This is one of the most underrated towns in northern Spain - The Times

For decades Aviles was the place Spaniards drove past. The northern Asturian town was synonymous with steelworks and pollution, and holidaymakers made instead for the region’s other attractions; places like Llanes and Ribadesella. 

Mention Aviles almost anywhere in Spain and many people still picture chimneys, smoke and a grim industrial landscape. The surprise is that almost none of that survives.

Instead, visitors today find one of northern Spain’s loveliest historic centres: arcaded medieval streets, Renaissance palaces, belle époque mansions and leafy green spaces such as Parque de Ferrera. This is a place where neighbours linger over coffee and lunchtime vermouth. Just nine miles from Asturias airport, close to sweeping beaches and the lush, hydrangea-clad countryside of Green Spain, Aviles is quietly transforming itself.

The town is well placed as travellers abandon Spain’s scorching south for cooler Atlantic summers. Even the rain has become part of the attraction. Many visitors prefer a light shower and 22C to a battering 42C. Direct trains bring the town within reach of Madrid — it’s a four-hour journey.

“It isn’t only foreigners discovering us,” says Fernando Artime, a businessman whose restoration and transformation of historic buildings into hotels in Aviles and neighbouring San Esteban de Pravia is helping revive this corner of Asturias. “It’s Spaniards… and even Asturians.”

The city’s reputation, he says, simply failed to catch up with reality. “People still have that image in their minds, even though it’s a complete anachronism. Aviles has long been overlooked in favour of Oviedo and Gijon, despite once being one of northern Spain’s most important ports.”

The old industrial landscape has not disappeared altogether. On one side of the Ria de Aviles estuary port, giant wind-turbine sections lie stacked on the quays awaiting export. Brick chimneys, now dormant and protected by heritage laws, rise above the waterfront, reminders of what was once the town’s lifeblood — the steel industry, and its port is still home to a large factory producing the metal.

I start my exploration on that side of the estuary at the site of a former industrial wasteland, where the Oscar Niemeyer Centre embodies Aviles’s reinvention. Opened in 2011, the sweeping white curves of the exhibition and concert venue rise above the river. Its main building resembles a cross-section of a boiled egg.

Niemeyer, the Brazilian architect, donated the design after receiving the Prince of Asturias award for pioneering the international style, asking only that it should stand beside water. Its director, Carlos Cuadros, says “it brings together everything that defined his architecture”. Curves. Concrete. Primary colours. Above all, white. The Atlantic climate has other ideas. Salty humidity stains the concrete, resulting in the buildings having to be cleaned every six months.

Atop the centre’s mushroom-shaped tower, the chef Adrián San Julián pursues a similarly striking vision in the restaurant, Yume (tasting menus from £26; yumegastro.com). His signature dish transforms an onion into broth, puree, reduction and crisp. “If you’re making a dish from an onion,” he says, dismissing the fashion for zero-kilometre cooking, “it has to be the best onion. I don’t care where it comes from.”

Crossing the footbridge spanning the estuary, you step straight from the futuristic into the heart of old Aviles. Outside the medieval San Antonio de Padua church, a woman in a black lace mantilla closes the door to prevent my entry, explaining firmly that prayers come before tourists and that now was rosary time.

Returning later proves worthwhile. Father Luis De La Cruz, the parish priest, shows me round. Its original Romanesque structure was completed in the early 13th century, making the church the city’s oldest building, he says. Near the main altar an ornate casket holds the remains of Pedro Menéndez de Aviles, the swashbuckling admiral who in 1565 founded St Augustine, Florida, the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the US.

Before I leave, De La Cruz points to another curiosity in a chapel closed to tourists. Inside stands the statue of Santísimo Cristo de los Zapatos (Christ of the Shoes), said to have been found floating at sea by fishermen. Worshippers kissed its feet until they wore away, prompting devotees to protect them with silver shoes.

I ask De La Cruz why the town is not better known. “With the decline of industry people are discovering Aviles,” he says. “It had always been there. It was simply hidden.”

Wandering through Sabugo, the old fishermen’s quarter, the clang of church bells drifts above cafés preparing for the lunchtime vermouth crowd. “There is still a social way of life here,” says Ana González, a guide who works with the town hall and joins me to show me some of its sights. “People stop to chat and spend hours on café terraces.”

We pass a strange statue of a hugely plump girl in court dress, Eugenia Martínez Vallejo — La Monstrua, or The Monstress. “We have a lot of affection for her,” González says. Vallejo was a 17th-century court jester whose physical size, now thought to be the result of an illness, brought her to the attention of Spain’s King Charles II. She was the subject of two paintings by the Aviles-born portraitist Juan Carreño de Miranda, a pupil of Velázquez, which hang in the Prado in Madrid. The sculpture, created by Amado González Hevia from the Carreño portraits, is a reminder of a cruel past. 

González produces another surprise. In Aviles there are two churches dedicated to Thomas Becket, England’s murdered archbishop. One knows him as Santo Tomás de Canterbury; the other, more endearingly, as Santo Tomás de Cantorbery. “We’ve always looked more towards northern Europe than Madrid,” González says. Aviles was built on trade with England, France and Flanders and once held a monopoly on Spain’s salt trade.

González explains that devotion to the saint spread rapidly after the news of his murder in Canterbury cathedral in 1170 was carried abroad by merchants, sailors and pilgrims. Prosperous medieval Aviles embraced England’s newest saint so enthusiastically that a second parish was eventually dedicated to him.

Before leaving me to continue alone, González points out the delicacies of the town’s bakeries, in particular the mantecado de Aviles, a delicious rich sponge cake made for its Easter festivities since the 17th century and known as El Bollo. Guests at the Palace Hotel, on Plaza de España, where I am staying, receive a batch of the cake which is baked in its kitchens. The recipe, so they say, was invented to nourish generations of Asturians making the journey to seek their fortunes in places as far afield as Cuba.

The hotel is formerly the palacio of the aristocratic Ferrera family and, from the back, looks over what were their elegant gardens and are now the public Parque de Ferrera. The grand houses of such returning emigrés, known as casas indianas, adorn Aviles as elsewhere in Asturias. Artime is transforming the exuberant Casa Eladio Muñiz, built by a wealthy indiano returning from Cuba, into what he hopes will become the region’s first great luxury hotel.

The next day, inevitably, it rains. I seek shelter in the covered market where fishmongers arrange monkfish, bonito and shellfish. Waiters in bars pour cider in glittering arcs from a height, as is the Asturian fashion.

In the mizzle I watch as pilgrims plod up Calle Rivero on the Camino de Santiago, marking the end of stage 21 of the Northern Way. Their presence and the merchants’ houses and palaces that abound near my hotel recall the town’s centuries-old pre-industrial links. History did not bypass Aviles. A sad chapter recalls that the Nazi Condor Legion bombed the town in 1937, during the Spanish civil war. Folklore holds that the ghost of a British pilot called Walter, who fought for the Republicans and died trying to save the town, haunts one of those palaces. De La Cruz told me how, in turn, Republican forces vandalised San Antonio church.

But that is the past. One of the great joys of Asturias, famed for fabada, a white bean stew made with chorizo, black pudding and bacon, and cabrales, a rich blue cheese often melted on top of beef or pork fillets, is its hearty, gargantuan dishes of food. At Casa Tataguyo, a local institution, the chef Belén Jardón serves me delicious wild Cantabrian sea bass cooked in onion and white wine, accompanied by an elegant albarin blanco from nearby Cangas. I confess I had already bolted a dish of longaniza sausage and potatoes placed unasked before me as an appetiser. For postres (pudding), an exceptional flan melts in the mouth (mains from £16; tataguyo.com).

The next morning I drive west to San Esteban de Pravia, where the Nalon, Asturias’s great river artery, reaches the Cantabrian Sea. Old cranes, now idle and smartened up, still dominate the quays where coal was once loaded onto ships bound for Britain, France and beyond. “It died,” Artime says simply of the town after Asturias’s coalmines closed in 2018.

His response was Gran Hotel Brillante. The building opened in 1905 as Pension Brillante, when San Esteban was enjoying its brief golden age as one of Spain’s busiest coal ports. Captains, engineers, travelling salesmen and families arriving by train lodged there. The poet Rubén Darío frequented it, as did the painters Joaquín Sorolla and Mariano Fortuny. The Brillante was not merely somewhere to sleep but a gem, remembered in a local refrain long after its busiest years had passed.

Then it closed. Artime had admired the building since childhood and spent years trying to persuade its owners to sell. When they finally agreed, rain had poured through the roof, the floors had rotted and many believed it was beyond saving. “People told me I was crazy,” he recalls. Rather than remodel it beyond recognition, he restored it patiently, preserving its great old-world charm and introducing modern luxury.

The hotel and San Esteban, which you can also get to on a picturesque local railway route, the Cercanias Asturias C-7 line, have become the object of devoted annual visitors who seek the peace of the deep estuary and its coastal paths — the fruit of another post-industrial resurrection. 

“The hotel is proving a catalyst for the area,” Artime says. From its restaurant terrace, diners look across the estuary to the cranes that now preside over an improbable tranquillity. Moored directly opposite is a smart wooden motorboat in which visitors can chug up the majestic Nalon. For a place whose fortunes were once tied to endings — the last coal trains, the last ships, the closing mines — the Brillante has brought new beginnings.

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Isambard Wilkinson was a guest of Hotel Palacio Aviles, which has B&B doubles from £140 (melia.com), and Gran Hotel Brillante, which has B&B doubles from £140 (granhotelbrillante.com). Fly to Asturias