Village
Its 10,400 inhabitants are spread across a mountainous municipality presided over by Peña Ubiña (2,411 m), with its capital at Pola de Lena. It holds Santa Cristina de Lena, a 9th-century pre-Romanesque jewel declared a World Heritage Site in 1985, and the historic Pajares corridor.
Monument
Santa Cristina de Lena, famous for the three-arched iconostasis on marble columns that closes off the sanctuary, was built in the mid-9th century, in the year 852, under the reign of Ramiro I, which is why it is classed as ramirense alongside the monuments of Naranco. It stands on a hill in the parish of Felgueras, near Vega del Rey, overlooking the valley of the Lena river 3.5 kilometres from Pola de Lena; it may have had a Visigothic origin in the ancient foundation of San Pedro y San Pablo de Felgueras, dating from the 7th century. In 1793 Jovellanos visited it on horseback and sketched it on site, a milestone for its wider recognition. Listed as a Monumento Histórico Artístico (heritage protection category) in 1885, it underwent restoration work in 1887, 1919 and 1950; oral tradition says miners used it as a parapet during the revolution of 1934. Unesco inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 1985.
Monument
A large 16th-century building in the Lena capital, remodelled many times over its history. From the original fabric it still preserves a window with carved decoration and an arch with a dripstone, both uncommon in the civil architecture of the valley.
Monument
A manor house of longitudinal body topped by a three-storey tower in Campomanes, the village where the Huerna and the Pajares meet to form the River Lena. Its doorway, centred on the façade, combines panelled pilasters and a balcony with wrought-iron railings.
Monument
A country church in the upper Lena valley whose east end displays an altarpiece of San Pedro dated 1690, with Rococo side altarpieces of 1768. On the sacristy ceiling, eight panels painted on a trough-shaped roof tell scenes from the lives of several saints.
Monument
An urban dwelling of popular design datable to the 18th century, right in the centre of Pola de Lena, where the poet and playwright Vital Aza was born in the mid-19th century; its value is above all symbolic, and the town's theatre bears his name today. It has the shape of a parallelepiped adapted to the slope of the ground, with door and window openings flush and lintelled in ashlar stone. Two building phases can be distinguished, the older one from the 18th century and an extension from the 19th, and because of its rustic appearance it formed part of the auxiliary outbuildings of the house of the Marqués de Carrizo, with which it shares a boundary separated by a masonry wall.
Monument
The 42.7 kilometres of railway between Puente de los Fierros and Busdongo, built from 1880 to 1884 and opened on 15 August of that year, cross the Cantabrian mountain range through the Pajares pass with 61 tunnels, 156 bridges and viaducts and a characteristic 2% gradient; it is considered one of the greatest works of Spanish engineering of the 19th century, and the British enthusiast Trevor Rowe described it in 1970 as one of the most difficult mountain crossings in Europe. The La Perruca tunnel, the longest at 3,072 metres, was bored by hand in May 1883 and marks the highest point of the line, at 1,270 metres. After the opening of the Pajares bypass in November 2023, the line is expected to be closed because of the high cost of maintaining it.
Nature
The Pajares pass, a crossing of the Cantabrian mountain range at 1,378 metres between Pajares and Arbas del Puerto, separates Asturias from the province of León. It is known for its winter snowfalls, its fog on summer nights and its gradients, which officially reach 17%, as well as for the nearby Valgrande-Pajares ski resort. The N-630 road runs through it, which together with the León-to-Gijón railway line makes it a key communication route between Asturias and central Spain; the road and the railway follow the same natural crossing, through the valleys of the Pajares river on the Asturian side and of the Bernesga on the León side, although the railway does not cross the top of the pass, instead crossing the range lower down through the Perruca tunnel.
Nature
Peña Ubiña, together with the Fontán Sur, crowns the Ubiña massif, on the watershed between the Asturian concejo of Lena and the León municipality of San Emiliano, between the Babia and Asturias regions. At 2,417 metres, it is one of the highest peaks of the Cantabrian mountain range. Jovellanos was already citing it in 1792 as «the famous Peña Ubiña». In a survey carried out in 1992 by the newspaper La Nueva España among mountain people of the Principality, it was voted the second most beautiful mountain in Asturias, after the Picu Urriellu.
Nature
The Las Ubiñas-La Mesa natural park is a protected area of mountains and valleys in the central part of the Cantabrian mountain range, spread across the concejos of Lena, Quirós and Teverga and centred on the Ubiña massif, which rises above 2,400 metres at the Fontán and Peña Ubiña peaks, and on old high-altitude routes such as the Vía de la Carisa or the Camino Real del Puerto de la Mesa, a Roman road. Unesco added it to its worldwide network of biosphere reserves on 11 July 2012. A third of its area is covered by forests of high ecological value, mainly beech woods, and it holds archaeological sites such as the Fresnedo rock shelters and several castros, as well as the Visigothic fortifications of the Homón de Faro, in Lena.
Nature
It comes down from the pass of the same name through a narrow valley in the south of Lena and joins the River Pajares at Campomanes to form the River Lena. Its natural corridor is also that of the AP-66, the motorway known precisely as the Huerna motorway.
Curiosity
A pavement found in 1921 among the remains of a possible Roman villa, at the place the sources call Memorana. Framed by a chequered band and decorated with birds, molluscs and flowers, it has no parallel in Asturias; it is kept in the Archaeological Museum.
Curiosity
Characters of the Lena masquerade who cover their heads with a cone full of coloured ribbons topped by a fox's tail and wear cowbells at the waist, which they ring while making spectacular leaps with the help of a pole.
Curiosity
At 4,144 metres it is the longest tunnel on the Huerna motorway and links Lena with the León municipality of Sena de Luna beneath the range. The first bore came into service with the motorway in 1983, but the second was not opened to traffic until 1997.
Activity
The Estación Invernal y de Montaña Valgrande-Pajares is a ski resort in the Cantabrian mountain range, in the Asturian concejo of Lena, located at the top of the Pajares pass, on the boundary between Asturias and León. It opened on 17 January 1954 and offers alpine skiing, cross-country skiing and snowboarding across the slopes of Celleros, Cuetu Riondu and Cuitunigru. It has two lodges, including the one belonging to the University of Oviedo, and seven lifts: a cable car, two four-seat chairlifts, two ski tows and two moving carpets, giving access to 38 marked runs and a 7-kilometre cross-country circuit. In the 2022-2023 season the cable car was installed, the only one in the entire Cantabrian mountain range, giving access to the high ground of Cuitunigru.
Activity
A pilgrimage festival on the first Sunday in July in a meadow at the top of La Cobertoria, where the boundaries of Lena, Quirós and Riosa meet; dozens of lambs are roasted on a stake in the Argentine manner brought back by a returning emigrant. It has been of tourist interest since 1984.
Monument
A large 16th-century building that housed the hospital of Nuestra Señora de la Alberguería, where pilgrims on their way to Oviedo were given supper and a bed; it formed part of the chain of hospitals between Pajares and the capital.
Activity
On the first Sunday in July Lena and Quirós come together at the Prau Llagüezos to roast lambs skewered on stakes; declared of tourist interest in 1984, it awards the Güelos del Aramo to the oldest couple present.
Curiosity
In 1266 Alfonso X the Wise granted the privilege that gathered the valley's scattered inhabitants into a new settlement beside the road to the Meseta; from that document springs the town that is today the municipal capital.
Curiosity
A winter masquerade in which the zamarrones go round the villages with headdresses of coloured ribbons, leaping acrobatically with the support of a pole and sounding cowbells to drive off a bad year.
Nature
The second great limestone massif of the Cantabrian mountain range after the Picos de Europa, shared by the Asturian concejos of Lena, Teverga and Quirós and by the Leonese comarca of Babia; its gullies, pastures and crags close off the concejo of Lena to the south. The Asturian side forms the Las Ubiñas-La Mesa nature park, a Unesco biosphere reserve since 2012. Its forests of beech, oak and birch include, in the Puertos de Aguería, the largest holly grove in Asturias, and its wildlife includes deer, wild boar, wolf, chamois, roe deer, otter, capercaillie and brown bear. It has 58 peaks over 2,000 metres; the highest, Peña Ubiña, at 2,417 metres, gives the massif its name, along with others such as Peña Rueda and El Siete.
Historical milestone
The physician, writer, playwright, journalist, poet and humorist Vital Aza Álvarez-Buylla was born in Pola de Lena on 28 April 1851; he wrote thirty-eight works of his own and another twenty-four in collaboration, chiefly with Miguel Ramos Carrión and José Estremera. He studied secondary school in Oviedo and worked as a draughtsman on the Oviedo-Gijón railway before graduating in medicine in Madrid, a profession he never practised, turning instead to satirical journalism and theatre; he also published the light-verse collections Bagatelas and Pamplinas y frivolidades. In 1899 he presided over the first Sociedad de Autores Españoles. He spent his summers in Mieres, where he is buried after dying in Madrid in 1912; several Asturian theatres bear his name, among them the one in Pola de Lena.
Monument
In Carabanzo stands this 17th-century baroque palace, now partly in ruins, one of the few examples of manor-house architecture the municipality retains outside the town of Pola de Lena. It was built for Matías Faes Miranda, a judge (oidor) at the Audiencia of Manila, and follows the classic model of the Asturian baroque manor house: a large rectangular façade topped by an imposing tower at one corner, with the family's coat of arms guarded by two lions. In ruins since the Civil War and now used as a stable, it serves as the setting for Carabanzo's Astur-Roman festival; it appears on the Lista Roja del Patrimonio of Hispania Nostra (the heritage-at-risk red list kept by the Hispania Nostra association), and the Principality refused to declare it a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection), which blocked possible conservation works in 2017.
Nature
Above the Valgrande-Pajares resort, on the very divide with León, the alto de Cuitu Negru crowns a bare ridge of pastures and scree from which the Ubiña massif is dominated; its final ramp is famous among cyclists.