Oviedo, the elegant capital of Asturias, guards a UNESCO treasure: the 9th-century pre-Romanesque churches of Santa María del Naranco and San Miguel de Lillo, built before the rest of Europe had imagined the Romanesque at all.
Gijón, by contrast, faces the sea — a lively port city of beaches, the old fishermen's quarter of Cimavilla, and sidrerías where cider is poured theatrically from above the head.
The journey's coast is at its most beautiful at Cudillero, an amphitheatre of brightly painted houses tumbling down to a tiny harbour, and at Luarca, the 'white town of the green coast'.
