Oviedo in a Day

Oviedo fits into a day: the old town with the Catedral de San Salvador and its Cámara Santa, Santa María del Naranco and San Miguel de Lillo about four kilometres from the centre, Plaza del Fontán and Calle Gascona, the Bulevar de la Sidra. The full visit to the cathedral costs €7, and it's worth doing it first thing.

Oviedo takes its time even when you've only got a day for it: it fits into a single walk, but carries the weight of a capital. In a few hours you go from the medieval gold of the Cámara Santa to a ninth-century church perched on a hillside, from the bustle of the Fontán to the ritual of pouring a culín on Gascona. The trick is to start early and let the city set the pace: there's time for everything if you don't rush.

The old town and the Catedral de San Salvador

Start where it all began: Plaza de Alfonso II el Casto, arcaded and cobbled, presided over by the Gothic façade of the Catedral de San Salvador with its single tower — the second one was never built, and that asymmetry is now part of its character. Inside beats the heart of medieval Asturias: the Cámara Santa, pre-Romanesque and a World Heritage Site, holds the Cruz de la Victoria and the Cruz de los Ángeles — today on the Principality's coat of arms and flag — alongside the venerated Santo Sudario.

The full visit costs €7, and the partial one — Cámara Santa, cloister and museum — €5; under-12s go free. In July and August it's open all day, from 10:00 am to 7:00 pm (Saturdays until 5:00 pm), and there are no tourist visits on Sundays: it's worth fitting it in first thing, before the old town wakes up.

The pre-Romanesque churches on Mount Naranco, a quarter of an hour away

About four kilometres from the centre, up the slope of Mount Naranco, wait the two jewels that put Oviedo in every art history textbook. Santa María del Naranco wasn't built as a church but as the royal hall of the palace Ramiro I had built around the year 842: a slender, two-storey building with loggias open to the valley, so far ahead of its time that it's hard to believe it's pushing twelve centuries old. Two hundred metres further up, San Miguel de Lillo retains barely a third of its original fabric, just enough to sense the ambition of the whole complex.

Both have been a World Heritage Site since 1985. Admission costs €5 per person (€4 for groups of twenty or more), covers both monuments, and includes a guided visit except on Mondays, when entry is free but self-guided. It's worth bringing cash — it's the only payment accepted — and knowing that photos aren't allowed inside San Miguel de Lillo: that particular memory will have to be carried in your head.

The Fontán: market, square and midday

Back in the centre, no scene captures everyday Oviedo better than Plaza del Fontán, an arcaded rectangle that was once a lagoon, then a market, and always a meeting point. The covered produce market opens every day except Sunday, and it's the place to nose around Asturian cheeses, cured meats, fabes and seasonal produce. Around it, on Thursday, Saturday and Sunday mornings, from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm, the open-air market sets up.

If you land on a Sunday, the mood shifts: the surrounding streets fill with the antiques and flea market, a treat for rummagers. It's also the natural hour for vermouth, and for letting yourself drift towards the nearby cider houses with no fixed plan.

The city of statues

Oviedo prides itself, rightly, on being an open-air museum: close to a hundred sculptures dot its streets and squares, signed by top names like Botero, Úrculo and Julio López Hernández. The most photographed is the bronze Woody Allen — raincoat and heavy-rimmed glasses — standing on the pedestrianised Calle de Milicias Nacionales, put up after the filmmaker's praise for the city when he collected his Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes in 2002.

Don't miss La Regenta, opposite the Cathedral, a tribute to the heroine of Clarín's novel that turned Oviedo into the literary 'Vetusta', or Botero's imposing Maternidad, those impossible curves the locals nicknamed, tongue in cheek, 'el Culis Monumentalibus'. Coming across them unhurried, almost by chance, is the best way to walk the centre.

Gascona, the cider boulevard

No day in Oviedo ends well without a stop on Calle Gascona, known as the Bulevar de la Sidra: barely two hundred metres that pack in much of the city's cider houses, terraces always full, the smell of apple in the air. This is where you learn the art of pouring by watching the waiters: raising the bottle above the head and letting the stream fall so the culín — the small measure of cider poured and drunk in one go — 'breaks' against the rim of the glass and takes on air.

The golden rule is to drink each culete in one go, without letting the cider sit, since it loses its qualities almost at once. Pair it with a cachopo (a breaded, stuffed veal cutlet), a fabada (Asturias's bean-and-pork stew), or a board of Cabrales, and if you land on a Thursday, stay for the cancios de chigre, the old tavern songs that soundtrack the night. A rounded close to a city that takes a day to walk but stays with you far longer.