A set of historical tide gauge sea level records from Santander (Northern Spain) have been recovered from logbooks stored at the Spanish National Geographical Institute (IGN). Sea level measurements have been digitised, quality-controlled and merged into a consistent sea level time series. Vertical references among instruments benchmarks have been derived from high precision vertical levelling surveys. The observations were recorded as daily averages and are from three different instruments in two locations in Santander (Spain). The historical sea level record in Santander consists of a daily time series spanning the period 1876-1924 and it is further connected to the modern tide gauge station nearby, ensuring datum continuity up to the present. The data from Santander comes from a floating gauge and then syphon gauges. This scarcity of long-term sea-level observations, as well as their uneven geographical distribution is a major challenge for climate studies that address, for example, the quantification of mean sea-level rise at centennial time scales, the accurate assessment of sea-level acceleration or the long-term changes in sea-level extremes that are vital for coastal risk assessments. This dataset represents an additional effort of sea-level data archaeology and aims at preserving the historical scientific heritage that has been up to now stored in old archives in non-electronic format. The research was partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. A further two series were rescued from Alicante under the same initiative.