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If, like me, you fancy a spot of torture and witchcraft with your holidays, you shouldn’t miss the medieval village of Santillana del Mar, in the northern Spanish province of Cantabria. Set amongst low, rolling hills of jade green grass, Santillana (pronounced Santi-yana), is a fabulously preserved 12th-century hamlet, a sleepy little collection of ancient cobbled streets and noblemen’s mansions carved in stone. Declared a national monument in 1899, Santillana is the kind of place where, as brochures are wont to say, “time stands still and every stone tells a story.” All of which fails to prepare you for the fact that, in Santillana del Mar, time stands still and every stone tells a story.

One of the best stories concerns the town’s beginnings. Strolling up the main street I came to a 12th century Romanesque monastery, the Colegiata de Santa Juliana. A handsome building in its own right, the church is also the resting place for Saint Juliana, a chaste Spanish dame who lived in the 3rd century AD. Not much is known about Juliana, apart from the fact that she had the misfortune of being married off to a Turkish pasha, who tortured her to death for not renouncing her faith. (Sexual frustration may also have come into it, since her faith was not the only thing she refused to renounce.) Juliana duly became a Christian martyr, and the town of Santillana (a corruption of Santa Juliana), grew up around the church that was built to house her remains.

Leveraging this tragic tale, Santillana has set up a Museum of the Inquisition, an exhibition of some of the cruellest instruments of torture ever devised. The Inquisition was practised throughout the Catholic world from the 15th century to the mid 1800s, but it was the Spaniards who made it an art form. Some 32,000 people were killed during the Spanish Inquisition, many of them tortured with the kinds of gadgets on display here, from garrotes, iron maidens and head crushers. It was all very informative: who would have guessed that victims weren’t simply drowned but bound in a sack with a dozen cats, then dunked repeatedly, like a tea bag?

Exiting, somewhat woozy, I made my across the road and into another museum, this one devoted to an exhibition on witchcraft. Brilliantly presented, the collection featured items like a ritual trumpet made from a human femur, an exorcism manual from the 1600s, and a potion traditionally made by local witches to induce “hallucinations of levitation.”

But Santillana is more than just pain and torment. There are some great walks to be had in the surrounding countryside. Pack a bottle of beer and head out of town in any direction; you can’t go wrong. Also worth a look are the cave paintings at Altamira, 2km south west of Santillana. Dating back to 12,000BC, the paintings of bison, deer and horses are in a precarious state, and have been closed to all but a handful of daily visitors since 1977, due to damage from human breathing. But life-size replicas in the adjacent museum will give you an idea of what you’re missing. (If you want to see the real thing, you have to write at least a year in advance to Centro de Investigación de Altamira, 39330 Santillana del Mar, Cantabria, Spain.)

Apart from its history, Santillana’s biggest draw card is the food. The locals are very big on simple delicacies: cheese, Atlantic anchovies, fresh cider. There are some great restaurants — Casa Cossío (named after the legendary Spanish bullfight historian), and Restaurante Altamira. Local taverns also offer excellent fare, most of it classic soul food: soups, crusty breads, wild boar roasted on giant open fires. My favourite was the fabada, a hearty bean stew mixed with vegetables, chunks of meat and some particularly bloody blood sausage. This is Santillana, after all.

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