Santana Motor - History

History

The company was founded as "Metalúrgica de Santa Ana, SA" and originally manufactured agricultural equipment. The company was set up with a start up of just 3 million pesetas following a drive by the Spanish government in 1954 who were offering start-up incentives to local businesses to encourage development in the Andalucia region of Southern Spain. The company decided to expand beyond its original products line and entered into talks with the Rover car company in 1956 in an attempt to get a licensing agreement to build Land Rover Series models in their factory, in a similar way to the Minerva company in Belgium and Tempo in Germany, both of which built Series Land Rovers under license. An agreement was reached in 1956 and production began in 1958 it was licensed to build Land Rover models. The Santana Motor company built Series Land Rovers under license in CKD form (Complete Knocked Down kits); essentially parts were shipped over from the Land Rover factory in Solihull and the Land Rovers were built up from this 'kit' at the Santana factory in Spain.

From 1968 Santana began to develop its own versions of the Land Rover Series Models, developing new engines and new models and this close relationship with Land Rover led to the company to change its name from "Metalúrgica de Santa Ana, SA" to "Land Rover Santana, SA".

In 1962 the company became responsible for promoting the Santana and Land Rover brands in the Central and South American Markets as well as Africa. CKD kits were also supplied to the Moroccan and Costa Rican markets by the company. Because of the harsh working lives vehicles lead in these environments, customer feedback on the range meant that Santana were often far more aware of each model's failings than the Land Rover company itself was. Because of the tight financial position of British Leyland in this period (who owned Land Rover), Santana were often better placed than Land Rover was to deal with these failings. This meant that Santana began to engineer its own solutions to common problems into the models it produced and so originality between Santana's models and Land Rover's equivalents - a trend which lead to the companies position today. Up to the late 1980s the Santana models - supposed to be quickly and cheaply built versions of Land Rover's own product often ended up being superior to the Land Rover equivalent. For instance Santana models featured anatomical seats, disc-brakes, turbo diesel engines, taper-leaf springs, parabolic springs, and civilian specification Forward Control models before the Land Rover equivalents and even a civilian version of the Land Rover Lightweight called the "Ligero" which was never released by Land Rover.