Village
Gozón is an Asturian municipality of about 10,400 inhabitants with its capital at Luanco, facing Cabo de Peñas, the northernmost point of Asturias, included in the Cabo Peñas Protected Landscape. Its coastline, made up of cliffs, gathers numerous beaches, among them Bañugues, where remains of Lower Palaeolithic stone-tool industry have been found, the oldest in the municipality. In the Viodo area, to the north-east, the remains of an old volcanic caldera, now half submerged beneath the sea, are preserved, the source of the area's abundant volcanic rock; and inland, the Charca de Zeluán is a natural monument with a large presence of migratory birds. The municipality lived from whaling and fishing, and its Museo Marítimo de Asturias is today among the most visited in the region.
Nature
The northernmost point of Asturias, in the municipality of Gozón, with cliffs of Armorican quartzite over a hundred metres high, highly resistant to abrasion; from the Peña la Gaviera, at 94 metres, Cabo Vidio and Cabo Busto can be seen to the west. Its lighthouse, the most important on the Asturian coast, has shone since 1852 —before that, ships were signalled by burning logs on a screen of stones— and it houses a visitor centre. The surrounding area has been a protected landscape since 1995, with 19.2 square kilometres included in the Natura 2000 network since 2014, partly a special protection area for birds because of its colonies of European storm petrel and European shag. It contains the best-represented Palaeozoic geological sequence in northern Spain and provides access to the beaches of Xagó, Verdicio, Llumeres, Bañugues and Moniello.
Monument
The Museo Marítimo de Asturias, in Luanco, capital of the municipality of Gozón, opened in 1948 on the initiative of the town council and belongs to the network of ethnographic museums of Asturias. It divides its collection into four sections devoted both to the biological side of the sea and to man's work in relation to it: marine biology, with animals and plants from prehistory onward; riverside shipwright's carpentry, with boats, photographs and tools; artisanal fishing, with tackle, nets and anchors; and navigation, whose models trace the evolution of the ship and include a display on the Spanish Navy and the Asturian merchant marine.
Monument
The Torre del Reloj de Luanco, in the centre of the town, was built in 1705 thanks to J. A. Menéndez de la Pola and A. García Caunedo to house a clock, although in its early years it served as a prison, powder magazine and warehouse, and it did not fulfil the purpose for which it was built until well into the second half of the 18th century. It has a square plan and four storeys, with a baroque doorway framed by eared mouldings, on whose lintel the Cross of Victory is carved, and it is topped by a small turret for the bells; the current clock, installed in 1920, was donated by the Unión Gozoniega de La Habana. It dominates the fishing quarter of Luanco, next to the church of Santa María and its 18th-century altarpiece.
Monument
A Romanesque church in the parish of Manzaneda, declared a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection). It is one of the few surviving examples of Romanesque architecture around Cabo Peñas, a land of heavily altered churches. Small in size and with a single nave, it belongs to the classicist Romanesque of the late 12th or early 13th century; its portal shows Jaca-style chequerwork, sawtooth motifs and zigzag patterns, and its apse preserves corbels carved with human and animal figures. Built of simple rubble masonry typical of local workshops, it was declared a Bien de Interés Cultural with monument status in 2010, and its history is linked to the nearby 17th-century Palacio de Manzaneda, built around a late-medieval tower.
Curiosity
In the Bañugues inlet, in the municipality of Gozón, the Sociedad Compañía Minera de Gozón, and later Duro Felguera, worked an iron deposit already known to the Romans from the 19th century onward. With no railway available, a harbour was built to ship the ore to Gijón, from where it went on to England or Germany or to the blast furnaces of La Felguera. The mine closed in 1967 when the deposit was exhausted and passed to Hunosa. Today the engine house, workshops, a mine entrance and the breakwater with its loading points survive in ruins, included as a historic ensemble in the Inventario Cultural de Asturias. Iron oxide still stains the sea red off Llumeres, and in 2008 tamarugite was found on the beach, a unique case in continental Europe.
Monument
The church of Santa María de la Anunciación, seat of the parish of Luanco (Gozón, Asturias), stands on a small headland between the beach of Santa María and the harbor pier, and was declared Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection) in 1992. It was built in 1730, as the old church had become too small; the Sailors' Guild funded the altarpieces and the camarín, and the design fell to the architect Pedro Muiz Somonte. It has four bays with ribbed and star vaults, and in the 19th century the bell tower was enlarged. Inside, the main altarpiece of 1739 stands out, with the image of the Cristo del Socorro, so named since, according to tradition, it calmed a storm that threatened nearly three hundred sailors of the town; its feast is celebrated in February.
Nature
The Zeluán pond, in the concejo of Gozón, and the neighboring Llodero inlet, already in that of Avilés, form a natural area that preserves the least altered vegetation of the Avilés estuary and which was declared a natural monument in 2002, with 23.41 hectares of which only 0.5 correspond to the pond. It is one of the three main refuges for waterbirds in Asturias: during the spring and autumn migratory passages they host thousands of waders, such as the ringed plover or the dunlin, along with terns, herons, gulls and threatened species such as the curlew or the shag. Among the pond's vegetation, reeds and rushes serve as nesting sites, and on Zeluán beach the low tide reveals a marshland landscape reminiscent of a former estuary.
Nature
Xagó beach, in the locality of Nieva, in the municipality of Gozón, is a stretch of sand nearly two kilometres long backed by a dune field of about 35 hectares, one of the largest on the northern Spanish coast, both included in the protected landscape of Cabo de Peñas. The dune system, with gently sloped ridges and pyramidal and tongue-shaped dunes, supports an abundant colony of marram grass, a plant that helps stabilise the sand. The beach, with strong surf due to its northwest orientation, is highly valued by surfers for the quality of its breaks and by fishermen for its sea bass, and it appears in Spain's naturist guides because nudism can be practised in several areas of the dunes; in recent decades it has been losing sand volume owing to the dredging of the Avilés estuary.