CANTABRIA - Spain/España
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Cantabria is an autonomous community of Spain, containing one province (also called Cantabria).
It borders to the east on the Basque Country (province of Vizcaya), to the south on Castile and León (provinces of León, Palencia, and Burgos), to the west on Asturias, and to the north on the "Cantabrian Sea", the local designation for the part of the Bay of Biscay that lies off its coast.
Santander functions as the capital of Cantabria.
Cantabria shares the National Park Picos de Europa (in the Picos de Europa mountain range) with Asturias and León.
In pre-Roman times the people known as Cantabri inhabited Cantabria. The name has no connection with Cantabrigia, a Latinate version of Cambridge. Many different authors have written about the origins of the name Cantabria, including Isidore of Seville, Julio Caro Baroja, Aureliano Fernández Guerra, Joaquín Gonzalez Echegaray, and Adolf Schulten. No consensus on the matter exists, but many experts suggest a derivation from the Celtic root cant-, meaning "rock" or "stone", and from the suffix -abr, used frequently in Celtic regions. From this we can deduce that the word "cántabro" means "dwelling in the mountains", referring to the rugged terrain of Cantabria.
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