Chalet grande en Soto de la Marina

The house is spacious and comfortable for 6-8 people. The garden is fully fenced so safe for a dog. The neighborhood feels safe. The nearby bar is lively and the nearby pizzeria is good value. The beaches on the other side of Liencres are great (Valdearenas and Canallave) - long sandy beaches, safe for swimming, especially great for surfers or anyone wanting to attend surf school and there are showers and a cafe. There is also a national park with woodlands behind the beaches, which is great for a shady walk.

Apart from the nearby bar and pizzeria it's a long walk to everything else - the town (30mins plus), the nearest sandy beach (25mins), supermarket (30mins plus). Then if you drive, parking is a massive problem in August, especially at the nice beaches and if you go to any of the nice towns like Santander, Comillas, Suances etc. The property is managed through an agency. When we arrived they had not arranged the cleaning so we had to wait until nearly 8pm to enter the property. We had a couple of small issues with broken items etc and found the agency to be unhelpful.

Nice location, close (20 minutes' walk or 5 mins drive) to one of our favourite beaches, other beaches a bit further away. This is a wonderful part of Spain, great food and generally not full of tourists. The house had a good supply of hot water - once we'd fixed the boiler (it needed repressurising). There was just about room for 2 cars in the garage and lots of on road parking.

Communication was non-existent - I emailed and texted several times about our early arrival and never received a response. Every was via a key lock and we never met anyone at the house- felt very impersonal. Washing machine was broken and flooded the garage. The drains were blocked and flooded the garden. These were both fixed within two days. We also had problems with repeated fuses blowing and inadequate hot water pressure (which we fixed). The microwave worked only intermittently. The kitchen was poorly equipped - although it slept 8 people, there were inadequate cups/glasses/etc for all of us. The cutlery was poor and several items perished with use (aged plastic). There were no wine glasses other than champagne flutes. The chopping board was perished and unhygienic - we had to buy our own. Furthermore, there was not enough seating for 8 - both the table inside and outside only fitted 6. Many of the lightbulbs were either broken or absent. The garden is tiny and overlooked by other buildings in the complex, one of which had a loud, aggressive dog behind the fence. There was no BBQ (admittedly this was not listed but seems unusual for a beach side Spanish property). Beds were profoundly uncomfortable, hard and with only single pillows, even for a double bed. Overall, the cost was relatively cheap but for a few hundred Euros' investment and updating the owners could have got themselves an 8-9 star house. As it is, we had a lovely holiday despite this house's failings. I certainly would not return nor recommend it to friends or family.