Hermandad de las Cuatro Villas

The Hermandad of the Cuatro Villas de la Costa de la Mar ('Brotherhood of the Four Cities'), also cited under the name Cuatro Villas de la Costa de Cantabria,^[1] was a medieval and modern administrative entity that grouped the coastal cities of the north of the kingdom of Castile, all of them part of present-day Cantabria; namely, from west to east: San Vicente de la Barquera, Santander, Laredo, and Castro-Urdiales. At the end of the 15th century, it became part of the corregimiento of the Cuatro Villas along with other territories in the north of the Iberian Peninsula. In 1514 the province was renamed the corregimiento de las Tres Villas de la Costa, by separation from the town of San Vicente, which rejoined in 1521. Towns twinned since the 13th century, its foundation as a corregimiento dates back to the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, around 1496, surviving until its inclusion in the province of Cantabria in 1778.^[2]

They formed a naval and commercial power of the first order at the service of the kingdom of Castile and their economic importance was such that together with the brotherhood of the Marismas (of which the Basque seafaring towns also formed part) they stopped the expansion of the Hanseatic League towards the south of the Atlantic Arc.^[3] As a corregimiento, they constituted the largest and most important historical administrative entity of those that preceded the current autonomous community of Cantabria^[4] and as a brotherhood, from the mid-15th century to the mid-16th century, they absorbed 40% of all commercial activity generated in the Iberian Cantabrian Sea.^[5] The Cuatro Villas was also, together with the town of Santillana del Mar, the only urban fabric of the region in the Middle Ages, whose structure was eminently rural until the 19th century.^[6]