“Cantabria” is since 1982 the name of an autonomous region in northern Spain. As such, “Cantabria”, proclaimed in law as “a historical community”, is a proper name signaling both the current polity and the millenary tradition which the territory refers to, being in Cato the Elder (c. 195 BC) the first written mention about the “cantabri”, and in Strabo (c. 29 aC) about “Kantabría”. In Visigothic times, there was a “dux Cantabriae”, Petrus, whose son Adefonsus would become the key figure in the consolidation of the Christian kingdom of Oviedo after the Islamic conquest of most of Iberia. Yet, from that event onwards, the name “Cantabria” traveled eastwards, up to La Rioja and Navarre. In the Middle Ages, then, to be “Cantabrian” was to be a subject of the king of Pamplona. As consequence of this fact, since the sunrise of modernity Spanish Basques strongly claimed to be the direct descendants of the ancient Cantabrians. Only in the second half of the 18th century two Augustinian scholars (Flórez 1768, Risco 1779) demonstrated beyond doubt that the Basque Country had never been “Cantabria”. Since then, the administrative Castilian province of “Santander” began to claim the label of “Cantabria”, which it fully caught two centuries later. Thus, “Cantabria”, with its associated epic values (warrior-like, freedom-loving, aboriginal Spaniards), has been for over two thousand years the ethno-political sign for very different peoples and territories. Such a semiotic wandering contributes to explain the force of legendary discourses in the formation of political identities.