Santander

🇪🇸 Spain
🌍 Southern Europe
🏢 Coastal

🔗 Website

About

Santander, capital of the Cantabria region in northern Spain, is a coastal city recognized for its natural beauty and digital innovation efforts. It has been a European pioneer in smart city experimentation, deploying sensor networks to improve mobility, waste management, and energy use. Combining tourism, maritime activity, and research partnerships, Santander fosters sustainable urban development and citizen engagement.

Additional Information

Santander is internationally recognised as one of Europe’s pioneer smart cities, having deployed a city-wide sensor network (SmartSantander) since 2010, with over 20,000 sensors covering parking, environment, and traffic monitoring. The city collaborated with NEC, Telefónica, and multiple EU-funded projects (SmartSantander FP7, Synchronicity H2020) to establish an open urban data platform that has since served as a replication model for cities across Europe.

City Snapshot

Population

175425

Area

36 km2

Density

4873/km2

Altitude

15 m

Weather

Temperatures (°C)

Rainfall (mm)

Strategic Vision and Achivements

Challenges

Challenges are defined by cities to clearly express the urban issues they are facing. They describe specific needs and contexts, helping innovators, companies, and organizations understand the problem and propose relevant, tailored solutions.
Secure IoT Sensing in Public Parks

✅ Finalized

🌳 Environment
Parque de las Llamas is a large public park in Santander, described as one of the city’s green lungs and significant to the well-being of its inhabitants. The Municipality of Santander needs to gather trustworthy environmental and visitor-count data from Las Llamas Park, securely and without compromising visitor privacy.
Federated IoT Experimentation Infrastructure

✅ Finalized

⚙️ Operational Efficiency
Santander needs a structured, scalable model for opening its city-wide sensing infrastructure to approved external researchers and companies, rather than arranging access testbed by testbed.
Digital Citizen Engagement and Incentive Mechanisms

✅ Finalized

🌐 Digital
Santander has sought to encourage and reward resident participation in municipal civic initiatives. Santander needs a reusable way to encourage and reward citizen participation in municipal civic initiatives.
Real-Time Traffic Management

✅ Finalized

🚲 Mobility
Santander has sought to improve everyday traffic management using real-time data from across the city. Santander needs integrated, real-time traffic-management information covering its road network.
Supporting Independent Living for Ageing Residents in Santander

✅ Finalized

🩺 Health
Santander faces rising demand for tele-assistance as more older residents live alone, while the shift from button-press alerts to continuous sensor monitoring generates highly sensitive data about daily routines. The city seeks solutions that make always-on home monitoring secure and trustworthy enough for providers and residents to adopt at scale.

Experimental Capacity

Pilots

Pilots are real-life implementations of selected solutions in cities. They allow stakeholders to test ideas in real conditions, measure their impact, learn from the results, and determine whether the solution can be improved, replicated, or scaled to other contexts.

Secured IoT Devices in City Parks – Santander

✅ Finalized

🗓️ Start: 2018-07-01

⇨

🗓️ End: 2021-09-30
The pilot used IoT devices in Parque de las Llamas to collect environmental data, including temperature, humidity, CO₂, volatile organic compounds, and noise, alongside estimated visitor counts. The team placed five environmental sensors across the playground area and along a section extending from the University of Cantabria towards the residential zones. A people-counter device below the park restaurant detected Wi-Fi and Bluetooth MAC addresses. The system sent the data to three destinations. Eclipse sensiNact supported visualisation and analysis. The Crypto Companion Database encrypted the data with an asymmetric key pair, allowing only the owner and authorised operators to access it, and recorded a hash on the Quorum blockchain to protect its integrity. The marketplace made the data available for purchase because it contained no personal data, with buyers paying in M-Sec Tokens, a blockchain-based cryptocurrency. Nine QR codes around the park allowed visitors to open a web app, view their location and decrypted sensor readings, and rate their satisfaction on a five-star scale.

Federated IoT Experimentation Testbed – Santander

✅ Finalized

🗓️ Start: 2014-10-01

⇨

🗓️ End: 2017-09-30
The SmartSantander city testbed, run by the University of Cantabria and Santander City Council, was federated with other European and Japanese testbeds in the FESTIVAL project. Experimenters gained common access to city-scale IoT deployments, open data and living labs under an experimentation-as-a-service model.

Smiley Coupon – Santander

✅ Finalized

🗓️ Start: 2013-04-01

⇨

🗓️ End: 2016-06-30
Santander replicated Smiley Coupon, an application first trialled in Fujisawa that issues citizens and visitors personalised coupons according to their degree of smile — the clearest instance of Japan-to-Europe transfer in the project. This application gives customised coupons to citizens and tourists based on how much they smile. It was first developed in Fujisawa and then used in Santander to test if it could work in a different region.

Traffic and Mobility Management – Santander

✅ Finalized

🗓️ Start: 2013-04-01

⇨

🗓️ End: 2016-06-30
The University of Cantabria and Ayuntamiento de Santander built a map-based mobility application that pulls the city’s transport and environmental data into a single route recommendation. A traveller enters an origin and a destination and receives five options — bike, walking, car, taxi, and bus — each with distance, journey time, and environmental readings along the way. Behind it sit bus timetables, positions, speeds, arrival times and occupancy; bike, taxi and train availability at specific stops; traffic speed and road occupancy; indoor and outdoor parking availability; fixed and mobile sensors measuring carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone and noise; and the traveller’s own preferences and real-time events reported from smartphones.

Home Monitoring Security System for Ageing People in Santander

✅ Finalized

🗓️ Start: 2018-07-01

⇨

🗓️ End: 2021-09-30
Senior Care is an IoT-based tele-assistance solution that uses home sensors to monitor older people’s well-being and detect emergencies or unusual behaviour. The M-Sec components provide secure, interoperable data collection, access control, GDPR-compliant data management, and trusted data sharing. The pilot was conducted in Santander with five users from Atenzia’s network.
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