Santander Airport

Santander Airport is an international airport near Santander, Spain and the only airport in Cantabria. In 2012 the airport handled 1,117,617 passengers and 17,070 flights, far more than in 1995 when it handled only 180,000 passengers. Since then, the traffic has declined following the trend in Spanish airports and the decrease in operations by some of the companies.NameThe airport is named after the famous golf player Seve Ballesteros, born in Pedreña, a few kilometres from the airport and being one of the most well known public figures of Cantabria in the last century. The airport was known as 'Santander Airport' until 2015. In May 2014, a popular initiative taken to the Parliament of Cantabria was unanimously approved to change the name after Seve Ballesteros, an icon in sport and life and one of the best ambassadors that Cantabria ever had in the last decades. The Spanish Government approved the change on 16 April 2015HistoryThe current airport, built on ground filled of the bay of Santander, was opened to traffic in 1977. Before there was on the same site a smaller airfield built between 1947 and 1952 by prisoners of the Spanish Civil War. It opened in 1953 replacing the old Santander airport located in La Albericia, that was receiving commercial flights since 1949, and received the name of Aeropuerto de Santander and popularly known as "Parayas". It received the international rating in 1957.After a three-year closure (from April 1974 until August 8, 1977), in which the airport underwent a major renovation that significantly expanded its facilities and had a cost of more than 1,100 million pesetas of the time; it was reopened with a new 2,400 m runway and with the technology to allow both visual and instrumental flight; the first flight after the renovation corresponded to the Iberia's DC-9 "Ciudad de Santander", that covered the Barcelona-Santander-Santiago de Compostela route.