Oviedo

I’d read that Oviedo was clean, walkable, and a little overlooked next to Spain’s coastal heavyweights, and all three turned out to be true — though “overlooked” undersells it. This is the capital of the Kingdom of Asturias, the only part of Iberia the Moors never conquered, and that eighth-century holdout status gave the city a body of pre-Romanesque architecture found almost nowhere else on earth. UNESCO recognizes several of these buildings as a distinct category of their own, separate from the broader Romanesque style that came later across Europe — Asturias essentially invented its own architectural language while the rest of Christian Iberia was still under Muslim rule.

The best of it sits just outside the center, on Monte Naranco: the Santa María del Naranco and San Miguel de Lillo churches, built under King Ramiro I in the ninth century. Santa María, originally a royal hall rather than a church, has this odd, almost modern austerity to it — barrel vaults, blind arcading, medallions carved with a restraint that feels centuries ahead of the ornamented Gothic and Baroque that would dominate Spain later. I climbed up there on a grey morning, mostly alone, and the building’s plainness against the green hillside was more moving than half the gilded cathedrals I’d seen elsewhere on the trip.

The Cathedral and the Holy Ark

Back in the old town, the Cathedral of San Salvador — Gothic, with a single soaring tower that took centuries to complete, mismatched with its older Romanesque and pre-Romanesque sections underneath — holds the Cámara Santa, a chamber built to house relics including the Arca Santa, a reliquary chest that medieval pilgrims believed contained cloths and objects connected to Christ himself, smuggled out of Toledo and Jerusalem ahead of various invasions and eventually landing here for safekeeping. Oviedo was, for a long stretch of the Middle Ages, considered such an important pilgrimage stop that there was a saying: “who goes to Santiago and not to the Salvador, visits the servant and not the lord.” Pilgrims on the Camino Primitivo — the original, oldest route of the Camino de Santiago, which starts right here in Oviedo — still detour through the cathedral before heading west.

Cider Culture and a Bronze Woody Allen

Outside the churches, Oviedo runs on cider. Asturian sidra is naturally sparkling but not carbonated in the bottle — it gets its life from being poured, or “escanciado,” from a height of nearly a meter above the glass, splashing hard to aerate a small measure that you’re meant to drink in one go before it goes flat. I spent an evening on Calle Gascona — the so-called “Cider Boulevard” — watching waiters pour with one arm stretched high and one low, barely looking at the glass, a party trick so ingrained it’s basically muscle memory passed down between generations of Asturian bar staff. I tried it myself, badly, and soaked my shoes for the effort.

Oviedo also has a lighter claim to fame: Woody Allen, who called it “a delightful, undiscovered city” after filming here, is honored with a bronze statue near the cathedral that tourists queue to photograph themselves beside. It’s a strange little monument to civic gratitude — the city apparently took the compliment seriously enough to cast it in metal — but it fits Oviedo’s slightly self-effacing charm. This isn’t a city trying to convince you of anything. It just quietly has more history, and better cider, than its size would suggest.

When to go: Late spring through early autumn (May–September) brings the mildest Asturian weather; visit in September specifically if you want the cider harvest energy without the peak summer crowds of the coast nearby.