Relativity can be developed without coordinates: Laurent 1994 (SR), Winitzski 2007 (GR).
I would normally define a vector by its transformation properties: it's something whose components change according to a Lorentz transformation when we do a boost from one frame of reference to another. But in a coordinate-free approach, we don't talk about components, and vectors are thought of as immutable. For example, Laurent describes an observer using a timelike unit vector $U$, and then for any other vector $v$, he defines $t$ and $r$ uniquely by $v=tU+r$, where $r$ is orthogonal to $U$. The $(t,r)$ pair is what we would normally think of as the coordinate representation of $v$.
In these approaches, how do you define a vector, and how do you differentiate it from things like scalars, pseudovectors, rank-2 tensors, or random objects taken from something that has the structure of a vector space but that in coordinate-dependent descriptions would clearly not transform according to the Lorentz transformation? It seems vacuous to say that a vector is something that lives in the tangent space, since what we mean by that is that it lives in a vector space isomorphic to the tangent space, and any vector space of the same dimension is isomorphic to it.
[EDIT] I'm not asking for a definition of a tangent vector. I'm asking what criterion you can use to decide whether a certain object can be described as a tangent vector. For example, how do we know in this coordinate-free context that the four-momentum can be described as a vector, but the magnetic field can't? My normal answer would have been that the magnetic field doesn't transform like a vector, it transforms like a piece of a tensor. But if we can't appeal to that definition, how do we know that the magnetic field doesn't live in the tangent vector space?
Bertel Laurent, Introduction to spacetime: a first course on relativity
Sergei Winitzki, Topics in general relativity, https://sites.google.com/site/winitzki/index/topics-in-general-relativity