Don’t be surprised to spot a few backpackers nursing their blisters in Oviedo’s vast Plaza de la Catedral, the Cathedral Plaza. For centuries, pilgrims have been trekking through this Spanish city on one of the many trails that make up Northern Spain’s famed Camino de Santiago route, also known as the Way of St. James.
Oviedo's historic Plaza de la Catedral.
Your trek through the Asturias region may be considerably shorter and less strenuous, but thanks to yet another of Spain’s historic centers having been made vehicle-free you too may find the serenity you seek in this very special Oviedan square in which the chapel of San Miguel within the Cathedral of San Salvador is part of a collection of local monuments that make up a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Forming an almost-equilateral triangle with the Cantabrian Sea coastal cities of Avilés and Gijón, Oviedo is solid and spotless as befits what is the capital of Asturias. Which means that its cultural offerings are robust too.
On a corner of the Cathedral Plaza, the Museum of Fine Arts of Asturias is housed within two historic mansions and a newer building, all connected in a thoroughly labyrinthine manner. But getting turned around a few times is well worth it to stumble upon a room of saints by El Greco, a cocky youth painted by Goya, and a stark Zurbarán depiction of Christ on the cross. The museum’s holdings lead you further through the age of Picasso and Dalí, as well as provide an opportunity to discover some fine lesser-known (to you) Spanish and Asturian artists of the last century.
The Plaza de Ayuntamiento is home to Oviedo's town hall.
Head some blocks further southeast in the old town to reach the restored Mercado El Fontán, one of those fine glass and cast-iron market temples from the late-19th-century. Browsing aisles of vendor stalls brimming with fresh produce, robust sea creatures and thick meats will give you your first inkling that Asturian cuisine just might be something special.
When you head up Fruela and Uría streets, the latter a main shopping boulevard, and get to Escandalera Plaza you’ll readily recognize a zaftig female form and plump baby on her lap that make up the bronze statue La Maternidad (Maternity) as a Botero. A slight detour on Pelayo Street and you can’t miss running into Culis Monumentalis, an enormously tall Botero-ish statue that, as the name to a Spanish speaker suggests, is a huge butt, or more accurately a statue that displays a butt on each side of it. Oviedo may be properly bourgeois, but it’s not stolid by any means.
As elsewhere in Asturias, the newer parts of town show off well-preserved Art Nouveau (called Modernism in Spain) banks and office buildings, the funding of which no doubt came in part from indiano riches, as those Spaniards and many Asturians were called who went to the Americas and came back wealthy and ready to flaunt it.
The Plaza del Fontán in old town Oviedo is known for its covered market.
Just west of the old town, the Campo San Francisco public park is laced with shady pathways of the sort along which you can imagine good Oviedan burghers of a century ago strolling en familia in their Sunday finery. Today, you’ll pass statues of prominent figures of that past, as well as a whimsical figurine of Mafalda, a cherubic and precocious little girl whose Argentine-Spanish creator Quino won a 2014 Princess of Asturias Award for his comic strip character.
Dwarfing the park on the urban spatial scale, the enormous decade-old Congress and Exhibition Palace in a further western city district is a Santiago Calatrava work which anyone who knows his work would guess immediately by its whitewashed ribbed-shell of a structure with wings that jut high into the air.
Also mixing the old and new, the modern Hotel Barceló Cervantes, which takes its name from a street which is in turn named for the illustrious writer, is built around a century-plus-old casa indiana. As usual for these villas built by Asturians returning with great wealth from the Americas, this one has an almost confectionery red-brick facade, while today it is wedged between glass hotel wings which cater more to business types.
A few blocks from the Barceló Cervantes hotel, the small Eseteveinte taberna is a light and bright bistro type affair that puts out shared plates with modern twists and artful presentations of seafood, meaty stews and other traditional Asturian dishes.
The Campo San Francisco park is a welcome city oasis outside of old Oviedo.
Just a few miles south of Oviedo, things turn rapidly rural and in a spot that is not much more than a highway stop, the down home cooking of the husband and wife team who run Bar Camacho is one of those great serendipitous travel finds. Walk past the small bar area in front, right through the tight kitchen with its boiling pots, and you arrive in a back dining room that looks more like your eccentric aunt’s drawing room, with an old piano, deer skulls on a wall and bric-a-brac aplenty. Everything from stews like callos caseros to scallops on the shell and fried cod keep local devotees from industrial workers to suits coming back.
North of Oviedo, a slight detour on the way to Gijón city on the coast takes you to a parish called Prendes and right into the house that is Restaurante Casa Gerardo. The restaurant may have been founded in 1882 as a modest “roadside eating house,” yet today you’re in for a culinary experience of the high end with its Michelin-star kitchen under the command of Chef Pedro Morán and his son Marcos.
The Moráns are known for their take on the Asturian staple of fabada, a stew made with beans, black pudding, pork fat and chorizo and dishes such as hake in cider sauce, and pitu de caleya, an Asturian free-range chicken. For his part, Marcos Morán can expound passionately and at great length on bean quality, sourcing and preparation. Much like Oviedo and Asturias themselves, Casa Gerardo for all its novelty retains and honors its deep roots.
Note: For those flying into Madrid’s Barajas Airport, it’s just another hour-flight to Asturias, with the Avilés airport located some 20 minutes outside of town. The flight pattern takes you right over the rugged Cantabrian Mountains where hamlets below appear as so many miniatures, a view that serves as a great introduction to the heart and soul of this region.
