Mountain Studies Center

Official Chronicler of Cantabria since 1934

Creed in Santander the year 1934 and slowly approaching the century of existence, he Mountain Studies Center has been covering essential demands of culture in the Cantabrian region, offering at the same time a stable and extensive range of first-rate cultural projects and infrastructures.

It was born in utopian times of the small homeland of Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo and in his own superb library, immersed in the spirit of the polygraph and in study environments with great significance in the international historical panorama, such as those linked to archeology, prehistoric rock art and Altamira Cave, grotto from which the C.E.M. took the name for his new magazine “Altamira” that took over from the Santander Magazine to provide it with an open projection to the world, or with ancient Cantabria and the Cantabrian Wars that allowed the emperor Caesar Augustus to project Rome towards his great empire, to cite two topics of maximum interest in that first half of the century..

EThe Center for Montañeses Studies is well known for its extensive editorial projection, which, by maintaining the current pace, will be able to reach two hundred monographs when it soon reaches its first centenary of existence., to which must be added another hundred volumes of periodicals published under his seal, although he has many other meritorious achievements that are less remembered by the general public.: He Historical Archive of Cantabria, the museums ethnographic, Maritime and of Prehistory and other various heritage compilations, enhancements and conservation projects of the culture of Cantabria have in their origin, as creators and main protagonists, to the Center for Montañeses Studies and its members.

Today it continues to maintain a wide participation in the Cantabrian culture and vast editorial career that spread widely throughout the world, effectively contributing to making the most outstanding aspects of the culture of Cantabria universally known.

Its contributions as an advisory entity on cultural heritage and the sharing of multidisciplinary perspectives on culture between generations, make this veteran entity a continuous and valuable reference.

EThe Center for Montañeses Studies is a cultural institution for the promotion of studies on history, to literature, the art, ethnography and the sciences of autonomous community of Cantabria, of which is the Official Chronicler, title with which his previous status as Official Chronicler of the Province of Santander was subrogated. He is a member of Higher Council of Scientific Research (CSIC) integrated into the Spanish Confederation of Local Studies Centers (CECEL) and was a founding member and dean of the disappeared Cultural Institution of Cantabria (1967-2013). It is also Consultative Institution for the History and Heritage of Cantabria. In March of 1994 was named Honorary Member of the Casa de Cantabria in Madrid. It is also Heraldic Advisor or King of Arms of the City Councils of the region since March 1995.

Dthe Center for Montañes Studies lists relevant documentary collections, some of which have been able to be inventoried and digitized, becoming publicly available in recent times. The library, with an interesting section of old funds, has more than 10.000 specimens related to the culture and history of Cantabria; the newspaper archive reaches 15.000 volumes, surpassing the 600 headers. The archival originals have numerous relevant documents, some of them available here, among which we can cite only as an example some exceptional works, like the Cartulary of the Monastery of Oña, the inventory of documents from the Cathedral of Santander prior to the fire of 1941, the inventory of the Piarist School of Villacarriedo from the time of the Enlightenment or the relations of municipal historical archives of Cantabria prepared in the mid-20th century. Equally noteworthy are the CEM's historical photography collections., undoubtedly the most important in the country regarding the architectural and artistic heritage of Cantabria (The Mountain Art Archive, self-made in the mid-20th century to record the architectural and artistic heritage of Cantabria and gather materials for its study, or the collections of Fernando Cevallos de León and Julio García de la Puente among the most notable, whose original negatives and slides we preserve and reproduce digitally in the corresponding sections of this website…