Faro Santander is a new cultural project promoted by Fundación Banco Santander, conceived as a landmark space where art, culture and technology come together in an open and accessible environment for all audiences.

Faro Santander is located in the Pereda Building, the former main headquarters of the bank and one of the most emblematic buildings in the city of Santander. This historic building is now being reborn with the ambition of becoming an innovative, inclusive cultural space, closely connected to society and to Cantabria’s cultural ecosystem.

The architectural design of the centre has been entrusted to British architect David Chipperfield, winner of the 2023 Pritzker Prize. The building will feature a variety of exhibition and mediation spaces, a multi-purpose auditorium, a shop, as well as a café and restaurant located on its terrace, creating a vibrant environment designed to encourage free exploration and visitor participation.

The opening of Faro Santander will mark a new milestone for the city, offering a dynamic, stimulating and enjoyable place where everyone is welcome.

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Faro Santander will dedicate an entire floor to showcasing the Banco Santander Collection, a largely unknown collection that will have a permanent and dynamic presence within the programme.

Another full floor of the cultural centre will be devoted to ambitious temporary exhibitions, with a wide-ranging approach in terms of both subject matter and historical scope.

Between these two floors, a novel space for experimentation and exploration will be created for children and not-so-young visitors alike. A distinctive area where visitors can enjoy art and creativity in an environment specially designed for this purpose.

Faro Santander will also feature innovative installations in which technology will play a central role, serving as a means of transmission for projects linked to Santander’s memory, innovation and artistic experimentation.

The visit to this new cultural centre will begin with an exhibition space dedicated to artists from Cantabria, where collaborative projects developed with different cultural agents from the region can take place.

One of the exhibitions that can be enjoyed at the center starting on September 8 will be Leonora Carrington: Symptomatic Surrealism. Co-organized with the Freud Museum in London, it will be the first exhibition devoted exclusively to the artistic work created by the painter, writer, and visionary Leonora Carrington during her hospitalization at Dr. Morales’s sanatorium in Santander.

The exhibition marks a milestone thanks to the public presentation of the previously unseen oil painting known as Villa Pilar, which the artist dedicated and gifted to her doctor when she left the sanatorium and which has remained hidden for decades. The work will be displayed alongside the iconic canvas Down Below, which depicts several residents on the sanatorium grounds transformed into hybrid human-animal creatures. The painting was dedicated and gifted by the artist in Madrid in 1941 to the Mexican diplomat Renato Leduc, who helped her escape to New York. It will be the first time that the two paintings are exhibited together in the very city where Leonora Carrington created them.

The Leonora Carrington exhibition reflects Faro Santander’s vision as a space that is open to the world while remaining deeply rooted in its local territory, and it forms part of the broad program of exhibitions and activities that will be presented starting on September 8 to mark its opening.