. The swordfish looked fake, though. Hanging overhead were the skeletons of half a dozen whales and whale relatives that had washed up on Santander shores over the years (or perhaps been taken alive). A massive skeleton of a baleen whale of some kind (perhaps a fin whale. The sign said it was a ballena comun: all I know is it was not a blue whale) hung next to a sperm whale. Nearby hung the skeletons of various dolphins and a killer whale. In back a few tanks exhibited live fish, but somehow these were not nearly as interesting as the dead ones.